Times are tough

[David Gerstein]

> Just as it would be very interesting to know what Donald's *real*  
> answer in the last panel of WDC 152 to the talking dog's "Times are  
> tough, huh, bud?". Not "You're not kiddin'!" which again has been  
> lettered distictively different.

	"Kiddin'," as well as the Y in "You're," look like Barks' own  
lettering.
	I suspect the original answer, as broken-up by line within the voice  
balloon, was

	You
	ain't a-
	kiddin'!

	...where the edit appears to have been done to improve Donald's  
grammar.

	There are a lot of rather obvious reletterings in Barks comics from  
the late 1940s onward. Here are a few that have always caught my eye.

	In "Ghost of the Grotto," unless I'm forgetting something, every last  
reference to the armored man as a "ghost" are lettered in by Carl  
Buettner. The actual "Ghost of the Grotto" lettered title in the  
story's opening panel, and the story's entire opening caption, are  
lettered by Buettner, too.
	It seems like all of the story's ghost references, including in the  
title, were added by someone other than Barks.

	Starting with the second BRER RABBIT Four Color (OS 208), extreme  
Southern dialect in some Disney comics was softened in the editing: so  
the published "the," "that," and "then" were originally lettered as  
"de," "dat," and "den," with the "th" being crammed into a space where  
only a "d" previously stood.
	This becomes significant for Barks because it also affects "Lost in  
the Andes"; in the giant SFX that spells out "Theah they blows!" on  
page 29, one can see from the lettering and spacing that "Deah dey  
blows!" was originally intended.

	In "Back to the Klondike," the surviving four panels of the original  
Page 16 are usually printed as pics 1, 2, 7, and 8 - where pics 3-6  
are the 1980s interpolation by Barks and Jippes.
	However, pic 2 contains an interesting clue as to what the original  
page may have been like. Donald has just told Scrooge that Goldie  
skipped town. In pic 2, Scrooge screams at Huey "Wouldn't you know it!  
Someone owes you a billion dollars, /and/ they skip town *every* time!"
	The word "and" has been added in a non-Barks hand, with the voice  
balloon roughly expanded underneath it so we can tell there was  
originally no word in the balloon at that point.
	The only reason for this particular line of dialogue to lack an "and"  
would be that it originally functioned quite differently on the page,  
and in my mind this relates to the otherwise unexplained fact that  
Scrooge screams at *Huey* - when as published, the bringer of bad  
tidings one panel earlier was Donald.

	It's not hard to imagine the page working like this:

	Pic 1 [theoretical]
	Scrooge: "And that's the last I saw of Glittering Goldie! If she's  
still around today, I wonder if..."

	Pic 2
	Donald: Hey! I've been talking to some old-timers! They say Goldie  
left town years ago and hasn't been seen since!

	Pic 3 [theoretical]
	Huey: She musta skipped town 'cause she still owed you *money!*  
People do that sometimes!

	Pic 4
	Scrooge: Wouldn't you know it! Somebody owes you a *billion* dollars,  
they skip town *every* time!

	(And then imagine pics 5 through 8 as a more extended version of what  
we see as pics 7 and 8 today. Present pic 7 looks like it may have  
been cut down from a double-width...)

--
David Gerstein
ramapith at gmail.com
http://www.cartoonresearch.com/gerstein
http://ramapithblog.blogspot.com