Keskustelujen arkisto

There has been extensive discussion about contradictions among the
timelines of the various stories, as reflected in the characters'
positions on the family tree, their home towns, etc. For instance,
Rich Bellacera writes:
> As for mixing the comics and cartoons I don't see the great harm, atleast not
> until there becomes a debate over some details. For example, I think
> DUCKTALES and Uncle $crooge could very well be somewhere within the same
> timeline. There are, of course some minor details like Duckworth is a dognose
> in the cartoon, but in the comic his name is Dudsworth and he's a 'duck.'
> Other things like the existence of Webby and Mrs. Beakley, and even Ma Beagle,
> names for the Beagle Boys and Bubba Duck do not generally exist in Uncle
> $crooge, but, I still don't see that as a contradiction, just a difference of
> timing, and a little writer's perogative taken. Things could be explained if
> there ever was an attempt to make a cohesive universe. Marvel and D.C. did
> it, but I'm not really advocating that Disney/Gladstone follow that same
> route.
>
Rich is of course referring to D.C.'s attempt to straighten out their
miriad contradictory "origin" stories and "parallel universes" by
wiping out all the ones they didn't like anymore in the notorious
"Crisis on Infinite Earths" storyline. For the purposes of the
current discussion, it may be worth noting that when Marvel took over
the "Mighty Mouse" title, they too tried to do away with the old heros,
villains, and plots through a storyline which they called the "Mices on
Inifnite Earths". It should also be noted that the "Mighty Mouse" comic
folded within a year. People like the information they're familiar
with in the comics world about Who's Who and What's What, even if it's
completely inconsistent. As Rich notes, it just gives you more options
of what to believe from story to story, and this seems perfectly appro-
priate for the Disney universe. So if Duckburg seems to move around
from story to story, let it. Some years ago the "Washington Post"
devoted an editorial to Disney fandom, and on the basis of some data
provided in selected stories they reached the conclusion that Duckburg
in fact coincides with Washington, D.C. As they put it (I'm paraphras-
ing from memory), "This means that Duckburg is - here. Although others
may scoff, we feel that this explains a variety of local phenomena."

Wilmer Rivers
rivers at seismo.css.gov

Comments on the last digest:

No, I don't like the idea of having some stories in old Barks comics real and some "imaginary". I meant that the EARLIEST stories
or versions of characters can be excused from the canon. As we all know, $crooge was originally only intended as a one-shot character,
then as only a minor supporting character... "the rest is history". While doing my "Life of $crooge" series I have found it necessary
to ignore a bare minimum of Barks' $crooge facts. I ignore the existance of the "magic hourglass" as being antithesis to everything
$crooge is (as is the fraudulent idea of a "lucky" #1 Dime). I ignore the story of $crooge having natives roughed up (as well as the
dates in that story). I ignore the date on the calendar in the flashback in "North of the Yukon" as being one year too late. And I
think I ignore some date pertaining to that "Ghosttown Railroad" story as being 10 years too early to be possible. Not only do I
not ignore any other facts, but the thing that I hope Barks fans will find amazing is that I incorporate ALL of them... every detail
of $crooge's past life, no matter how tiny the fact was or how buried it was in the third sentence of the sixth panel of an obscure
story, it's ALL incorporated into my series, set into granite forevermore, all available in one tale. (pant pant pant)
And as for MY stories, the world that the Ducks live in IS the real world in every detail (except that the people have black noses).
I never make up silly names for cities, and I never use half-accurate gag names for historical figures. I have $crooge meet REAL folks
in his early life, and he lives in the real world of 1867-1947 with all places and dates absolutely 100% accurate. No screwing around!
It's all real.
(Only the DUCKTALES stories are imaginary. I'd love to do a story where DUCKTALES is an unauthorized TV series in Duckberg based on
$crooge's life, and $crooge must sue the creators of the show for slander.)

HARRY FLUKS: Jeepers -- I'm impressed! I didn't know how closely you worked with Tom Roep (whom I've never met). What all are you
involved in? And where are you?
Yes, I didn't need Roep to tell me my art sucks. I dislike my art no end. But I'm no professional cartoonist.... I'm just another
Barks fan living a dream while they let me. I am constantly puzzled as to why my stories are SO popular, first in America, and now
the world over. Why don't people prefer all those NICELY drawn stories? The only answer I can see must involve my overly detailed
art.... readers seem to sense how much fun I'm having and how much extra work I put into every panel, and they enjoy it along with me ...?
Anyway, that's all I can figure.

Gil Milburn: You're the guy from Bardstown? Have we met or been in contact before? Where are you now did you say? And thanks for
all the extraordinarilly nice things you say about me!!! I wish you could see me blushing. Yes, I constantly remind myself to never
take for granted the gift I've been given -- how many people get the chance to live their fondest dream, and even be some sorta success
at it?! That's one reason that I know Disney can never succeed in their constant meddling with the existance of these Dell characters
and with my career in handling them -- fate will not allow Disney to prevent me from writing and drawing these Ducks. They might
stop me now and then, but not for long, and I always come back.

Last week, I had some comic book money left over, and so I bought the
Disney Comics album of Uncle Scrooge in Trall-la-la. I have some
questions concerning the stories presented in this album.

1) Why is Carl Barks' style on the Junior Woodchucks story so different
from the rest of his work?
(This story concerned US and the JWs going to Tibet (?).)

2) What happened to the golden geese (and the valley of feathers) that
Uncle Scrooge bought?

Regarding the Junior Woodchucks:

I have an issue at home that has three stories in it. One deals with a first
aid competition between the JWs that involves a circus airplane. The
second deals with maple syrup collection for fund raising, and pits the
JWs against US and a female version of the JWs.

!!! SPOILER WARNING SPOILER WARNING SPOILER WARNING SPOILER WARNING !!!

The second story, which is much more interesting, involves the JWs
discovering an intact dinosaur skeleton. US discovers this as well, and
the troop leader and US race to file a claim on the hill, which US wins.
As US walks through the skeleton, which was unearthed in a rockslide,
planning the interior design of the restaurant, Pluto (Yes! PLUTO.) grabs
a nearby plant and adds it to US' tea. US drinks the tea and has
HALLUCINATIONS that the fossil is flesh and blood, and gladly signs over
the deed to the JWs.

Ignoring the facts that: 1) the fossil would be protected by landmark
laws, and that
2) US was under the influence of a narcotic
when he signed away his deed,

does anyone out there wonder if this story, because of the drug element,
will ever be reprinted in comic book form?

Is it in the Barks' collection?

Was it approved by the Comics Code Authority?

Torsten Adair torsten at cwis.unomaha.edu Omaha, NE, USA
Minnie Mouse is NOT crazy!

Fredrik Ekman <d91fe at ide.ide.hk-r.se>:

> Per wrote:
> >one of "our" states must go to leave room for Calisota. (Which one?)
>
> To which Harry, the humourist, replied:
> >I think he skipped Minnefornia.

Yes, I know it wasn't that funny. My reply was sent before I could stop
it...

> (...)
> This is quite often the case with Gutenberghus/Egmont stories. They copy
> stories both from their own production and from others. I don't quite know
> why they do this, but I have two theories:
>
> 1: The authors must create yet another story and lack the imagination to
> make one up for themselves.
>
> 2: The editors decide they like the story, but don't like the original art,
> so they have it remade. Alternatively, it might be cheaper to have one of
> their own artists doing it than to buy it from the foreign company. Pure
> speculation. Does anybody know?

Thom Roep (yes, he again) once said in an interview that there is a fixed
price for a page of Disney art, regardless of the origin or quality of the
work. And all Disney comic producers _have_ to deliver at that price.
If theory 2 sub 2 is true, then that price should be higher than the
costs to let someone redraw the pages...

Theory 2 sub 1 is true in at least some of the cases. Some stories are redrawn
because the editor didn't like the art (I remember a story from 'HDL Back To
School', redrawn by Vicar). The Danish coded the story 'D-BTS 1', so they
knew what the origin was.

> Another interesting thing: In most stories, especially from the 70's and
> 80's, it's extremely easy to identify the country of origin on the drawing
> style alone. Especially for D-, S- and H-coded stories.

Well, some editors 'use' the same artists (Spanish, South American), so
this is not always the case.

> I-coded stories,
> on the other hand, are most easily identified by the fact that they don't
> look like anything else! Why is this so?

I think every editor has its own "view" on Disney comics. The Dutch had the
idea to make all Donald's beaks as long as the old Barks beaks (they don't
have that policy anymore though). In Holland, they have an 'art director'.
He is the judge of all the work produced. His task is to get a certain
uniformity in the comics. "The work should be Disney's, not Van Schuylenburg's,
Jippes's, Milton's or Heymans's". Of course, they still leave some room for
an artist's own style.
I guess other editors have someone like that, too.
I understand that in Italy, they don't reprint Danish or Dutch comics. So
they don't have the problem that their own comics don't look like them...

--Harry.

Harry Fluks ()_() Dutch Disney comics freak
PTT Research, Leidschendam (_) H.W.Fluks at research.ptt.nl
"Yeah... I've _heard_ of coral barques!"

I tried finding my copy of HDL,JW, and couldn't find it. I did
find another issue, and discovered that it had two stories, one of which
was the maple syrup story. The other story featured Magica DeSpell and a
giant bottle.

I will look further.

Torsten Adair torsten at cwis.unomaha.edu Omaha, NE, USA

Wilmer:
> People like the information they're familiar with in the comics
> world about Who's Who and What's What, even if it's completely
> inconsistent. As Rich notes, it just gives you more options of what
> to believe from story to story, and this seems perfectly appropriate
> for the Disney universe. So if Duckburg seems to move around from
> story to story, let it.

Well, partly I agree. If it makes a particular story better writers
shouldn't be afraid of ignoring some "facts" when they really aren't
that important. E.g., if in one story we see Donald's neighbours on
both sides, and then the next month a completely new character is
needed to live next door, and he is supposed to have been Donald's
neighbour for some time, that's not much of a problem and any attempts
at explaining this will probably just detract from the story.

But on the other hand I *like* to try to "get it all together", so I
would probably sigh about this "inconsistency" and try to find some
explanation for it. So even though I like to try to find consistency
when there is none, that doesn't mean that I think that the creators
ought to be hampered by it.

On the other hand, as long as it doesn't detract from the story I like
some continuity, especially when you don't *have* to have read the
first story to get it, but it adds something extra like you're
included in some sort of inside joke. That's why I like many of the
allusions to Barks's stories in Rosa's stories.

> Some years ago the "Washington Post" devoted an editorial to Disney
> fandom, and on the basis of some data provided in selected stories
> they reached the conclusion that Duckburg in fact coincides with
> Washington, D.C. (...)

Hmm, I wonder what stories they selected for that conclusion...

Don Rosa:
> No, I don't like the idea of having some stories in old Barks comics
> real and some "imaginary". I meant that the EARLIEST stories or
> versions of characters can be excused from the canon.

Yeah, especially Scrooge really behaved in strange ways in his first
stories, and there are other little strange things which just are
signs of Barks not having decided (discovered? :-) how it really is
yet. E.g., in "The Trail of the Unicorn" Gladstone thinks "My noisy
cousin, Donald Duck, going toward his uncle Scrooge's place!" Why on
earth would he think of Scrooge as *Donald's* uncle instead of just as
"Uncle Scrooge"? Probably because Barks hadn't decided that Gladstone
and Scrooge were related yet. As for stuff like that I'd say ignore
ignore ignore.

But when there really isn't anything contradicting a statement I
believe it, and I don't think I agree with your statement that Donald
always has lived in Duckburg and that all mentions of other towns are
too ancient to take into account. Are there really any later facts
that say that Donald must have lived in Duckburg all the time? And
will anything important be lost if he hasn't?

[List of facts Don has ignored while doing "Life of Scrooge" deleted]

That seems to be very sensible choices to me. Have you read Jack L.
Chalkers _An Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck_? It's the only
other attempt at piecing it all together I know. (It's much less
ambitious though.) Chalker disregards all stories with Scrooge in WDC
as non-canon though, as well as Christmas on Bear Mountain and The Old
Castle's Secret ("Scrooge returns to a _fully_intact_ Castle McDuck to
get a chest of gold and jewels hidden by an ancestor _because_he_
_needs_the_money_desperately_---this in the late 1940's, when he's
already a billionaire plus")

> every detail of $crooge's past life, no matter how tiny the fact was
> or how buried it was in the third sentence of the sixth panel of an
> obscure story, it's ALL incorporated into my series, set into granite
> forevermore, all available in one tale. (pant pant pant)

I'm curious of the story behind Miss Penny Wise. Will you finally
tell it all?

What about other sources than Barks? Do you think they carry any
weight at all about things that Barks hasn't told us about? In
particular I'm curious about your treatment of Scrooge's first dime.
I guess you told about when Barks's earned that Old Number One
in the first parts of Life of Scrooge which I haven't read. As Barks
never told us about this, did you make up your own version from
scratch or did you build on "Getting that Healthy, Wealthy Feeling" in
US 50 (art by Tony Strobl) where he earns it from chipping off mud off
a ditchdigger's boots?
-- "
Per Starback, Uppsala, Sweden. email: starback at student.docs.uu.se
"Life is but a gamble! Let flipism chart your ramble!"

Don Rosa wrote:

> We'll see if this method works better for me. The session where I
> answered 20 individual messages cost me over $10!!!

Gosh! I'm so used to free net access that it's hard to think of
having to pay for it. (My phone bills use to be pretty expensive
though. Have modem---will travel!) Is Compu$erve that expansive? Is
there anything that can be done about it?

> But to redraw an entire STORY makes no sense -- are we sure they've
> done this?

They have made many strange things in Scandinavia. For a while they
had someone shorten the long beaks of old Barks comics when reprinting
them to make the ducks look more like later Barks which the readers
were more used to. They reprinted WDC 89 which takes place at winter
in summertime, and then had someone change it to a summer setting,
etc. etc.

> The only thing I can think of is maybe some freelance writer is
> passing off these stories as their own new work since they can't be
> sued for plegarism, but only cussed by the editor in the unlikely
> event their copying is noticed (and that's not likely with tens of
> thousands of Duck stories out there and editors who don't know much).

That probably happens too, as it did in the old days. There are
Disney stories that are remarkably similar, like a Mickey Mouse story
very much like Barks's The Gilded Man. (And of course even Barks
himself more or less copied himself a couple of times.)

> The digest says there has been much discussion about the conflicts
> in the timelines and hometowns and family tree in the Duck comics.
> I'd like to know what such conflicts are as I'm aware of very few.
> (DUCKTALES, as I said, does not count.) And no one has even seen the
> Family Tree yet!

Well, as for family trees we didn't consider only Barks's comics when
such things were discussed. One thing was the discrepancy between the
newspaper strip Donald Duck where Donald's cousin Della, and the
cartoon "Donald's Nephews" where Donald's sister Dumbella sent him
Huey, Dewey, and Louie. My guess is that *you* will call the boys'
mother (and Donald's sister) Thelma, as it is in Carl Barks's family
tree, if she ever appears in Life of Scrooge. Right?

> But any reader who wants to believe the Barksian universe and MY
> universe will have NO conflicts to worry about; this universe is
> specific and accurate and constant. And I can answer any questions
> anyone might have on it. So...?

Great! Hm, here is one question pulled out of my hat and there are many
more where that came from: Is Scrooge's uncle Jake McDuck still alive
(see A Christmas for Shacktown), and in that case, how come Scrooge
was the "last of the clan McDuck" in The Old Castle's Secret?

> TORSTEN ADAIR asks me if I might someday draw Pegleg Pete. No can
> do. He does not exist in the Duck stories -- he's a Mouse villain.

Except in "Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold" of course, as "Black Pete".
(Sorry for being so nitpicky. I know you know, but I just want to set
it straight.)

> Besides, Disney has abolished his pegleg because that made fun of
> cripples or some such.

I think I've read a Gottfredson story where Pete explains that he's
now got a modern artifical leg instead of the old peg leg.
-- "
Per Starback, Uppsala, Sweden. email: starback at student.docs.uu.se
"Life is but a gamble! Let flipism chart your ramble!"

COMMENTS ON DIGEST 4:
Well, this can't go on much longer! Each time I glance at and answer even these digests, it's costing me about $4-$5 since I'm not
using TAPCIS or anything (never needed it till now).
Anyway, I'm about to go away for the weekend to Ithaca, NY, to another comic convention. But here's a reply to some comments from Per
(I think).
I think I mentioned that I considered Barks' old privately done Family Tree, but changed parts and I think "improved" on it... all
done with the help of other Duck fans and Mr. Barks himself. I'm using Della as the name of Donald's sister. That was the original,
first used, even though it was in the newspaper strip which I regard as a different "Donald Duck" than the comic book version. Still,
the name Thelma came from nowhere, and didn't go as well with "Duck".
I show Jake McDuck all through the "Life of $crooge" series, but he just sorta disappears along the line. By the last chapter he would
be dead, as would all the other McDucks except $crooge. Naturally I don't show or speak of ALL these deaths -- but I DO deal with the
deaths of both $crooge's mother and father in scenes unlike ANYTHING that have ever been in a Disney funnybook.
And yes, Black Pete was in "Pirate Gold"... but again, that was far too early (the earliest!) a story to take seriously.