Keskustelujen arkisto

Hi!

DON ROSA:
> Recklinghausen? Was I ever in a place called that?
Yes, you were! ;-) Or it was a GREAT imitation of a 'Rosa-door'! ;-)

> Wasn't that a suburb of some big city, like Koeln or such?
Well, it's part of the Ruhr-gebiet, which can be seen as one big city.
It is at the north of this area, next to Herten and not far away from
Dortmund.

Talking about this 'Rosa-door', what's the WEIRDEST thing that
you have done for a fan? Or what is the weirdest thing you ever made
a fan-drawing on?

> Oops. I guess that was a bad choice for a worthless gift
I think that it's great that people can't easily see what it is. It's
one of those gifts to which one would say: "Oh ... Wow! This is just great!
Thanks a lot! I've always wanted to have this! I can use it to ... errr ..
what is it, by the way?" ;-)

> I don't have anything to do with the coloring so I don't know
> which they made into a blue nephew
I figured that, but I presumed that you had the album so that you could
see whom I meant with the 'blue nephew'.

> [...] since everyone else was prolly puzzled if you were.
Is that short for 'probably'? That's funny.

> We never got around to anything else for the 300th issue, but
> starting soon I might have a page of art in each monthly PICSOU...
That sounds great! But ... not so great after all, because it would mean
that I have to try to obtain ALL future issues of Picsou, to make sure
I have all your stories! ;-)

Bye!

Arthur de Wolf -- Roosendaal, the Netherlands
email: (Email removed)
homepage: www.pi.net/~wolfman

JONATHAN:
The "Cave-Man Island" reprint from Abbeville is a repackaging from
those big white books (published in the U. S. by Abbeville, too). Although
the text has not been altered, it has been relettered -- the letterer just
did a much better job than usual, so it looks a lot more like the original
(but not quite).
You mention "A VERY early Pete, with peg-leg, green vest, derby
hat, gun belt, no pants, clawed foot..." This is from "Mickey Mouse in
Death Valley," Pete's first appearance.
As regards DD #300:
>Marco Rota's "The Runestone's Curse," once again aided by David Gerstein,
>was a hilarious Asterix spoof. What is the history of the Andold stories?
Marco Rota created Andold Wild Duck, Bo, and Brutus in the 1970s.
The earliest story I've seen with them is an AT-story (Almanacco Topolino)
from around then. It's okay, but not great (and Andold lacks the duck on
top of his helmet). The first story also makes the character's adventures
a dream/hallucination experienced by Donald after he's hit on the head!
The second story (the only previous one printed by Gladstone, in DDA 23)
sort of "restarts" the character... it's actually a better "first story"
for him. Later, when Rota started working for Egmont, he did more Andold
stories. I've seen, I believe, two other D-coded ones besides "The
Runestone's Curse."
"...and how Evil are the American translations?"
When doing "The Runestone's Curse," by the time I got a version to
work from, it had been translated from Italian to Danish to British
English. Each translation was condensed a little more, so it read very
quickly and without a lot of detail. I added some references to actual
Vikings and to the village as being Folkestone to ground the story in
history. Since, visually, the story seemed a tribute to Asterix, I added
Asterix stylings to the text (as you saw).
The names "Andold," "Aydis," "Bo," "Brutus," and "Walstaen Castle"
originated with Gary Gabner's DDA 23 translation. I just followed his
lead.
You might say I'm Evil ;-) in that my version of the story isn't a
lot like the one I started with... but I started, remember, with a
simplified version that lacked complicated wordplay so that translators in
each country could put it in as they saw fit. Anyway, I'm nuthin' compared
to the German translators! When the first Italian Andold stories appeared
in German digests in the 1970s, they became the adventures of "Sir
Donnerbold von Duckenburgh" -- that is to say, Sir Quackly McDuck of Dismal
Downs!
As for the date being 1996 in "Hero 300"... in every country where
the story appeared, the panel in question bore the then-current year's
date: 1992 in some countries, 1994 in others, and so on. John and I saw
that DD 300 was the only opportunity in the foreseeable future to print
this special jubileum story, so why not make it current? (Of course, we
know it's _really_ set in the 1950s, don't we? ;-)

KRITON:
The works of Mau Heymans and William Van Horn have been mixed up in
the past. The German 60th-Anniversary Donald album has two Heymans
stories, H9022 and H89132, which have been given Van Horn credits
hand-lettered into their opening splash panels!)

David Gerstein

<(Email removed)>

Hi all together!

I had been offline since the end of October. First I have had to give back
my e-mail account to the owner because he wanted to use it himself again.
Second there had been great hardware difficulties. There was a harddisk
failure. For this there had been some data lossed. Some data concerning the
e-mail system like the e-mail adress-book got lost.
I didn't get any e-mails since Oct. 28. If there is someone sending me mail
after Oct. 28 I am sorry about, but I hadn't been able to get it. And so I
hadn't be able to answer it.

DON:
I'm sorry to tell you that the promised translation is lossed too. But I
will do it again. Probably in the winter vacation.

ORJAN:
Finally, the promised package is on the way.

Some minutes ago, I retrieved the latest digest from the archive. I noticed
one new but familiar name: Hi Juergen (GEBHARDT)! Happy to see you here. And
nice to hear about the next issue of DER DONALDIST.

I don't know when I'm back here, because I had to look for an own e-mail
account first. We'll see.

See you!
Joachim

--------------------------------
End of Disney comics Digest V96 Issue #266
******************************************

Please forgive the probably wasted bandwidth, but there have been
a number of replies to postings (some of them mine) on which I wanted
to comment, but deadline pressures at work made it impossible for me
to do so. So with your indulgence I would like now to catch up on
those comments, even though I'm sure no one cares any more (and probably
very few people would have been particularly interested, even when the
discussion was still current).

This first comment isn't really a reply to anything specific; it's
just speculation about "The Universal Solvent." You will recall that
the solvent works by swallowing up whatever it touches, squeezing that
material down into a very dense atomic state, and then extruding the
"dissolved" material as a very dense "dust". Now this solves a great
many problems that an author encounters in telling a story about a
journey to the center of the earth:

(1) It solves the problem of how to keep the shaft from collapsing
under the great pressures of the earth's interior: the ulta-dense
dust that lines the shaft shores it up. If it weren't for this
super-strong material lining the hole which the solvent dug, the
sides of the shaft would experience a cave-in only a few kilometers
down into the earth, and that would be the end of that tunnel.

(2) It solves the problem of how to pass through the liquid outer core.
You can't dig a tunnel through a liquid! But the Universal Solvent
can, because it squeezes the liquid down to an ultra-dense solid.
Just like a soda straw in a hot milkshake, as Don notes vividly.

(3) It solves the problem of how to escape the heat as the temperature
climbs into the hundreds, and then the thousands, of degrees. The
ultra-dense dust lining the shaft acts as a heat shield. (That is,
until it melts!)

(4) It solves the biggest problem that the author of a story like this
one faces, namely: when you dig a hole all the way to the center of
the earth, what do you do with all the dirt from that hole? :)
The Universal Solvent just squeezes it down and pushes it aside, and
it's then free to move on and dissolve even more rock underneath it.

Now here's my speculation. It is not just because it dissolves every-
thing, but also because it solves so many of the author's problems, that
the Universal Solvent is known as "OmniSolve." Am I right, Don?

Now on to the replies to replies. I wrote about the surface of Venus:
> It is hypothesized that the whole crust may have sort of turned over
> and been covered by magma from underneath.
>

and Jacob Sparre Andersen added:
> A very probable explanation of the young surface of Venus is that the
> heat production (from nuclear fission) inside the planet can't get out
> through heat conduction and convection. To compensate for this
> problem, the planet kind of turns "inside out" (correct English?).
>

This is indeed the prevalent theory. On earth, the heat generated by
radioactive decay can escape through convection, since "plumes" carry
magma up from the mantle at "hot spots" like the volcanoes of Hawaii
or the geyser fields of Yellowstone Park, and since sheets of magma rise
up into the crust at the mid-oceanic ridges which span the whole planet
(where they create new ocean floors). This doesn't happen on Venus, so
all the planet's internal heat builds up until the whole thing boils
over, as it were. Since your institute is the "Center for Chaos and
Turbulence Studies," do you study that sort of phenomenon there?

Danny Coenen writes:
> The earth`s mantle isn`t TOTALLY solid, most materials start melting
> about 100-200 kilometers under the earth`s surface because of the
> frequently rising temperatures.
>

A lot of people have been commenting here on whether the mantle is
really solid or not. It's solid. I shall discuss the evidence for its
solidity in a separate posting, since this evidence relates not just to
"The Universal Solvent" but also to "The Land beneath the Ground" in a
fashion which I consider to be rather amusing. You can judge that for
yourself, of course. I suppose it depends on just how easily you become
amused.

Danny goes on to discuss gravity:
> even if Gyro created a vacuum in the shaft to avoid them getting
> squashed into jelly, gravity will do exactly that job when they
> approach the center of the Earth.
>

As you now realize, this won't happen. One of the things that I really
like about Don's story is its recognition of this fact. I thought
"Journey to the Center of the Earth," starring James Mason, was a pretty
good movie by and large (well, other than the inclusion of Pat Boone in
the cast!), but I was disappointed that it showed the adventurers' just
walking down to the center of the earth without ever experiencing any
effects of reduced gravity. I think this should be an important feature
of the story, and "The Universal Solvent" benefits from showing it.

> Thinking about gravity, as soon as the solvent would have disolved the
> liquid outer core (AND the liquid part of the mantle), gravity would
> immediately cause the solid parts to collapse and fall into the
> center. They would more or less simply stick to the inner core, wich
> would make billiard ball in a fish bowl effect impossible- simply
> because the bowl will not be existant any longer!
>

The fundamental idea about the catastrophes which would be caused by
the solvent's crushing the liquid core down to compacted dust is what
HD&L describe, namely that the mantle would no longer have anything
underneath it to support it, so it would sink. This would cause the
earthquakes and "tidal waves" (i.e., tsunamis) that HD&L mention. Don
took a bit of artistic license only with how he chose to illustrate
this in the thought balloon. He shows the solid core crashing out
through the shell of the earth surrounding it. As you say, that shell
would actually collapse around the solid core. Either way, the result
is pretty much the same - the mantle and the crust break up, leaving
a pile of rubble and a solid iron sphere. Don's way of showing this is
a pretty good way of expressing it in such a small space (a thought
balloon). If you really tried to show the break-up and collapse of the
crust and mantle and the subsequent destruction of the earth, you would
need a full 2-page splash panel, at the **very** least! I shall leave
it to the disney-editors on this list to comment on whether the demoli-
tion of the earth is too violent and scary a concept to be illustrated
in a disney comic, except as a small cartoon of a billiard ball-like
core popping out of a fish bowl-like globe.

In a previous reply to Kriton, I wrote:
> Incidentally, the upper mantle is largely an olivine/pyroxene-rich
> ultramafic rock called "eclogite". You can go see it in a museum.
> It's dark green, and it's ugly.

This prompted Harald Havas to ask:
> And pray tell, what is "ultramafic"?

In an igneous melt, the minerals with a high concentration of silica
(SiO2, which when it's by itself, constitutes quartz) float to the top
of the melt and form "pretty" rocks like granite. Since these are the
light minerals, we find granite here at the earth's crust. The minerals
which are depleted in silica are heavier, and they form rocks like
basalt which end up in the lower crust. These rocks are called "mafic",
and they're dark and not "pretty". The real dregs of the melt form
dark and heavy rocks, and they sink to the bottom, so you would find
these rocks (like eclogite) in the upper mantle. Being way low in
silica relative to granite, they are called "ultramafic". They're
**really** dark, and (IMHO) they're ugly. That's why I said I'm glad
that the disney-comics colorists take some liberties and show the
mantle as being "prettier" than it really is.

In that same reply to Kriton, I also wrote:
> This is because, as you correctly implied, an object which is dropped
> into a shaft through the center of the earth is really in orbit around
> the center, and so it will keep returning to the surface for that same
> reason.

And in his same reply to me, Harald asks:
> Sorry, I just dont get this: why would an object, neglecting friction,
> NOT be effected by the opposite gravity after passing the center?

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it wouldn't be affected by
gravity, so I wasn't making myself clear. Since this same issue (or
variations on it) has come up in a number of discussions about this
story, let's resolve it here, once and for all. I think we can all
agree that this is how things work:

For an object dropped into a pre-existing shaft through the center of
the earth, which has been vacuum-pumped so that there's no air resist-
ance, and which stays away from the walls so that it generates no
friction (whew!):
| The object starts out at the surface with T0 = zero kinetic energy
| and U0 = GmM/R potential energy, where m is its mass, M and R are the
| mass and radius of the earth, and G is Newton's gravitational con-
| stant. The object accelerates as it free-falls, but the force pull-
| ing it downward weakens as it descends, because there's less of the
| earth's mass below it. When it reaches the center of the earth,
| there is **no** mass "below" it (everything is "up" from there), so
| it is weightless. The potential energy that it had at the surface
| has all been converted to kinetic energy, and it now has no potential
| energy (since it's weightless), so now the kinetic and potential
| energy are given by T = U0 and U = zero. (The sum T + U must always
| equal T0 + U0, by the conservation of energy.) The object's momentum
| is given by sqrt(2mT). This momentum will carry the object past the
| earth's center, since there's nothing down there to stop it.
|
| The object will therefore start to come up to the earth's surface
| through the other end of the shaft. As it ascends, there is now
| more earth "below" it, so the object gains weight, and its momentum
| decreases (i.e., it slows down). By the time it reaches the earth's
| surface at the antipodes, we once again have T = zero and U = U0.
| The object's momentum is zero, and so it stops. But only for an in-
| stant, because it immediately falls back down the shaft, and the
| cycle repeats. Since there's no friction, this will continue forever.
|
| **The object is thus in orbit around the earth, in a particular orbit
| which passes straight through the earth's center.** Maybe that sounds
| weird, but consider what you would see if you looked at a circular
| orbit of an earth satellite "edge-on", i.e., in the same plane as the
| orbit. You would see the satellite executing simple harmonic motion,
| like a yo-yo from pole to pole, just as if it were passing back and
| forth through the center of the earth. So **it's the same thing.**
| This is because satellite orbits are examples of conic sections, and
| depending on how you slice a cone you can get either a circle or a
| straight line. I know this part about satellite orbits to be true,
| because I read it many years ago in "Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land."

**HOWEVER**, this is **not** the scenario for "The Universal Solvent."
Specifically, the action described above doesn't happen because:

(1) There's no pre-existing shaft through the center of the earth into
which the solvent falls. Instead, it is digging its own shaft as
it goes down.

(2) Because it's digging rather than falling, the descent of the solvent
is highly frictional. It's considerably slower than free fall.

(3) Since its descent is slowed by friction, the solvent doesn't have
all that much momentum when it reaches the center of the earth. It
does have some momentum, though, and so it goes a bit past the
center before falling back. On account of the friction, the yo-yo
process dies out after a few cycles, but it does take place, and
this is how the hollow chamber at the earth's center gets excavated.

(4) When the ducks begin their own descent, there **is** a pre-existing
shaft into which they fall. However, they make their way down by
means of a platform which is designed to lower them at a speed much
less than free fall. (It does this by generating friction against
the walls of the shaft, since they are rolling down on a raft with
wheels.) We know that they are descending at a rate far from free
fall on account of how long it takes the ducks to reach the center
of the earth. As explained above, if they were free-falling then
they would really be orbiting the earth, and their descent to the
center would represent one-fourth of an orbit. That period would be
measured in minutes, not days.

(5) Since the ducks are descending at less than free fall, they **do**
experience the effects of gravity (i.e., they can sit down or move
around on the platform) all the way down.

(6) As they near the earth's center, they do indeed become "light as a
feather" and finally become weightless, just as they should.

(7) Since their descent is being braked by the tires on the platform,
they have no trouble overcoming their momentum when they reach the
center of the earth, and so they stop there. They **make** this
happen. They're not at the mercy of gravity and momentum.

(8) When they're inside the pocket of air in the hollow chamber around
the earth's center, they are very nearly weightless. They can thus
swim through the air back from the very center of the earth to the
platform at the bottom of the shaft. In other words, they are shown
flying through the air under their own arm-power, just like "real"
ducks! (Of course, human explorers would try the same thing, but
I bet it works better for folks with feathers!) Speaking of duck
feathers, one of Don's suggested titles for this story was "Down,
down, down." I suppose that pun is untranslatable.

**So**, the physics behind "The Universal Solvent" is defensible, at
least within the limits that you can realistically expect to impose on
a comic book. The only real exception is the punch line. The diamonds
that Scrooge retrieves from the earth's deep interior wouldn't really be
so heavy that you couldn't wear them as jewelry. Of course, that's just
added to close the story with a gag, so I don't think anyone here would
object to it. If you **really** want to be a physics-purist, maybe you
could mentally re-write that to make the diamonds be so dense that they
are too **tough** to cut into jewelry in the first place! Actually,
super-dense diamonds might be **ugly**, since they would have a differ-
ent crystal structure from "normal" diamonds! If that were the case,
then they would have to be used for industrial applications. The obvi-
ous gag would be to use them for phonograph needles, and then find that
they're so tough that they carve a groove through the records! Of
course, maybe the concept of "records" and "phonograph needles" would
plant the story just too firmly in the 1950s for official disney policy!

O.K., now we can put the subject of Universal Solvent physics to rest.
(I hope!) Let me take all this stack of print-outs of discussions on
the subject, and I'll file them away somewhere. Let's see, where to
put all this narrative about petrology, gravity, momentum, and comic
books? This jar looks like a good place... GLORP!!!!

Wilmer Rivers

BYRON:
>Nah, we Egmont editors don't bother to spend an extra hour late at night
>or on weekends to make sure silly little things like panel-to-panel
>transitions flow smoothly, much less worry about proper voices for the
>characters, or reject stories because we don't think Scrooge would
>*really* do this or that. Nah, we don't ask "typical" Egmont authors
>like Don Rosa to throw out a third of "Attack of the Hideous
>Space-Varmints" and rewrite it because we didn't think it was as good as
>it could be. Hell, no! -- it'd be silly to waste our time on striving
>after *quality* when the assembly line is roaring full-speed ahead!

Er...perhaps I'd better repeat my first quote:

>(This is not so important for typical Egmont stories, since those
>are essentially assembly-line products.)

Note I said *typical* Egmont stories. This does not apply to the elite few
which include Don Rosa, William Van Horn, John Lustig, and *someone* who
wrote "A Mouse and his Dog" (D 95028), which is my FAVORITE non-Gottfredson
Mickey story reprinted by Gladstone in their second run.

But I will not recant my belief that the normal Egmont stories are stamped
off a die. The different artists--Vicar, Santanach, Millet, and about
450,000,000,000,000 others who go by one (often nearly unpronounceable) name
only, draw ducks in the exact same style, exact same facial expressions as
every other normal Egmont artist, and never with the looseness and
bounciness of Van Horn or the lifelike images of Rosa. The staff of writers,
with such names as Dave Angus, Tom Anderson, and Jack Sutter, are told, as
David Gerstein explained earlier, to write their scripts in a minimal
English vocabulary bordering on Orwell's Newspeak so it's not too
complicated for editors in Russia and China to translate these stories.
"Hey, Longfellow! Stop rhyming your poems in English 'cause they won't rhyme
in Italian!" "Hey Dickens! Don't name you character "Scrooge" because we
can't find that word in our dictionary!" And they cannot make there stories
past (gasp!) *8* pages without serializing them, because that is way too
long! "Hey, Homer, you'll have to make that 'Iliad' serializable into at
least 55 issues!" Futhermore, that computerized lettering ultimately
obliterates even that forum for individuality, ending any chance of
duplicating Walt Kelly's "characterized" speech for characters, i. e. having
a certain character talk in Gothic type and another in circus poster
letters. Thank your lucky stars that I've never seen the Egmont's coloring,
so I can't criticize that.

>xxxx YOU!

The "CyberPatrol" program on my computer actually blocked out this one into
x's when I first opened it. (For those of you who still have it blocked,
Byron first wrote "F," then "U," then "C," then "K.") Hmmm....this word was
also used by Pieter Van Cleef once...maybe just being a Disney comics editor
impairs one's vocabulary like that.

P. S. Even before this, I already knew that if Gladstone or De
Geillustreerde Pers was up for grabs, I would *not* submit mny stories to
Egmont, so don't blame Byron for that (not that you'd really want them ;-).

--Jonathan "Fanboy" Markoff

ARTHUR:
I need your e-mail address!

GARY LEACH:
So what's Gladstone got up it's sleeve for the April-July break in the
Uncle $crooge albums? I'm extremely curious! :)

-$haun

--------------------------------
End of Disney comics Digest V96 Issue #264
******************************************

Remember I told you about a Donald Duck story in the students' magazine
at Aarhus University, Math/Computer Science, a year or two ago?

I was just handed the latest year of that publication, and found two
more: a Gyro 4 pager(!) about an automatic blackboard cleaner, which
features an 'interactive spellchecker' and thus wipes out incorrect-
nesses and faulty logics. "Assuming that..." <swish-swish>

The other one, "The Electric Duck" - a 14 page Donald story divided
over two issues, is a really well written story about an 'anddroid'
(no typo, but an intranslatable pun) copy of Donald supposed to go
with Daisy to a lecture on "The Impossibility of the Cartesian Theater"
by Daniel C. Dennett (whozzat?) while he himself goes to a football
match. Gyro builds it after the live model ("Hmmm, rostrilongitude-
quotient = 1,0... classical"), and to check if it really is intelligent
he gives it a Turing test, asking questions alternating between Donald
and the robot:

Q) How would you prevent the nephews from getting lost in the woods?
A) I guess I'd put uranium-buttons on their caps and track them with
a geiger-counter.
Q) What's the first line of "The Wailing Cowboy"?
...
Q) What animal goes "meow" and catches mice? An owl?
A) A cat! A CAT!

Obviously the two get mixed up and get into a fight over the tickets
for the football match and a chase is on. The climax borrows heavily
from "Blade Runner", but all the rest is - as usual for the creator,
Kristian T. Pedersen - a tribute to Barks. This story even has a code,
MF-1-96, so maybe it should be in our index...

The really great thing is that you don't just have to take my word
for the quality of this story: check it out at...

http://www.daimi.aau.dk/~leeman/anders.html

Are you BTW out there lurking, Kristian, or should I send
you an invitation to the list - I'm _sure_ you'd like it here!

-- Ole, who's so lucky as to have a brother at the right faculty...

Hi !

The latest german MM weekly features Rosa s "A matter of gravity"
story at the end of the comic. So this is one of the few MM weekly
comics which is a "stand alone" and has no continued story in it.

Does anybody know if there are more german MM comics that have no
continued story in it?

Don Rosa:
1. Yes, you were in Recklinghausen (sometime last year..
and the name of the Comic Shop is "Mr. C"),
but you only could make drawings for about two hours:
10-12.00, because you had to catch a train to Cologne).

2. I just read the pertwillaby and the Duck versions of that King
Arthur story, and I am wondering how you intended the original
story to end...
As you didn t use any villian (or omnisolve) in the Duck adaption, there is some
space left for interpretation. The Pertwillaby story ended with
an announcement for something like a black knight, so it seems
that that villian maybe used the remains of the omnisolve to make a
very special "Knight Suit". Am I just making things up or ...?

Mike