Keskustelujen arkisto

ARMANDO, ALL

>I have a very distinct (and pleasant)memory of
>the Cutty Sark story (and, for that matter, also of Don's "The Duck Who Fell
>To Earth", which was featured on the same ZP 112 ;-))

OK, I hope Don will excuse me if I once again use references to his
work as a springboard for one of my (luckily rare) rants... :-)

First of all, I can't resist :-) , my own fave is "A Matter of Some
Gravity", too, but is that "just" plain slapstick ?

I mean, does it make any sense to divide an authors work into "genre"
slots ? I like Don's style of storytelling and drawing, whether he
does Lo$, treasure hunts or slapsticks, and possibly even better when
he does mix it all together... a story I'm surprised nobody mentioned
(or maybe I missed that) is "The Duck That Never Was", my own second
best (I'm a Capra fan, too), what "genre" would that be ?
Parody, maybe, but anyway it doesn't fit much into any "schematic"
approach to Don's work...
Also, among the Lo$ chapters, the "Cutty Sark" one is my favourite,
for various reasons, among which, I admit, its ambience, I spent a few
months in Indonesia long time ago, and loved it (hello, Arie, apa
kabar ? :-) and the *slapstick* parts of it made me laugh my head off...

How could anybody isolate those ingredients from a story, and try
to make a serial product out of a single one of them ?

Mind you, I quite enjoyed a few shorts as well, like the "Wrecked Car"
or "Master Landscapist" ones, but having *only* this kind of stories
published because the long and intricated ones are not well accepted
by the readers themselves is something that caught me totally by
surprise, I find it quite hard to believe...
Don surely is not in the challenge for presidential elections in
Finland because of "Master Landscapist", as good as it was... :-)

I wonder whether Byron Erickson and/or his close collaborators take
this kind of decisions themselves, or there's a marketing section
that rules...

I hope, for the sake of my Scandinavian and German friends, they would
take in consideration the idea of at least publishing long stories Don
would make in the future as extras or albums...

>Well, tastes are tastes... I won't worry, as long as Don is able to keep
>writing the story he likes himself, for one publisher or the other ;-)

I do worry, though... there're not many Disney publishers left on this
planet, even less actually *produce* stories...
How long would be Don, or anyone else at that, be able to follow their
own inspiration rather than marketing research lists of figures ?

Well, sorry, folks, it seems I'm in a pessimistic mood right now, but
this piece of news saddened me nearly as much as Gladstone closing shop
did, although it seems I'll be one of the few lucky fellows who will be
able to keep reading Don's long stories in a language they can understand
(hoping it won't be Greece *only* :-)...
It's the matter of principle that worries me, and I don't see any silver
lining in this cloud...

Cheers

Eta Beta

Hi, all,
After lurking for quite a time, I feel compelled to break the
silence. With some annoyance and much surprise I've
been reading for the last days, the discussion of Donald
being human. And everyone seems to agree....
Donald doesn't. Some nice oldies of the dutch Disney
weekly give me proof ;-). Issue 33 of 1964 contains a story
telling about Donald and his nephews visiting one of those
for-one-single-case-cousins. Donald and the cousin retell
an old remembrance of their running away from home and
getting into lots of troubles. After just failing to become a
bear's prey, they swim home and Donald says:"Sometimes
it's nice to be a duck! This is much handier than walking!"
The cousin agrees:"To be a living duck is even nicer!" The
most beautiful thing: even if they're using their arms a tiny
bit, the panel SHOWS them swimming like ducks.
Over half a year later, issue 11 of 1965, Donald answers
the door and finds it's Feathry. Stupidly aiming a gun at
Donald, he says:"Hello, Donald! I'm heading for a duck
hunt!"
Donald(throwing the gun away):"But you cannot do that!
We're family members! We're cousins!"
Feathry:"Aw, but I'd never shoot at you! I'm hunting only for
real ducks!"
Donald:"What an insult! What do you think I am....a fake
duck?"

Well, he's even insisting being a real duck and nothing else.
Seriously, the idea of Donald and his family members being
humans, makes me wince. And I'd really like to know: why
should anyone WANT them to be?

Greetings to everyone,
Henri Kunne

(Sorry, a bit off-topic)

Soren wrote:
>I, too, could live easily without the extras in German weekly
>... without the extra there would not have been space and edges
>to squeeze...

Yes, and why the %&@#!? do they always use a glue which causes damage to the
paper when removing the extra?! I'm not that kind of collector who cares
much about such things but ruined pages are very ugly.

(Hint, hint, Ehapa!)

- Claudio

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> From: Eta Beta <pflip at tiscalinet.it>
> he does mix it all together... a story I'm surprised nobody mentioned
> (or maybe I missed that) is "The Duck That Never Was", my own second
Isn't the real title "The Duck Who Never Was"???

> best (I'm a Capra fan, too), what "genre" would that be ?
Capra or Carpa??? Are you just sleepy or you just take a heavy dose of
drugs? ;-)

> Parody, maybe, but anyway it doesn't fit much into any "schematic"
> approach to Don's work...
> Also, among the Lo$ chapters, the "Cutty Sark" one is my favourite,
> for various reasons, among which, I admit, its ambience, I spent a few
> months in Indonesia long time ago, and loved it (hello, Arie, apa
> kabar ? :-)
Baik sekali, thank you. ;-) Sorry for the other milizers:-) Can't understand
a bit, huh? BTW, in what city were you?

> Well, sorry, folks, it seems I'm in a pessimistic mood right now, but
> this piece of news saddened me nearly as much as Gladstone closing shop
> did, although it seems I'll be one of the few lucky fellows who will be
> able to keep reading Don's long stories in a language they can understand
> (hoping it won't be Greece *only* :-)...
> It's the matter of principle that worries me, and I don't see any silver
> lining in this cloud...
Lightning maybe??? Wow, you must be takin' somethin' ;-)

> From: "Henri Kunne" <HJC.Kunne at net.HCC.nl>
> After lurking for quite a time, I feel compelled to break the
> silence. With some annoyance and much surprise I've
> been reading for the last days, the discussion of Donald
> being human. And everyone seems to agree....
> Donald doesn't.
Well, duck isn't always a duck if you know what i mean. Sure DD and the
"gang" were drawn in duck shapes. Sure they're ducks alright. But IMHO, the
creators and artists (CB and DR included) likes to tell stories about DD
and U$ in their daily adventures which --if you notice-- showed the readers
how "human" can they be in emotions and thinkings. C'mon, guys The Golden
Helmet where DD showed his "darker side" made me surprised and entertained.
In short, what i'm tryin' to say is it's all about imaginary characters in
our real world(else why CB and DR likes to include "human" historical and
mythical stuffs in the "ducks" world).

> From: "Anders Christian Sivebaek" <acsive at mail.mira.dk>
> > Someone named PE??? sez somethin like this
> His name is Pekka, and it's short for his name. the reason it says ISO
> 85756353 PE 56856874647 is that his computer sends messages in a
> scandinavian format.
i see. That's pretty interesting. What's his real pronouncable name then?
;-)

> > Or maybe they are far too complicated for us Scandinavians?
> The coin isn't too complicated I would say.
May i know what's with this whole Scandinavian things? i mean how come the
stories which to be printed to Scandinavians are selected as though they're
a bunch of low IQs. Hey, don't get me wrong. No offense was meant and that's
the impression i got after reading that line.

(One day, Liu Bei was walkin in the city and read the plague about the
recruitment to fight the rebels. After reading it, he sighed. Suddenly,
there's a loud voice from his back saying,"Why don't you join the army and
help defend our country than stand here and whining?" Liu Bei looked back
and--Three Kingdoms)

Whoa.
I did NOT mention this Egmont policy here in order to start any sort of
anti-Egmont rant. If I'd wanted to do that, I would have done it a year or
two ago when they first told me about the new policy of what sort of
stories they wanted me to stick to. Instead, I found a solution to it by
starting to work for other publishers in addition to Egmont. But I now
needed to explain that action here since I was getting questions asking me
what I was currently working on, for whom and why -- and I have also
recently had to spend a bit of time trying to straighten out messages on
several European comics-forums where some Duckfans had notified the world
that I had "quit Egmont"... and I've been trying to squelch such
rumors-based-on-assumptions. As long as Byron Erickson is at Egmont, I plan
to do work for them. Should Byron ever leave or change his position, *then*
I would probably do the same, but not before. If it weren't for Byron, I
would not be doing these comics.

Aside from that, we've discussed the fact that Donald is a human-being here
in the past, and I won't get so deeply into that again since I know people
either "get it" or they won't. I am surprised to see that, for the first
time, a European thinks he is unhuman... normally it's strictly the
funnel-visioned Americans who have that concept. I assume that's because
the European comics culture is infinitely more diverse than America's
two-note scene. There have been decades of human-caricatures such as Tintin
or Asterix and *many* others in Europe ... characters that are supposed to
be human but have impossible shapes... no human beings could actually be
shaped that way, but no one claims they are actually animated stuffed toys.
They are still humans. For some reason, in America, we have always only had
obvious humans and many characters who are too obviously animals such as
Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck. And since the human-caricature characters like
Donald are so few, Americans dump them all into one mix. "Daffy is a Duck.
Donald is a Duck." But that's obviously wrong to anyone who has read years
of Barks stories or Barks-style Donald stories. Or Mickey stories, too, for
that matter.
Why would I want Donald not to be a duck? Because ducks don't wear clothes
and live in houses and drive cars and talk and are not sentient beings
except in fairy tales and funny-animal comics, neither of which I do. Daffy
Duck flies south in the winter and is hunted by duckhunters. Bugs Bunny
lives in a hole and steals carrots from farmers. And what one writer puts
into the dialogue of a comic in 1965 or 1999 is hardly significant -- not
everything that has ever appeared in a Disney-Duck comic in 50 years is
automatically written by someone who understands the characters, nor drawn
by someone who can draw like a professional (I prove the latter fact, at
least). (Seems like I've seen at least one story even in recent years where
Donald goes out into the woods and meets a skunk or raccoon or something...
and the critter casually TALKS to him! Whaaaat? Somebody missed a basic
point somewhere! Yow! Where was the editor that day?) And even what little
I've seen of the Disney-comics style-"bibles" telling how the characters
are to be used (Disney does have them, though I'm sure there's only one
employee in the whole corporation who remembers what drawer they're stuck
in) states (in essence) that Donald will never be referred to as an actual
"duck" and no reference will ever be made to his bill or his feathers,
because he is a human caricature. Like Asterix is.
But... I *am* getting too deeply back in, aren't I. That's all I'll say!
Promise!

I wrote: "It's all a matter taste".

That should of course be "it's all a matter *OF* taste".

Greetings,

--- Daniel

Hi!
I'm delurking after reading this message from Francois:

>Fernando Ventura:
>>Yes, Brazil production off Disney Comics return with new histories,
>>that i'll be exported to various countries!

>I'm very glad to here about this. I've always considered that the
>Brazilian stories from the 80s and early 90s were some of the best
>Disney comics produced!

It's true, Brazilian local production returned in March,
1999, and I'm *sure* I happily reported it to DcML at that time: Abril Jovem
ordered me new Joe Carioca short stories then; now, almost one year
after, they want Donald and Mickey stories
"for export". I'm writing them right now! I hope you Francois and all of you
interested in Brazilian stories be reading them soon... :-)

-- Arthur.