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Quote from user: rodneyA lot of people dislike Rosa because he was a fan, just like us, who managed to acheive a decent living and some measure of fame through telling stories about characters that he loves. They are jealous because they were never given that opportunity, or their work has not been embraced to the same degree.

It seems pretty obvious to me.
It's obvious to me, too, rodney.

Quote from user: MorequackQuote from user: rodneyA lot of people dislike Rosa because he was a fan, just like us, who managed to acheive a decent living and some measure of fame through telling stories about characters that he loves. They are jealous because they were never given that opportunity, or their work has not been embraced to the same degree.

It seems pretty obvious to me.
It's obvious to me, too, rodney.
Just to clear up a small thing regarding the "They are jealous because [...] their work has not been embraced to the same degree" remark: I've stated it before, but I'll do it again. I have never heard of a single Disney creator being jealous of Don. I know of some creators who love his work and some who don't, but none are jealous.

Quote from user: MorequackQuote from user: Lars JensenI have never heard of a single Disney creator being jealous of Don. I know of some creators who love his work and some who don't, but none are jealous.
Really? None? Why do I find that impossible to believe? I'll tell you why. First, no one person can speak for all others. But a person learns to make an "educated" conclusion based on various clues and observations. Call it just being around people. It's a natural human talent that is intangible, that lies somewhere between man's intuition and the extent of his life's intelligence-gathering. And it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge.... oh, sorry, that's Rod Serling...
OK, there's no way I can argue with Rod Serling. :)

And, yes, of course there might be creators out there who are jealous. But, again: I have never heard of a single Disney creator being jealous of Don Rosa.

I seem to get the impression that Dia-Dia is arguing that Don Rosa's work is only popular because he markets himself as creating a better product that other artists. If this is the case, which appears to be the overwhelming argument, I assume is, because he has written text pieces about how he creates his stories for various books and albums which Egmont, Boom, whomever print and reprint time and time again.
But.....why would those books and albums be published at all, were the stories not so popular in the weeklies where there was no accompanying text? In that format, the stories have no choice but to stand on their own.
Certainly, you do not think that Don has anything to do with the creation of the various high profile editions of his work, do you? If he did, he would be able to get copies of them for his own collection, and I can confirm first hand that this is not always the case. PLUS......even if he does get copies of them, he doesn't get a single penny in royalties for the endless reprints of his work.
So, Dia-Dia, I ask you: If Don Rosa were indeed promoting himself into popularity, why would he ever bother when such popularity does not grant him extra income? I obviously feel that it is because he is passionate about the characters and the medium, but I eagerly await your response.

It seems almost impossible to criticize Rosa without launching into irrelevant personal attacks, or, conversely, to defend him without resorting to rhetorical hyperbole. I fail to see why a site is descending into a pit because one member says nasty things about Don Rosa. In my childhood I was a Rosa fanatic, but on reaching maturity I've realized that the minority that dislikes his stories have more right on their side. Please bear in mind that the following comments are not attacks on his character, but critiques of his work.

To being with, Rosa's artwork is rather unpleasant to look at; I believe Barks referred to it as being "outside the Disney tradition," or something similar. I agree--Rosa's background is in "fanzine" comics, and not in animation like the backgrounds of Barks, Van Horn, Scarpa, and most of the great Disney artists. Rosa's art lacks the cartoony energy and the simple, uncluttered staging of the aforementioned masters. His figures are drawn so realistically that they cannot be put through cartoon slapstick without inducing discomfort in the reader----the final panel of Treasure Under Glass is a prime example of this. Rosa has given Donald and the young Scrooge chest definition, and shown slight cleavage on Magica de Spell and Glittering Goldie, something no other Disney artist has done. The effect is disturbing and grotesque, and makes the Ducks look like some kind of sci-fi humanoids at times.

Rosa's over-reliance on Barks is also a definite failing. It's no coincidence that two of his best and most popular stories, His Majesty McDuck and The Black Knight, are also two stories with almost no borrowings from Barks. Not all of his Barks pastiches are failures--I liked Return to Plain Awful quite a bit--but far too many of them crash and burn due to Rosa's inability to comprehend Barks' genius. Comparision of Tralla La and Return to Xandau is instructive; while Barks' story is a brilliant satire of the whole concept of Utopia, Rosa's story shows Utopia as an achieveable reality only torn apart by accidental outside forces, not by innate human corruption.

All this leads me to one of my biggest problems with Rosa, his stories' lack of humor. This may seem a strange charge for such a purveyor of slapstick, but when you set aside Rosa's physical humor, his stories are largely barren in laughs, and certainly lack the character humor of Barks' tales. All his Ducks' personalities are one-note, and are painted in shriekingly flat colors. Scrooge is tough, crabby, and seemingly stingy, but really a sentimental dreamer. Donald is lazy, stupid, and hot-tempered. The Nephews are priggish, preachy, and unchildlike, always predictably acting as Scrooge's "conscience" by becoming authorial mouthpieces on respect for environment or foreign cultures. Gone is the absent-minded, naive eccentricity of Barks' Scrooge, which was a far better counterpoint to his crabbiness than forced sentimentality. Gone is the occasional everyman wisdom of Donald that allowed him to counter Scrooge's obsessions with a welcome bit of practicality. And gone is the wide-eyed, gee-whiz nature of the nephews that always balanced out their impossible intelligence.

Rosa's lack of humor also shows up in the way he lets preaching creep into his stories. Barks never had his character simply stand still and deal out indigestible chunks of his philosophy the way Rosa's Ducks do; Barks' ideas were much more skillfully woven into the plot. Louie's lecture to Scrooge on not scoffing at Incan legends in Son of the Sun is an example of this trait in Rosa's stories, as is the lengthy speech on respect for Nature given by the Peeweegah chief in War of the Wendigo or Teddy Roosevelt and Jabby the aborigine's speechifying to Scrooge in the Life and Time saga. This preachiness is part of a larger problem with Rosa's stories; his inability to "cut to the chase" and make himself understood by quick, economical turns of phrase the way Barks did. I think this is another problem partly traceable to Rosa's lack of background in animation.

I also agree with Rosa's critics in feeling that the Life and Times stories were misguided in the extreme. They rob the references Barks' Scrooge made to his past life of all their colorful tall-tale quality, and their popularity has caused other writers to be sadly limited in what they can and cannot show of Scrooge's past. Once introduced to Duck comics by Rosa, the whole continuity notion has gotten utterly out of control. The Barks/Rosa universe, a "universe" not at all of Barks' making, but somehow attributed to him, has even been imposed upon stories written before Rosa began his own stories--a case in point is Scarpa's "Secret of Success" story with Jubal Pomp--for its first American printing translator David Gerstein chose to make the secret of Scrooge's success a letter from Rosa's character Fergus McDuck, leaving me curious to know what Scarpa actually made the "secret" in the original story. Obviously, this type of interpolation isn't Rosa's fault, but it's a result of his imposition of continuity on Duckburg.

Please don't get me wrong; I find lots of vitality and raw talent in Rosa's stories, and have enjoyed some of his stories, but I think it a great and regrettable loss to the Disney comics world that he did not have the same training and background that Barks did, training that might have disciplined his talent and removed the self-indulgence from his work, enabling him to really become the brilliant New Duck Man that he is popularly acclaimed as.

Is this thread a joke? "Talibanesque"?? You're freakin' kidding right? Pretty ironic (to say the least) term to use while crafting such a malefic spew of fundamentalist nonsense. Maybe you should, I dunno, go outside for a while or something.

Quote from user: Lars JensenI know of some creators who love his work and some who don't, but none are jealous.
Maybe not jealous, but I've seen the resentment get thick enough to cut with a knife. See it here on this forum often enough.

So many people just love to blame Don for everything they don't like about any Disney comic not written by either themselves or insert-sacred-cow-artist-here.

Don't see the point of spending so much effort to hate any Disney creator really, seeing as the nature of the medium itself pretty much makes it possible to enjoy the artists of your choice while completely ignoring the work you don't care for, without there being any real relevant effect on a story-to-story basis. Van Horn's Uncle Rumpus isn't on Rosa's Duck Family Tree and somehow the moon still hasn't crashed into the Earth. Baffles science eh?

Quote from user: Dan_ShaneI've often heard him complain to me that he sees his own work that way.
So have I. Which makes the "smug" thing pretty baffling.