Back from Rome

Per Starback starback at Minsk.DoCS.UU.SE
Tue Aug 10 18:17:14 CEST 1993


Hi everyone!  I'm back after a week in Rome and am glad to see that my
digestifier script seems to have been working.  (In fact I was very
near screwing it up just before leaving so that no digests would have
gone out...)

I bought a stack of Italian Disney comics in Rome, and I also found
(and bought) a book I hadn't heard about: P. Marovelli's, E. Paolini's,
and G. Saccomano's _Introduzione a Paperino: La fenomenologia sociale
nei fumetti di Carl Barks_ (Firenze, 1974).  I wish I could read it
too, but it seems to contain serious as well as tongue-in-cheek stuff.
Incidentally one of the appendices contains a list of Scrooge's staff!
(A matter discussed not long ago here.)

Well, I did other things too, but they didn't have much to do with
Disney comics.  Oh yeah, I was not very far from Vesuvius (when taking
a trip to Pompei).

And now for some comments on old stuff:

Rosa on Hamilton:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Hamilton may have exploited [Barks] but he also made him RICH and,
> though Barks created all his body of work, it was HAMILTON that made
> it popular with others than just poor Duck fans -- thereby creating
> about 90% of Barks' American popularity.

Well, I for one don't think I care much about Barks's new popularity
among people who never were and still aren't duck fans.  People who
buy Barks collectibles to show off or as speculation, but who don't
really care about it themselves.

Geir Hasnes:
> The young Scrooge apparently meets that guy, the professor from the south,
> was it Rhett Butler?, who had been to Plain Awful and found square eggs, on
> a train in the Midwest. How could that happen? Barks let him die just
> shortly after he had come out of the fog, and the eggs was brought to Cuzco
> by someone else.Apparently, the professor never returned to the US.

Rhutt Betlah it was.  Maybe I shouldn't answer this question, as it
was addressed to Don, and he should know best, but anyway:  Yes, that
is a continuity error that Don didn't think about.  He will (or have?)
revise(d) it after the Scandinavian publication, so it will be fixed
when it's published in the USA.  You didn't spot another closely
related continuity error though!  (I won't say what it is...)

> In my opinion it is quite all right to make a broader mythology out of the
> scattered remarks in Barkses stories, but sometimes I feel people take
> Scrooge et co. too seriously.  Scrooge never intended "three cubic
> acres of money" to be anything else than a pun, and then people
> start calculating the size of such an amount.

Which isn't easy as an acre is a square measure.  I've seen someone in
Der Hamburger Donaldist argue that this means that the Donaldistic
universe is six-dimensional.

> And can we be sure when he tells where he bought his top hat, that
> he tells the truth, or is he just an old man simply overstating,
> just as old people usually do - they tend to tell the truth in
> accordance with how they would like to see the truth.

I agree and find that a great way to explain away things that seem
to be contradictory.  The ducks sometimes lie, joke or misremember
things.  What is said in text boxes should be taken as the Truth
though, I think.

Apropos the essays you mention I'll just add bibliographic data making
them somewhat easier to find.

1. It was "Fine Feathered Friends: The Disney Ducks Part IV: Scrooge
McDuck: Saved By the Belle" in The Barks Collector #34.

2. Yes, it was Dick Harrison.  "Den engelske turisten" in
NAFS(k)uriren #16 (in Swedish).
--       "
Per Starback, Uppsala, Sweden.  email: starback at student.docs.uu.se
 "I haf missed my plane to Rome!  May I ask you for a lift?"




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