+Postage Due+Disney-comics digest #177.

[Don Rosa]

Juuso Paaso:
	(I don't really have an answer to your question -- I just love
to say "Juuso Paaso".)
	No, actually, we were up one side of this Grandma Duck scandal
and down the other on here before you came along.
	Simply put, Grandma Duck was created, I'm certain, with no
deeper thought than to have a kindly old grandma character with no
concern as to who she was. 
	As time went on the character was used in the comic books in
more complex stories than in grandma's newspaper-strip home. This
eventually required a writer to place Grandma in the Duck family, and
since most of these stories were written by hacks, they took a very
simple viewpoint on the Duck Universe, and treated the Duck Family as
if it only had one root. Only one side. Why should they worry about
making it more complex and realistic? But having made this decision and
carried on from there, they were eventually faced with the growing
complexity of the situation -- and not bothering to waste any thought
on the matter, somebody hastilly decided on the insultingly simple
notion that Donald's two older relatives must be brother and sister.
They didn't worry that this meant Donald's grandmother was the sister
of his uncle since they weren't writing this stuff for geniuses. This
also ignored all the other aspects of $crooge's life as the two
characters were created with no regard for the existance of the other.
	Barks never seemed to think he was working for geniuses either,
nor did he have any more respect for comic books than the others; but
his difference was that he put more thought into his work simply
because he took great pride in whatever his job was, regardless of the
pay or genre. This is the now-extinct "American work ethic". He
actually constructed a Family Tree for his own reference in order to
make sure the Duck Family was a logical, workable entity. And
naturally, as any person with half a brain would build it, Grandma came
from one side of Donald's parentage and $crooge from the other (to be
precise, $crooge is Donald's mother's brother, and Elvira "Grandma"
Duck is Donald's father's mother). The only problem left is that this
requires Grandma to be older than $crooge -- which places her in her
late 90s in the stories. I'd prefer her to be a bit younger than
$crooge but not everything works as well as can be. At least it's
better than the idea that your grandmother is your uncle's sister.