Disney-comics digest #235.

[Don Rosa]

HARRY:
	How OBSERVANT you are!!! You noticed things about that Lo$ part
I that I didn't even notice!
	The first page "prologue" was part of the original version which
your Oberon (or... what are its new initials?) decided not to use to
save space.
	How did you happen to notice that that other panel had been
enlarged. It had caught my eye and I suspected something was odd about
it, and you'll laugh when I tell you why: the caption box needed to be
reduced because Byron Erickson had rewritten my caption (with my
approval) AFTER I did the art (including the caption box); in my
version, Pa McDuck wasn't the speaker of the early captions, and that
particular box ended in saying something like "but the solitude is
disturbed by two visitors to the clan cemetary this day". When Gladstone
shrank the box they extended the lower panel, spreading the art. And the
reason it caught my eye as looking very odd is that there was a section
of foreground that was BLANK. I knew that I would NEVER leave a blank
space without filling it with needless and irritating detail!
	The bit with the mention of the "13th century" followed by
"1675" (and later by saying that it had been "200 years" since the
Hound) -- that one stumps me! I guess the previous European translators
had all corrected that error without pointing it out to anyone. I looked
at my original script just now, and I see where I have "1475" erased and
"1675" written in, and I failed to correct the "13th century" part. But
how did I decide on one or the other? That answer is lost during the 3
years since I wrote that chapter. I checked Barks' story and, at a
glance, I don't see any mention of year. Maybe I'll study this and
figure out why I decided to change it to 1675... and we'll correct that
for the future album reprint.
	Why use the American spelling of "labor". Hm. "Labor" and
"labour" are pronounced exactly the same, if you thought otherwise. When
I wrote the dialogue as a Scottish accent, it never occurred to me to
spell the words in the British style. I guess I could have.
	"The Making of the Lo$" might spoil your fun, so just don't read
it. I'm VERY glad I included those annotations in light of Barks'
ongoing public, unsolicited, mysterious proclamations that my Lo$ does
not agree with his version and that I am "reinventing" his characters
when I'm clearly doing just the opposite -- I'm reCONFIRMING his
history. "The Making of the Lo$" will prove this in each future issue of
the series.

JAMES WILLIAMS:
	You want the origins of Flintheart, Magica and the Beagle Boys?
Part II will give you the origin of the Beagle Boys, and another future
chapter will show U$'s first encounter with a young Flintheart (though
he never learns his NAME, as he did not recall him when they meet in
"The Second Richest Duck"). But as for Magica, since she is not as old
as U$, she couldn't have met him until after the events in my Lo$
(pre-1947), and you can tell by reading her first appearance in "The
Midas Touch" that that is the first time Magica and U$ had ever seen
each other. (In "The Second Richest Duck", it can be inferred that
Flintheart MIGHT recognize U$ from some previous encounter. He seems to
be expecting U$ when he shows up at his door in South Africa.)