Disney-comics digest #503.

[Don Rosa]

FREDRIK:
	You said that most writers, particularly the Egmont writers,
consider only Barks' writings as canon. I disagree completely. As near
as I could ever tell, NO writers of Disney Duck comics ever gave me the
slightest impression that they (or their editors) had ever read any
Barks stories. They were definitely fashioning their stories around the
characters that Barks created, but they never seemed to be aware of the
past stories or experiences of the characters. This would make writing
their stories very difficult and tedious -- it is incredibly binding to
a writer to force himself to adhere tenaciously to any canon, with all
the limitations and referencing that that sort of writing entails.
	THIS is precisely the anal-retentive attitude that I brought
into the scheme with my attempts to change all that, at least as far as
I was concerned. That's why, when I did my first story ("The Son of the
Sun"), I opened it with a tour of a "Barks Museum" to tell the readers
that MY stories would be based solidly on Barks' work as the only holy
canon, treating it as irrefutable fact. And, of course, Gladstone was
the first editorial group who, as Barks fans rather than just editors
filling jobs, would allow this or value it. And I still see myself as
the only writer who approaches the stories with this attitude.
	I don't hesitate to "boast" of this since the simple attitude of
treating only Barks as canon does NOT make the stories better or worse
(it might make them worse, if anything, due to the limitations it
imposes). But using Barks as the only canon requires a great deal of
extra knowledge and effort that no one else is willing to burden
themselves with.