digest #228

[Don Rosa]

From: john garvin
>>>>for Mr. Rosa:  What kind of impact, for better or ill, has your direct
pipeline to fandom had on your ability to create?  What do you think would
have happened had Barks been working in the same kind of environment, and
not in a vaccume?


Oops... I missed responding to this --
It's difficult for me to say what impact my direct pipeline "to" fandom has
had on my work since, as I frequently tell people in interviews and such, I
CAME into this as PART of that fandom. I don't have a pipeline "to" it, I
*am* it. I don't know what it's like to do comics from outside of that
collective group. If you were to ask me what my comics would be like if I
were not a comics fan first, and a "professional" second... I'm sure I
would be treating these stories as simple gags for youngsters, rather than
overly-serious comedy-dramas for adult fans like myself. But more than
that, I don't guess I'd be doing it at all because the corporations that
control the system make the job too frustrating if I didn't enjoy the
subject so much. I'd still be running that old family construction company.
But I think you're asking about how the feedback I get from other fans
affects my work? I just sat and tried to think of an answer for that, but I
can't. Perhaps it's how readers seem to most enjoy the same stories I most
enjoy doing, it only hardens my resolve to keep doing them... perhaps it
helps me decide to spend the extra time that I want to spend on research
even though it's making the job take longer. That lowers my income but
raises my enjoyment, making it easier to ignore those frustrations.
How would Barks' work have been different if he had known there were people
reading and loving his stories above all others, all over the world? I
can't possibly guess. Perhaps it is a very good thing that he didn't
know -- it is said that what he really wanted was a job doing an adventure
newspaper strip like "Terry and the Pirates" or such (where the only real $
was in comics in those days)... maybe if he'd known how beloved his work
was, he would have stopped doing the Disney stuff and made that decision to
the newspapers, using his popularity to convince a feature syndicate to
give him a start on a strip of his own. Or... I've often thought that Barks
had a lot in common with Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) in art style,
imagination and background in magazine illustration of the 30's. Perhaps if
he had seen how popular his stories were, or if Western Publishing had
realized or thought about it more, Barks would have gone into writing and
illustrating children's books that would belong to him rather than a
corporation, making lots more $ off his genius for both him and the
publisher than using his talents on comics where the profits were shared
too heavilly with a corporation that had nothing to do with Barks' creation
of the stories. And meanwhile the Dell Disney comics would still have kept
selling without Barks, even though perhaps not as well, so Dell/Western
would have still come out ahead with the UNshared profits off the
Barks?Western wholly-owned storybooks.
But if he had stayed on the Duck comics while being in touch with his vast
worldwide  readership -- I can't guess how the stories would have been
different. Perhaps, as with mine, not any different at all... only moreso.