+Postage Due+Disney-comics digest #161.

[Don Rosa]

COMMENTS TO #161:

Fredrik:
	I like to hear about man-in-the-street tests like you tried with
Lo$ part 9! Thank you. That was interesting. 
	I wouldn't be surprized that a non-Duck-fan or
non-$crooge-expert might come away from the Lo$ thinking it was only
mildly amuzing. It's all designed to only make complete sense or full
humor (such as it is) to those already thoroughly familiar with the
characters and their history -- which is the series biggest flaw. But I
always knew this weakness... a large part of the enjoyment of the
stories I expect (and design) to come from Duck fans who I expect to get
a kick out of how I've fit all the Barks-facts into one loooong story.
There are so many elements of the stories, so many sequences or
extraneous facts that are stuck in here and there JUST to get them
mentioned, and a casual reader would either get nothing from their
inclusion or would actually be puzzled by the seeming pointlessness of
lots of it. But this can't be an excuse -- if the stories fail to
completely entertain ALL readers, that can never be good.
	Anyway, the date on $crooge's Ma's tombstone was greatly reduced
and slightly blurred by the fact that these comics, I THINK, are
reproduced from computer generated images of my art... but the dates are
1840-1897. I had to check my large copies myself when I saw the
tombstone in print, because the 1897 looked like a "1697" to ME, too.
But that made me think about the date and it seemed wrong still, so I
checked my original notes and I see that I made a mistake... or a
diversion from my original plans. I don't know what happened at the
time, but I thought I'd intended to put "1830" instead of "1840"... I
pictured Ma as being a bit older than 57 when she dies. It's a tiny
error, but I try to be sooooo thorough that even itty-bitty goofs
irritate me. Then there are the kind of goofs like in part 3 where I had
Prof. Rhutt Betler alive nearly 20 years after he died. That was a
BIGGER goof. Anyway, these kinda goofs will be corrected in Gladstone's
versions.