Disney-comics digest #815.

[Don Rosa]

ANDREAS:
        So THAT'S what that little pamphlet was in the DD weekly a few weeks
ago. "Strange facts about the Disney comics". I wondered what it was (since
I can't read it)... but it did seem to be citing various facts, sometimes
along with an artist's name. And I was (naturally) particularly puzzled when
I saw my own name in a paragraph that seemed to be reciting $crooge's total
worth -- you know, the long line of "Ten fantasticatillion, eleven
impossibidillion, blah, blah, blah, ...and 25 cents" bit. Was the author
incorrectly attributing that line to ME instead of Barks? What other Duck
facts did the author consider "strange". Actually, if the author is Erik
Horthe, he's on-line here and might answer himself.

TOMMY:
        I'm reading with interest the installments of your paper. Is it
worth mentioning that Magica DeSpell is based in Pompeii (Mt.Vesuvius) and
not Crete... at least in the original American version.
        And I see you wrestling with how Magica (and $crooge) regard that #1
Dime. That is a concept that has gotten fuddled in the last 30 years. The
editor's note that you quote sums it up well. In the 12th chapter of the
"Lo$" as well as the chapter "0" that follows in the next Gladstone issue,
AND "The Treasury of Croesus" story, I try to straighten the whole thing out
(at least to my own way of thinking). And that is that Magica never said she
thinks that the Dime is what brought $crooge his fortune; rather, she simply
knows a spell that will turn the world's most successful man's oldest
possession into a talisman which will give her the Midas Touch. And that
$crooge would never consider the Dime to be a good luck charm as he was a
failure for the first 20 years he had it, but that he still does regard it
as a symbol of his tenacity and final success, and he panics when he loses
hold of it (admittedly, a fine distinction, but the idea that $crooge owes
any iota of his success to luck goes against the most basic aspects of his
"legend").