digest #469

Don Rosa donrosa at iglou.com
Sat Apr 7 14:15:24 CEST 2001


From: "Olivier" <mouse-ducks at wanadoo.fr>
>>>>Mr Don Rosa:
Thumbing through the pages of  the Kalevala story to "answer"
Anders' question, one thing suddenly struck me, knowing there's
a lot of  research in the making of  your stories, and hidden references:
are the music bars we see throughout the story copied from some
Kalevala-related piece of  music?

It certainly is. And it was obtained at no small effort, requiring trips to
search through the music libraries at the University of Louisville. Just
one of the many details that I spend extra time on just for fun, knowing
99.999% of the readers will never notice it, or even if they did, would
never dream of the time that went into it.
Those are actual lines from Sibelius' "Finlandia".

Anyway, this business about the color of the coins in $crooge's Bin -- I've
addressed this before, but I will again:
Those coins have always been colored gold in European editions. I don't
know what sort of thought originally went into that, but it is now a
tradition. It's very important to continue such traditions in comics that
so many kids grew up with. I would not think it's a good idea that they
should ever tamper with that tradition, or others. Still, I'm pleased when
some publishers color the coins correctly when they print my stories,
because I want them colored as they should be, and often I make references
to the coins that require them to be colored that way. Even so, I hope they
continue to color the coins in their traditional way in all other stories
where the writers/artists have no special preference (but who actually
probably *prefer* the coins be colored gold since they are not Americans
and thought they were supposed to be gold).

However the European coloring, I suspect, was originally done by a colorist
who was not reading the stories. They thought that this zillionaire would
have a bin of gold coins. But this misses the entire point of the Barks'
original humor of $crooge's Money Bin -- it is filled with ordinary pocket
change. Pennies and nickels and dimes and quarters and silver dollars and
$1 bills, etc. That means *very* little other than silver coins (only our
pennies are copper).  No, this does not mean it should be colored "gray and
brown" (???)... it should be (and was) colored silver (white with light
blue highlights) with a sparse sprinkling of copper-tan spots.
As for Barks' paintings, the color of the coins which is used is picked
because it makes the most stunning painting. These paintings and lithos,
more often than not, are being done for buyers who never read the comics,
and who would prefer to see GOLD coins filling the background. Also, those
scenes don't actually even seem to be taking place in the Money Bin we are
familiar with -- the background, the vault door, everything is recreated
for the sake of the painting. The paintings are wonderful, but their
accuracy to the original comics was secondary to creating a  colorful,
intricate scene.







More information about the DCML mailing list