Donald's "real" father
Thierry Fernand
favio31 at caramail.com
Thu Apr 19 00:33:37 CEST 2001
Olivier:
>>>Most of the time they refered to Barks as "The *real*
>>>father of Donald" which is a statement I can't disagree
>>>with
>Well, how *can* you *agree* with it?
I can :-)
>Bruce Hamilton wrote something on the subject in the DD
>special 60th Anniversary issue (DD 286, Sept '94), "Will
>the First Donald Duck Please Stand Up?". Barks did a great
>job fleshing out the character.
>But what about Taliaffero? Even his Donald remains a
>slapstick comic character,
>he did a great job too.
At this point I think this is a matter of wordings and what
people mean by "the real father of Donald Duck".
Donald's fathers are of course the authors of the first
Donald cartoons (I don't mind about the earlier ducks that
appear here and there in children books and such).
Carl Barks began to "build" his Donald Duck in 1943
("Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold" doesn't count IMhO, this
is a cartoon recycled product).
In the meantime, Taliaferro made his own duck, and so did
Federico Pedrocchi, and the British authors (William Ward?)
in 1936.
BUT, these versions were not followed by the other artists.
Taliaferro was a great artist, one of my favourite, but his
duck remained strips only, with a few exception (the early
Danish works by Rydhal, the early Italian works by
Carpi/Bottaro/Scarpa who first didn't consider Barks' duck
as the real duck).
If you except those versions, Barks' is THE version of
Donald Duck that artists followed. In my opinion, it does
not mind that Barks started to draw stories even 10 or 20
years after the character was created, because he imposed
his version like no other artist / author ever did.
I believed, that if Taliaferro had been allowed to make
continuities, or draw more stories for the comic books, his
version would be much more "canonical" nowadays.
Favio
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