Where does Scrooge sleep? / Barks' Junior Woodchucks stories

Lars Jensen lpj at forfatter.dk
Wed Nov 12 09:27:20 CET 2003


On October 10th, Steven Rowe wrote:

> <<In fact, Barks' JW
> stories made a sufficiently large impression on readers back then that
> these tales got a mention in Jon Gisle's Donaldism book, even though
> Gisle didn't know Barks was the writer.>>
>
> odd - why didnt he know?  here in the usa at least, that info was out
> at the time...
>    did usa and european duck fandom not communicate?

Gisle's Donaldism book is based on Norwegian publications only and the
assumption that things are exactly as they appear to be. For instance,
he assumes the contents of the Norwegian weekly are printed in
chronological order. This week's stories are seen as being exactly one
week younger than last week's stories -- no matter when or in which
order the material was originally published in the US. This means, for
instance, that when the Norwegian weekly in the 1970s printed some
mid-1940s stories by Barks, similar to the ones they had used in the
late '40s, Gisle interpreted these tales as newly-made stories where the
Disney creators had returned to an early, "ur-Donaldistic" style.

Another result of the "things are as they appear to be" approach is that
Gisle interprets Barks' 1970s Woodchuck stories as being the work of a
newly-hired writer. (Since their ecology-friendly messages make them
radically different from anybody else's work -- even the earlier Barks
material -- it's easy to understand why he would believe this.) When the
weekly soon stops printing this particular type of JW adventures,
Gisle's humorous theory is that conservative Disney has had the "radical
writer" assassinated.

Gisle's book is a wonderful 1970s document on how to approach the
Norwegian weekly "scientifically" and has interesting content on various
subjects (such as Fethry), but it's not really usable as a source of
Duck facts. If you want up-to-date information on Ducks, there are
better sources out there.

Lars




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