Don Rosa is cool and is a comrade (wrote a fan comic where the nephews launch a revolution and Donald kills Scrooge), but he really love the ducks and doesn't want to criticize it too much once he got inside.
He also has beef with disney, because of how they treat their artists
Oh yeah Disney took every idea the comic artists came up with while giving them pretty much nothing in return. Like damn, Carl Barks singlehandedly created the whole damn Duck universe and what did he get, some crummy credit on Ducktales?
By the way, FUCK Ducktales.
An animated version of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck would be the only animated Disney thing I would want to see
Of course, the book is way too cool for Disney's brand of slop
Yeah, apparently they've been cracking down on depictions of firearms in euro duck comics recently, so that's like 50% of why Life and Times is cool gone.
I never watched duck tales, what's so especially bad about it?
The first series toned down all the crazy and cool stuff in the original comics, on top of removing Donald while creating new characters like Launchpad to replace him. For those who never see the comics, Barks' Donald is a sarcastic WW2 veteran who likes making obscure 50s pop culture references so the really did him dirty.
I think the new Ducktales is much better, for one they actually have Donald this time, but I'm still against it on the ground of Disney's treatment of its comic artists.
I only know of Ducktales because it seems yo be the only Donald Duck media americans know exists.
As someone who loved the shit out of Don Rosa's Donald Duck stories as a kid, reading about his treatment by Disney- though in this case it was more the publishers with the publishing rights to Disney comics- was heartbreaking :(
Basically they had no qualms about using his name and popularity to sell tons of books and merch but he saw no royalties for any of those due to the way artists were contracted- it was just one lump sum per story.
I don't think he was even compensated for all the times he was asked to fly to Europe to promote and sign books.
He quit because eventually his eyesight got so bad drawing comics became too straining for the money he was making.
He was approached by a bunch of publishers since and told he could write and draw any original comic he wanted but he was just nah, Donald Duck was the only thing I cared about and the only thing I wanted to make
Don Rosa is just a great guy, he still goes to a lot of cons an signs his artwork and stuff for free and chats with his fans. Just a guy who really loves comics and donald duck, getting exploited for his passion.
There's a bit of nuance to it. He was happy with the work for hire contract for the actual comics, that is something he signed and agreed to. He didn't agree to using his name for it, so he did trademark his name, also to be included in the quality control of how his works are published and coloured (the definitive version is the Fantagraphics Don Rosa Collection, which is an amazing publication if you're a fan.)
Also, the eyesight issue was part of it, but after his story "The prisoner of White Agony Creek" he also didn't feel he had anything left to tell with the characters.
Don Rosa is definitely an interesting character and he's quite active in his official Facebook group and he has some interesting opinions on culture and collecting. He truly hates collectors that only collect for monetary value and he's even put that concept into his version of Uncle Scrooge
Yeah, I remember the constant reissues and comic compilations being the major sticking point. Thanks for the extra info, my recollection of the whole situation is kind of fuzzy.
He truly hates collectors that only collect for monetary value and he’s even put that concept into his version of Uncle Scrooge
There was a story he did that was specifically lampooning these sorts of collectors, and he also railed against comic book collectors in the foreword to that story. Sealing comic books, things that intended to be read and enjoyed, into ziplock bags, never to be opened really stuck in his craw
I remember reading one story where the city? State? of Duckburg basically just printed a massive bill worth something like 20 trillion and gave that to Scrooge and confiscated all his money to put it back into the economy. In the end Scrooge gets all his money back because everyone has so much money to spend and because he's the capitalist shitlord who basically has a monopoly on everything.
Then there was another story where the state? City of Duckburg was going bankrupt so they sold formely public spaces to individuals and everything was great because the private owners would keep their stuff clean and beat up hoodlums who tried to vandalise their streets and busses. More private property, that's the answer. :sadness-abysmal:
Anyway yeah the goth is Magica de Spell who is :anti-italian-action: and she's after Scrooge's Number One Dime, in order to be able to make an amulet that will give her the Midas Touch.
I would make the standard american-italian "eyyyyyyy" comment but I'm scared of the goths among us. :scared:
It's the city of Duckburg in the state of Calisota. At least that is the Don Rosa reading, which after Barks is the most interesting.
Carl Barks didn't care about continuity and would change details from story to story. Decades later Don Rosa cobbled together his canon from all the disparate stuff in Barks' stories
The Italian Donald Duck comics, especially the older ones were WILD
Scrooge is Donald's landlord and debtor and is constantly forcing him into slave labour and half the stories have him evicting Donald and the nephews
Also Donald just want to sleep and eat and forces his nephews to cook and clean under threat of corporal punishment
Everyone knows Scrooge's one true love was the saloon singer he met in Klondike
Man I used to read so much Donald Duck comics, at one point I could distinguish and put names to around 15 artists styles. Still something I am kinda proud of.
Always wonder why the comics are mostly just popular in Europe and not the US. You'd think Disney would be churning them out.
They were popular in the 1940s and 1950s and then petered out. I believe Disney just didn't think they made enough money to bother with domestically
Disney never made the comics, they licensed it to other publishers. When US comics weren't available in drug stores and supermarkets anymore, the market for licensed youth comics died in the US, as there wasn't a real market anymore. This is mostly because distribution shifted to specialty stores that didn't send unsold comics back. It's why US comics is still a superhero-laden hellscape to this day.
It never changed in Europe, Disney comics are still easily findable in stores in most European countries.
When did this change occur? I think the very tail end of Carl Barks' Duck stories was somewhere in the early 1960s, (with the last stories just being writing/story credits) and growing up I remember seeing a bunch of old comics based on properties like Hanna Barbera characters in flea markets and yard sales that seemed to be originally American and from around the 1960s or 1970s
