One thing I like to read is Don Rosa's colorful opinions, it is part of the experience of reading Duck comics to read his strong opinions and I'm sure many of you have been looking up his interviews as well. I wanted to create a thread to compile his comments an discuss them.
1-Comments from Walt Disney Comics and Stories, accompanying his family tree. He doesn't consider Fethry canon but he included him after request by the editor.
2-Comments from oneman.gr interview, he doesn't consider the money bin containing "material" valuables, but rather memories of Scrooge's adventures:
You can find more Don Rosa commentary than you can shake a cane at in Fantagraphics’ Don Rosa library. Don certainly is one of the more outspoken creators in the Disney Comics community, although he is unlikely to consider himself a Disney artist.
"I should digress here to set straight a terrible misconception that all of Europe has always had about $crooge’s Money Bin. It is NOT filled with gold coins as it has always been depicted in European comics. The whole point behind Barks’ original creation of the Money Bin is that it is filled with ordinary pocket change. Quarters and dimes and pennies… NOT valuable coins! The idea is “here’s a guy who is SO CHEAP that he saves a whole building filled with pocket change”. To depict the Bin as being filled with valuable golden coins misses the whole point of the Money Bin. That’s a sad misconception in European comics that bothers me a lot."
No, Don, the misconception is that the coins in the Money Bin are depicted as gold coins in Europe. I am an European Disney comic reader and NEVER EVER thought they were gold coins. I always believed they were made of the same material as for example the 50 Euro cent coins which have a gold color but are NOT made of gold (they are made of a copper alloy). And I am dead certain the vast majority of European Disney comic readers never thought they were gold coins either. It's really annoying how confidently incorrect Don can be about various things.
"I should digress here to set straight a terrible misconception that all of Europe has always had about $crooge’s Money Bin. It is NOT filled with gold coins as it has always been depicted in European comics. The whole point behind Barks’ original creation of the Money Bin is that it is filled with ordinary pocket change. Quarters and dimes and pennies… NOT valuable coins! The idea is “here’s a guy who is SO CHEAP that he saves a whole building filled with pocket change”. To depict the Bin as being filled with valuable golden coins misses the whole point of the Money Bin. That’s a sad misconception in European comics that bothers me a lot."
No, Don, the misconception is that the coins in the Money Bin are depicted as gold coins in Europe. I am an European Disney comic reader and NEVER EVER thought they were gold coins. I always believed they were made of the same material as for example the 50 Euro cent coins which have a gold color but are NOT made of gold (they are made of a copper alloy). And I am dead certain the vast majority of European Disney comic readers never thought they were gold coins either. It's really annoying how confidently incorrect Don can be about various things.
They are very very frequently described as being gold coins in Italian stories, and many stories use this as a plot element. Don is not incorrect.
Most stories seem to imply that they are ordinary coins, like the stories where Scrooge finds a coin in the street ant put it in the Money Bin, or the whole OK Quack (a character designed in Italy) cycle (an alien whose ship could be miniaturized and resembles a coin, and is circulating as a coin in Duckburg, and because that OK Quacks goes regularly to the bin to see if the ship/"coin" is there).
Is there a particular character where you’ve inserted yourself more than the others in terms of mannerisms or dialogue or thought process?
Naturally I did not want to change the personality of any of Barks’ characters. “The Son of the Sun” was originally intended to be the ONLY Duck story I did, just on a lark, before going back to the family business. But when I began to realize that I was going to continue to do more Scrooge McDuck stories, I realized I had to come to grips with the fact that readers perceived him as a purely GREEDY character. But greed is “the root of all evil”. And I knew I could not continue to create stories about a character that I disliked on that basis. So I had to gradually twist Scrooge’s personality away from being simply greedy to being competitive, proud, adventurous and with a deep respect for his past.
After all, according to Barks he kept every cent he ever made in that Money Bin. He didn’t spend any of it. Greedy people accumulate wealth to buy material goods or power. “My” Scrooge preserved all of those coins as myriad trophies to his grit and glory. The coins were his memories of his life, not symbols of greed.
How can Rosa say that he "twisted" Scrooge's personality in this direction? And that this represents "his" Scrooge? ALL of these character traits were already there in Barks' original Scrooge comics, right from the point when Scrooge became a full-fledged comic-book star in Barks' "Only a Poor Old Man". I hadn't expected to ever see Rosa make such a bizarre claim.
(What's worse, Rosa fans who don't care much for Barks probably read stuff like this and take it as face value, thinking, "Yeah, right on, this is why I like Rosa SO MUCH BETTER than Barks!")
Don Rosa already had this take in the 90s, in this video he words it in a better way: "Scrooge wants the money or the treasure not so much for its buying power, like a normal greedy person would, at least the way I see it, these are trophies". "He saves all these things in the money bin so he can look back at that challenge".
I don't grudge Rosa his strong opinions (I'm just as opinionated myself), but I have to say that I often wince at the hectoring tone of a lot of his remarks on the Duck comics, an example being that indignant digression quoted above, about the coins in the Bin. That note of "you are all wrong, and this is why", an unfortunate hallmark of pop-culture debates across multiple fandoms, is always creeping into his comments. I recall him similarly lecturing people, in the old DCML days, on why Glittering Goldie was an "essential" part of the Scrooge mythos, and dogmatically insisting that it would be a betrayal of Scrooge's core character to ever have a romantic relationship with anyone else.
In regards to Rosa's take on Scrooge as "competitive, proud, adventurous" rather than simply greedy, I find it ironic that the New Ducktales show, which Rosa (rightly) abhors, basically copied that part of Rosa's take on the character. I think the reason why the Rosa version of Scrooge works (in Rosa's best stories, anyway), while the New Ducktales one fails, is the last part of the quoted Rosa sentence "...with a deep respect for his past." Rosa's emphasis on Scrooge's past, on the memories he treasures and the parts of his life that he lost along the way to his wealth, gives a wistfulness and a touch of tragedy to Rosa's Scrooge which prevents him from seeming like a smug superhero; the New Ducktales Scrooge never really lost anything, and is too cool to get misty-eyed about the past, and thus doesn't work.
That's an interesting point on the difference between Ducktales and Rosa Scrooge, didn't think of it that way before, the touch of tragedy certainly adds layers to the character. Do you have a link to that interview where Don Rosa talks aboit Goldie?
It wasn't an interview, but an old post by Rosa on the Disney Comics Mailing List, part of a lengthier debate about the omission of Miss Penny Wise from the Life and Times. Here's the link to the Goldie post:
Quote, "To me, it is an ESSENTIAL part of $crooge's character and personality and motivations that Glittering Goldie was his only love, that that love may or may not have ever been consumated (there in White Agony Valley), and that that love will never be renewed."
I don't agree with him, but he very clearly states that this is his opinion.
That's fair; the "to me" qualifier prevents the Goldie pronouncement from being as dogmatic as the discursus on the Bin's contents. Still, I find it a little bizarre that Rosa proclaims the idea of Goldie as Scrooge’s One True Love to be "one of the best parts of the Scrooge legend" when he's the one who basically invented that part of the legend in the first place. His extremely romantic take on the Scrooge-Goldie relationship is not really supported by Barks.
Don is at it again... A recent comment of his from the Rosa Facebook group:
"I know for a fact that all Europeans have grown up with the firm belief that $crooge's Bin is filled with GOLD coins, coins made of the metal GOLD, as incorrect as that idea is from the intention of the original stories."
WRONG. Look, I love Don, but he can be soo annoying sometimes, especially when he confidently spews incorrect information. Also, he constantly talks about his deep dislike for misinformation spread online but he himself has done it on several occastions. No, Don, NOT all Europeans have grown up with the firm belief that $crooge's Bin is filled with GOLD coins, In fact, I am dead certain MOST of them have not.
In his commentary for the first American publication of "Life and times of Scrooge McDuck" chapter IV, Don himself made mistake to say that John Rockerduck was an European creation, that made a guest apperance in Barks story... only to correct himself few issues later when fans pointed out to him that John was Barks creation (Ah, the pre-internet times) So even Don was a victim of spreeding misinformation...
This being said I did found his orginal commentary on his website on Lifes and Times very eyed opening at the time and made me appriciate the layers of that story even more. And it was fun to read his commentaries in Fantagraphics... Even if you can tell where he had very little to say about particular story and had to force himself to say something about a particular story, but when the "Background" was interesting it was worth reading.
Last Edit: Feb 25, 2023 23:45:57 GMT by Pan Maciej
Know as Maciej Kur, Mr. M., Maik, Maiki, Pan, Pan Miluś and many other names.