Why did Romano Scarpa stop writing his scripts?

[Hector]

His early stories, when he did both writing and drawing, show quite
a storytelling talent. Why did he later limit himself to designing?

[Monkey_Feyerabend]

Luciano Gatto, a Disney comics artist (still active!) who was Scarpa's inker in the 50's (together with Cimino) gave a possible explanation on the Papersera forum.
Conceiving the stories besides drawing them was much time consuming, and the hours spent to write were not well-paid. In other words, what Mondadori (the Disney license published in those days) paid Scarpa for those stories was not enough to make a family and have a decent life. Now, in the 50's and early 60's this was not a problem, because Scarpa still lived in his parents house. But when he married his girlfriend in the 60's he decided to focus mainly on the art work, so to produce more pages and be paid more, be able to afford a house, have children without making them starve and so on. 

This is Gatto's explanation. I think no interviewer ever asked directly to Scarpa, so we cannot be 100% sure. Anyhow, Gatto worked with him in those days and his explanation could be well-founded, as he may have directly discussed with Scarpa about this.

[RobbK1]

Oct 14, 2017 18:54:58 GMT Monkey_Feyerabend said:

Luciano Gatto, a Disney comics artist (still active!) who was Scarpa's inker in the 50's (together with Cimino) gave a possible explanation on the Papersera forum.
Conceiving the stories besides drawing them was much time consuming, and the hours spent to write were not well-paid. In other words, what Mondadori (the Disney license published in those days) paid Scarpa for those stories was not enough to make a family and have a decent life. Now, in the 50's and early 60's this was not a problem, because Scarpa still lived in his parents house. But when he married his girlfriend in the 60's he decided to focus mainly on the art work, so to produce more pages and be paid more, be able to afford a house, have children without making them starve and so on. 

This is Gatto's explanation. I think no interviewer ever asked directly to Scarpa, so we cannot be 100% sure. Anyhow, Gatto worked with him in those days and his explanation could be well-founded, as he may have directly discussed with Scarpa about this.

I can confirm that Mondadori's pay scale for writing stories was horribly low compared to their pay for drawing the stories' pencils and inking, and also related to the northern European pay rates for story writing.  People wrote for them for love of doing it, NOT to help earn a living. 

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Oct 14, 2017 23:33:20 GMT RobbK1 said:

Oct 14, 2017 18:54:58 GMT Monkey_Feyerabend said:

Luciano Gatto, a Disney comics artist (still active!) who was Scarpa's inker in the 50's (together with Cimino) gave a possible explanation on the Papersera forum.
Conceiving the stories besides drawing them was much time consuming, and the hours spent to write were not well-paid. In other words, what Mondadori (the Disney license published in those days) paid Scarpa for those stories was not enough to make a family and have a decent life. Now, in the 50's and early 60's this was not a problem, because Scarpa still lived in his parents house. But when he married his girlfriend in the 60's he decided to focus mainly on the art work, so to produce more pages and be paid more, be able to afford a house, have children without making them starve and so on. 

This is Gatto's explanation. I think no interviewer ever asked directly to Scarpa, so we cannot be 100% sure. Anyhow, Gatto worked with him in those days and his explanation could be well-founded, as he may have directly discussed with Scarpa about this.

I can confirm that Mondadori's pay scale for writing stories was horribly low compared to their pay for drawing the stories' pencils and inking, and also related to the northern European pay rates for story writing.  People wrote for them for love of doing it, NOT to help earn a living. 

And from my (I like to think rather detailed) knowledge of French comic history, Italians had it easy. French editors flat-out didn't acknowledge comic writers, and the legally-nonexistent writer would just have to hope the artist was nice enough to split his pay with them. Eventually a "syndicate" of writers was formed around René Goscinny, the comedic genius behind Astérix, Lucky Luke, and generally half of the great Franco-Belgian stories, and was backed up by the writers' usual artists who threatened to leave Edi-Monde (the main comic publishing society at the time) altogether if writers didn't start getting the credit they deserved. Still the editors dragged their feet, so eventually these "raucous youngsters" went off to found their own comic magazine, Pilote. 

[Monkey_Feyerabend]

Oct 14, 2017 23:33:20 GMT RobbK1 said:

Oct 14, 2017 18:54:58 GMT Monkey_Feyerabend said:

Luciano Gatto, a Disney comics artist (still active!) who was Scarpa's inker in the 50's (together with Cimino) gave a possible explanation on the Papersera forum.
Conceiving the stories besides drawing them was much time consuming, and the hours spent to write were not well-paid. In other words, what Mondadori (the Disney license published in those days) paid Scarpa for those stories was not enough to make a family and have a decent life. Now, in the 50's and early 60's this was not a problem, because Scarpa still lived in his parents house. But when he married his girlfriend in the 60's he decided to focus mainly on the art work, so to produce more pages and be paid more, be able to afford a house, have children without making them starve and so on. 

This is Gatto's explanation. I think no interviewer ever asked directly to Scarpa, so we cannot be 100% sure. Anyhow, Gatto worked with him in those days and his explanation could be well-founded, as he may have directly discussed with Scarpa about this.

I can confirm that Mondadori's pay scale for writing stories was horribly low compared to their pay for drawing the stories' pencils and inking, and also related to the northern European pay rates for story writing.  People wrote for them for love of doing it, NOT to help earn a living. 

Even the pay for the artwork was lower than the rest of Europe. I am talking of the 70's, under the first direttore (editor-in-chief) of Topolino, Gentilini.

To give you an idea, here is a story that Cavazzano told in a recent conference that I watch on youtube.
In the middle of the 70's Cavazzano was invited to Paris to receive an offer from the editor-in-chief of the French Le Journal de Mickey. It was something like two or three times more than what he was paid in Italy! He went to see Gentilini in Milan, saying something like "hey, the French just offered me this much. I do not ask you to pay me as much as that offer, but...could you at least rise a bit my pay? I have a child now...". Gentilni answered "No." Cavazzano said "goodbye, then" and went to work for the French. Discovered that Cavazzano was not bluffing, Gentilini called him on the phone and told him "I'm sorry mister Cavazzano, I changed my mind, I decided to give you that rising you asked for..." At that point Cavazzano said "Oh no, sir, now you have to pay me as much as the French if you want me back".
Eventually, Cavazzano went back to work for the Italians only in the 80's, when a new editor-in-chief of Topolino arrived. [The new editor-in-chief paid better everyone, writers and artists. Also, he put in charge of the editorial work on the scripts the good writer Massimo Marconi, who put a stop to all the very bad scripts coming from bad writers (often refusing or much editing stories proposed by the late Martina himself!) and set the premises for the great rebirth of Italian Disney comics in the 90's (the generation of  Faraci, Ziche, Artibani, Celoni, Mottura, Mezzavilla, Sisti, Guerrini, etc...). ]   

[Spectrus]

Oct 15, 2017 7:54:15 GMT Monkey_Feyerabend said:

Oct 14, 2017 23:33:20 GMT RobbK1 said:

I can confirm that Mondadori's pay scale for writing stories was horribly low compared to their pay for drawing the stories' pencils and inking, and also related to the northern European pay rates for story writing.  People wrote for them for love of doing it, NOT to help earn a living. 

Even the pay for the artwork was lower than the rest of Europe. I am talking of the 70's, under the first direttore (editor-in-chief) of Topolino, Gentilini.

To give you an idea, here is a story that Cavazzano told in a recent conference that I watch on youtube.
In the middle of the 70's Cavazzano was invited to Paris to receive an offer from the editor-in-chief of the French Le Journal de Mickey. It was something like two or three times more than what he was paid in Italy! He went to see Gentilini in Milan, saying something like "hey, the French just offered me this much. I do not ask you to pay me as much as that offer, but...could you at least rise a bit my pay? I have a child now...". Gentilni answered "No." Cavazzano said "goodbye, then" and went to work for the French. Discovered that Cavazzano was not bluffing, Gentilini called him on the phone and told him "I'm sorry mister Cavazzano, I changed my mind, I decided to give you that rising you asked for..." At that point Cavazzano said "Oh no, sir, now you have to pay me as much as the French if you want me back".
Eventually, Cavazzano went back to work for the Italians only in the 80's, when a new editor-in-chief of Topolino arrived. [The new editor-in-chief paid better everyone, writers and artists. Also, he put in charge of the editorial work on the scripts the good writer Massimo Marconi, who put a stop to all the very bad scripts coming from bad writers (often refusing or much editing stories proposed by the late Martina himself!) and set the premises for the great rebirth of Italian Disney comics in the 90's (the generation of  Faraci, Ziche, Artibani, Celoni, Mottura, Mezzavilla, Sisti, Guerrini, etc...). ]   

Thanks, that explains a lot, actually! So Marconi and the new editor-in-chief are among the reasons why our LTBs were so good during that period.

But Scarpa never really "stopped" writing altogether from what I can gather. He drew a lot more stories by others, but he kept writing a lot of stories through the 70s and 80s. See here: inducks.org/comp2.php?code=&keyw=&keywt=i&exactpg=&pg1=&pg2=&bro2=&bro3=&kind=n&rowsperpage=0&columnsperpage=0&hero=&xapp=&univ=&xa2=&creat=&creat2=&plot=Romano+Scarpa&plot2=&writ=Romano+Scarpa&writ2=&art=&art2=&ink=&ink2=&pub1=&pub2=&ser=&xref=&mref=&xrefd=&repabb=&repabbc=al&imgmode=0&vdesc2=on&vdesc=en&vde=on&sort1=s.firstpublicationdate

[Monkey_Feyerabend]

Yes , yes, of course, the premises of the question in the title of the topic is formally wrong. He never really stopped from writing. Basically he kept working on his own material without loss of continuity till the end of the career. But around the age of his marriage he diluted that a lot, making the artwork for other writers the greatest part of his job on a daily basis. 

Actually, after that he allowed himself to experiment a bit on the writing side. For instance in the second half of the 60's he started to write and drawn short comics stories with Ellsworth, presented as sequences of gags which mimicked the way different Sundays by Walsh and Gonzales were packed together in Topolino the decade before. And then in the early 90's he even started to do Mickey's strip stories! He had clearly an obsession with the American newspaper Mickey and from time to time tried to recreate adding his own touch.

[Spectrus]

Oct 24, 2017 9:45:09 GMT Monkey_Feyerabend said:

Yes , yes, of course, the premises of the question in the title of the topic is formally wrong. He never really stopped from writing. Basically he kept working on his own material without loss of continuity till the end of the career. But around the age of his marriage he diluted that a lot, making the artwork for other writers the greatest part of his job on a daily basis. 

Actually, after that he allowed himself to experiment a bit on the writing side. For instance in the second half of the 60's he started to write and drawn short comics stories with Ellsworth, presented as sequences of gags which mimicked the way different Sundays by Walsh and Gonzales were packed together in Topolino the decade before. And then in the early 90's he even started to do Mickey's strip stories! He had clearly an obsession with the American newspaper Mickey and from time to time tried to recreate adding his own touch.

I know two of those Ellsworth stories (the ones with Atomino) and they're pretty good. One of them is more like a regular story but the other is clearly split into four episodes where Ellsworth has to deal with a) Horace/Clarabelle, b) Pete/Trudy, c) Atomino/Einmug and d) Eega Beeva.

And one of Scarpa's later "big" stories has just been voted into our German Fan-Edition, namely the 1988 Olympics crossover.

[Monkey_Feyerabend]

Yeah but the Olympics crossover was still a regular story, with the regular lay-out of page. Around 1992 he did some four or five long stories actually divided into strips, which extended over two pages of Topolino magazines.
Like this one, or this one, and then a couple more... 

[Spectrus]

I'm just saying that he was still a very important writer even in the late 80s.