This story is pretty decent, I think Yeah, you could PROBABLY rewrite it into having the Blot as the villain instead without all that much difficulty, but Vulter feels like a pretty natural fit for the villain here.
Hm. I wouldn't know; never been printed in a language I can read, alack… but good to know, all the same. (I ought to clarify once again that I didn't mean fitting Vulter returns were impossible; I just think there's a reason they're scarce.)
Dr. Vulter (the most unfairly neglected of the classic-era Mickey villains, I've always thought)
It was one of the first Gottfredson stories I read, so I share the sentiment — but equally, I think he's just a tricky character to work into the general status-quo, with the best intentions in the world. I recall an Italian story which featured him as an escapee from the Mouseton prison, no different from the Blot or Ecks and Doublecks, and despite the thrill of him being back, it felt weird. Vulter's not quite Vulter without his Captain Nemo-esque devoted followers, and his Bond-villain base, and everything. Outside of a (highly appreciated) cameo, having him as some criminal who's generally lurking about without being a major, immediate threat just doesn't work. Doesn't mean there's not more life in the character yet, by any means, but I think the thing to do with him would have to be more along the lines of some big Casty epic.
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Feb 27, 2023 22:15:52 GMT
Funny enough, I'm more ready to accept gradients in a blank background than on characters/objects, by and large, so a number of the ones Caballero deems most unnecessary jar with me much *less* than some of the one he finds fitting… That being said, I've increasingly found that my occasional distaste has less to do with gradients *qua* gradient, and more with a sort of overly smooth, "technological", digital look. Though I wouldn't want'em all that way, I've generally enjoyed stories with hand-painted, cel-animation-like backgrounds. I'll freely admit that it's quite an irrational thing, and nor would I want thereby to imply that I *actually* think a digital colorist's work is easier/less respectable (if only because I've found myself doing a fair bit of digital coloring of my own in recent years!).
In any case, all that is personal taste, and bouncing off of what Ramapith said, I will certainly say that if Rosa likes gradients, I am very glad that the DRL has'em. (Likewise I deeply cannot abide Rosa's preference for Scrooge's collar and cuffs to be moleskin-gray, as I've mentioned a number of times before on this forum, but wouldn't have them any other way in a definitive, authorial edition like a Rosa Library.)
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Feb 15, 2023 19:11:37 GMT
Gah. Most unpleasant news. Figures I'd poke my beak back in here just in time for those kinds of news; it couldn't be "Rosa is coming back to script one last story, to be drawn by Rota", could it? Bah. (The real lark will be to see whether they also apply this to Voodoo Hoodoo. Not that I hope they will, but it would be the ultimate demonstration of the whole process's disingenuous haphazardness.)
Hey, forgive me for the oftopic but I don't want to start a new thread for this one and since it's Beagle Boy related...
I recall at one point some one did a page witha list of all Barks stories featuring The Beagle Boys and gave numbers of how many Beagles where spoted in each story.
Perhaps someone know what I talk about and have a link to it?
Most likely Gideon. Rumpus should be ruled out because he didn't grow up as Scrooge's brother... it could also be Scrooge's twin brother from Paperino e l'uomo del west, but is that story canon for anyone?
Well, it's canon to me! Though I do prefer to think of this strip as referencing Gideon. (I don't believe in things being non-canonical. Or perhaps, more accurately, I have believed less and less in “canonicity” as a concept with every year I've been alive…)
Also, reading this strip again, I'm noticing for, I think, the first time, that nothing in it technically states that this Grandma is Scrooge's sister — she could know of his youth secondhand, from having made an active effort to become a repository of “the whole family history” as a point of personal pride! (Last names notwithstanding, this strip could also be construed as depicting Grandma as Donald's maternal grandmother i.e. Scrooge's mum. Wouldn't that be something.)
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Aug 6, 2022 14:48:02 GMT
I'm too much of the Italian school to view them as anything but closely-intertwined, but Barks-Rosa-axis-focued purists might think otherwise. (And in any case, I have a notoriously vast conception of the Disney Comics universe — I don't balk at any of the crazier “crossovers” of yesteryear. Sure, Sleeping Beauty is canonical, why not?)
Is it a different farm though? The Sign of the Triple Distelfink establishes that Grandma has had the same barn since Daphne was born, which was some twenty years before Invader. Invader isn't at all internally consistent on Duckburg geography. In some panels, the farm is literally on the foot on the hill, while on others the hill is far away in the distance, maybe as much as a few miles out, considering its size. Which is also inconsistent. Fort Duckburg on the top is considerably smaller than Scrooge's bin occupying the same space half a year later. And we know for a fact that the hill wasn't flattened in the process of building the bin, since that would destroy the basis for stories like Guardians of the Lost Library.
Hmm. Well-observed. It's a bit odd — and rather unlike Don Rosa to have left such a conspicuous nuts-and-bolts ambiguity unanswered. I think my assumption has been that the Duck farming operation in the pre-Invader era was a fairly huge thing, with multiple sets of houses and barns, already including (but far from being limited to) the smaller portion that we see the elderly Grandma Duck still operating in the present day. So she did not so much move farms, as that the farm got smaller — and she stopped using the farmhouse at the bottom of Killmule Hill as the primary farmhouse, switching to a building further out, on the outskirts of what would become the city.
This… probably doesn't make a lot of sense scale-wise, depending on how large we assume Duckburg to be, and how off-centre vs. actually in the geometric centre the "city centre" is. But it's my story, and I'm stickin' to it!
Grandma already has her farm (or maybe it is a different farm from the one that she runs now?)
It's a different farm, yes — right at the base of Killmotormule Hill, unlike her modern-day farm which is clearly not in the middle of the city centre!
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Aug 3, 2022 20:18:35 GMT
Given the information presented in the Falcon story, and the topic of this thread, the amusing thought occurs of Eider's gimmick (if we wanted to make him a recurring character) being that he owns lots of strange animals — perhaps he runs some kind of animal rescue operation? —, and he keeps sending some off to his distant relatives without warning. Blam, Grandma Duck story that opens with someone delivering a live leopard to the farm. “It's from Eider!” Etc. etc.
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Jul 29, 2022 14:36:08 GMT
Setting aside characters who were public-domain to start with (like the Wonderland Alice), has a list ever been created of all Disney characters which have fallen into the public-domain in either the U.S. or Europe? Who would appear on such a list? The Alice in Cartoonland cast, certainly; presumably including the original-flavor, ursine Bootleg Pete (I wouldn't take my chances in foregrounding him on a cover or creating merchandise, but I expect you'd be alright putting him in a novel or the like). It seems fairly well-known that the Mad Doctor is fair game. Is there anyone else? I put this in this section because I expect most would come from the cartoons, but I even wonder whether any early comic-strip characters have joined the public domain…
Sadly "Dixie" is a politicized word--as witness the recent name change of the band formerly known as the "Dixie Chicks." Due to the song expressing an enslaved man's homesickness for the plantation of his birth (see "Dixie (song)" on Wikipedia), a song which became known as the anthem of the South, the word "Dixie" was associated with the South in the Civil War. Since then, it has been used as a nickname for the Southeastern states, including by white Southerners themselves, but has also became associated with the myth of the Lost Cause and nostalgia for the good ol' days of slavery. Certainly it's used as a girl's name, but it's highly unlikely to be approved by Disney for a character. For headcanon purposes, though, I agree that it sounds significantly better than "Dickie Duck."
Bugger. I wonder, do you have any other ideas for a name that's phonetically in the same realm as “Dickie”, but less incongruous or unwittingly-politically-charged-in-hindsight.
I actually like the last name Rosa came up with for Goldie. But even in Rosa's work, you'd think "Glittering Goldie" would be a stage name. The other ballroom dancers who worked with Goldie went by what were clearly stage names (Glass-eye, Snake Hips, Lulu). So maybe Olivia Goldleaf could be her real name!
I don't think that works, if you want to follow the letter of Rosa. In The King of the Klondike, we get a brief and entertaining glimpse of a pre-“glory” Goldie, who's not yet a glamorous performer, just the owner of a saloon. (Incidentally, I always liked this glimpse of a “casual” Goldie, wearing a ratty shirt and with her hair uncombed! Gives her a bit of depth, I think, a bit of reality.)
I suppose she could be living under an alias for whatever reason, but if she's just a proprietor-slash-bartender, it's unlikely that she'd already have come up with a “Snake-Hips”-style full-on stage-name. Indeed, the third panel's emphasis on “Glittering” implies that we're seeing a sneaky origin story for her actual stage name — Glittering Goldie, dropping the “O'Gilt” altogether, as Barks had it!
Now, it's still very possible that “Goldie” isn't the name on her birth certificate. Seems more like a nickname acquired due to her striking blond hair. Perhaps she is called Olivia. (Though actually, part of me wonders if she shouldn't have a name that feels absolutely wrong for Goldie — something long, old-fashioned, unglamorous — hence preferring to go by the “Goldie” nickname! Olivia is too much a name you could imagine her living by.)
But “O'Gilt” seems rather hard to construe as an alias. (And, for what it's worth, I like it! It's fun, if obvious, for Goldie to have an Irish heritage to match Scrooge's Scottishness. I wonder if we should imagine her as an immigrant too, though my gut says child of Irish immigrants, but born in America.)
Ooh, yes, Ducky Duck is indeed a poor choice. Even slightly worse than my least favorite English character name, Dickie Duck.
I trust you know this, but I do want to point out the amusing coincidence that “Ducky” is actually a pretty direct translation of “Paperetta”, moreso than “Dickie”!
In my mental Duckworld, Dickie Duck is named Paperetta--she grew up in Italy. When she comes to Duckburg in the USA for college, her friends call her "Retta." I decided that her mother, Goldie's daughter, married an Italian and moved there to be with her husband, also a singer. Then Goldie asks Scrooge to look out for Paperetta when she comes to college in Duckburg, as a favor to an old friend. I've also made up names for Goldie's daughter and her husband, but I won't burden you with all that. But the fact that they live in Italy helps explain why they never appear, without having to make Paperetta yet another parentless character.
Neat! (Perhaps you'd mentioned this before, in which case I apologize for forgetting; been a bit of a stranger around here. If so trust I called it “neat” then, and I'm doing so again.) Personally, aside from the part of me that will always think of her as “Chris Yé-Yé”, I've grown to like the more subtle alteration to her official English name of having her go by “Dixie” — a female name, and one with musical associations to nod to the “Yè-Yè” of her original and French names. The idea of her growing up in Italy… would easily enter my headcanon if I saw it in a story, but doesn't feel quite real to me until then. But I like the spirit!
I agree she's definitely not parentless, at any rate, and I don't think I ever got the impression that she was. She just inhabits the same space as April, May and June — and if Daisy's sister can remain perpetually off-screen even though she lives in Duckburg, I find it easy enough to believe that we never met Paperetta/Dixie's parents even if they just live elsewhere in North America!
Mickey City is like the city names in French: Donaldville, Mickeyville. I mean, really! The people who chose those names clearly weren't thinking about names that would make sense in-universe.
As I think I've mentioned in the past, in defense of the French translators of yore, there was a point where Donald was to a very real degree used as Donald's last name as far as France was concerned; hence Grand-mère Donald for Grandma Duck, and Donald-Dingue for Ludwig. So conceivably, they were just running with America's “Duck family” being the “Donald family” in France, hence “Duck-burg” —> “Donald-ville”; I don't think it's an unreasonable assumption that Duckburg takes its name from the Duck Family in some way, even though Don Rosa elected to make into a coincidence. “Mickeyville” is less justifiable, but was probably named by analogy to the preexisting “Donaldville” just as “Mouseton” was coined late with “Duckburg” as a model — granting that we were stuck with Donaldville, wouldn't it have felt odd if Mickey's city failed to parallel it?