It's amazing to see how popular artists like Gottfredson or Strobl in America are. I live in Germany (so sorry for my really bad English) and the most Germans don't like Gottfredson so much, becauso they don't know them! To date, not all stories by Gottfredson have been published in Germany, and some others are just published in 50-years-old books you cannot get.
Here's my Top Five (but it changes very often):
Writers: 1. Carl Barks 2. Casty 3. Don Rosa 4. Romano Scarpa 5. Tito Faraci 6. Floyd Gottfredson 7. Giorgio Pezzin
Artists: 1. Massimo De Vita 2. Giorgio Cavazzano 3. Romano Scarpa 4. Floyd Gottfredson 5. Marco Rota
Why making a top-five, if you can make a top 10? So here are my top ten authors: On place 10 of the authors, I take Rodolfo Cimino. I know some of you are going to freak out about this (topolino), but one of his best stories is in my opinion "Paperon De' Paperoni visir di Papatoa". This is a very classical story, printed in several countries in several publications. Also a very good story is "Zio Paperone e il nemico deomestico" and (of course)"Paperino e l'avventura sottomarina". Place 9 is reserved for Carl Barks, and I know some people might find this strange, but I don't like his stories that much. I think he's really overestimated. I mean, of course, he made the Ducks as they are today and I like his long adventure-pieces (that is the reason why he is on place 9 and not somewhere in the nirvana between 50 and 100, like Carlo Panaro), but there are much better artists and authors. Coming to no. 8 in my list, which is Giorgio Cavazzano. So, Giorgio Cavazzano is a really great artist and he influenced many modern Italian artists, such as Fabio Celoni or Paolo Mottura. But, nonetheless, many people don't know that he worked as an author too, due to his work for Panini Italia, before he went to Egmont. Unfortunately, his writing skills don't even come close to his skills as an artist, nonetheless there is one story I really love "Casablanca". This story's just totally great as I love the film "Casablanca". The next one (no.7) is Silvano Mezzavilla. He is a very unknown author. Thanks to Primus, a user in a German forum, who made this great review (maybe I'll translate it to you sometime in the future, it's really great), I learned about how great and philosophical Mezzavilla is. I'll mention him in the IDW-wishlist. No. 6 is Don Rosa, thanks to his great background infos and historical accuracy, his stories are just great. So, I like him very much, though I think his artwork is much better than his writing skills. Coming to no. 5 of my list, which is Romano Scarpa. His stories are just great. I cannot say why, he just has this old-school charme. No. 4 is then Giovan Battista Carpi. Stories like "That missing Candelabra" or "War and Peace" are just great, his literature parodies are amazing. Look at my short review if you want to know why I like him. Starting into the top 3 with Fausto Vitaliano, he is the genius head behind "Topolinia 20802", a story in which Mickey is going to a big city to start a new life as a reporter. He also made DoubleDuck, so you can't say he is unpopular, eh? Coming to no.2 which is Francesco Artibani, the genius behind "Scrooge's last adventure", which I reviewed in German, and "The river of time", which was mentioned by one user in the favourite story thread. Before shouting out my No. 1, here are some honourable mentions: Tito Faraci Floyd Gottfredson Teresa Radice Guido Martina Giorgio Pezzin Massimo De Vita Bruno Enna But number 1 is Casty. Yes, who has expected it? I mentioned him twice in German and he's really the best! His stories are full of fantastic elements and they have a massive splash of suspense!
Yeah, so that's it. Maybe I will make a list with my top ten artists sometime in the future, but for now, this should be enough.
Post by Monkey_Feyerabend on Feb 4, 2017 15:59:59 GMT
I always fall from my chair when I read someone saying things like "Barks is ok, he wrote good stories, but there are better (Disney) authors and artists". That strikes much more than when people tell "I do not like Barks at all", which is something that I can accept more in a way. But then I remember that myself I had to get to a certain age and a certain narrative awareness to really start understanding Barks's magic, so to get to the conclusion that he is not just better than all the other Disney writers...he is really another thing, his work is on another planet. In any case, everyone has his taste, so that's fine.
Strange that you put Mezzavilla and Artibani into your top ten, but not Faraci, considering the well known equation Faraci = Mezzavilla + Artibani + even more fun (The river of time is 99% Faraci-style and 1% Artibani-style) I suppose that the "even more fun" annoys you a bit.
Strange that you put Mezzavilla and Artibani into your top ten, but not Faraci, considering the well known equation Faraci = Mezzavilla + Artibani + even more fun (The river of time is 99% Faraci-style and 1% Artibani-style) I suppose that the "even more fun" annoys you a bit.
I think you read "la villa dei misteri" and so I can explain to you, why I like Mezzavilla.
In "la villa dei misteri" Mickey is first thinking, someone is in the background, heading the misterious events. But this is not! At page 29, Mickey starts to wonder about what is really going on; nothing! There is no head and there is no criminal who robs the things. And the story is getting surreal, Mickey finds a little door, which the Count never saw. So, Mickey is going through the door and than finding a big room with many things, including Mickey's old Teddybear. So, you think the whole time you are reading a crime thriller, how there are so much. You are thinking Mickey will solve the mistery, the criminal is going into jale, end. But then, 4 pages before the story ends, everything changes. Nothing makes sense and so you feel fooled by the author. That's it. Maybe, you don't understand it the first time reading, like I did. I just putted the issue back into the shelf and didn't think about it.
I didn't put Mezzavilla on no. 1, because it's just this story by him, that is really great, the others are solid, but not more. I really like Faraci, he's a great author, and I putted him into the honourable mentions, so I like him the same as Artibani.
Post by Monkey_Feyerabend on Feb 4, 2017 16:48:40 GMT
No, actually that is one story by Mezzavilla that I don't know. So I will not read your spoiler, sorry. Anyway, now I am curious, I will definitively try to find that story.
1. Carl Barks 2. Don Rosa 3. Casty 4. Romano Scarpa 5. Giorgio Cavazzano (especially his 70's artwork)
almost made it to my top 5 list: William Van Horn Luciano Bottaro (especially his work with Carlo Chendi) Sylvia Ziche Enrico Faccini
Honorable Mentions: Floyd Gottferdson Giovan Battista Carpi Massimo de Vita Marco Rota Hector Adolfo de Urtiága Vicar Daniel Branca Carol & Pat McGreal Kari Korhonen Flemming Andersen Giorgio Pezzin Tito Faracci Francesco Artibani Fausto Vitaliano Teresa Radice Lara Molinari Marco Gervasio James Silvani
I can't really understand this, I almost always find their work bad. There Ducks are acting very out of character. They're almost bad, but not in the way they are in the stories of Guido Martina, but in a crushed way.
I think it's not odd, at all, to leave Don Rosa off a best artist list, in any case. His drawing looks to me like a hacker Hanna-Barbera "artist", inking over Robert Crumb pencils, making them angular and stiff as possible.
An opinion, amusingly, that I believe Rosa shares; maybe not with the specific mentions (don't see Hanna-Barbera on his work at all, and depending on the era, implying HB artists weren't artists because their output was crap is a bit dishonest- it's known they knew they were making crap, but Hanna and Barbera were basically just using those crap cheap cartoons in order to avoid having roves of golden age animators go unemployed), or the severity, but he repeatedly disavows his own work. Which I think is fair- I like it, but I can see all the problems he and you and often me have with it
I'll give a list of my own once I've given this thought.
I didn't mean to besmirch Hanna-Barbera's reputation (I have, myself, worked for their studio). I simply compared Hanna-Barbera's stiff/angular style with Rosa's stiff drawing of characters.
I can't really understand this, I almost always find their work bad. There Ducks are acting very out of character. They're almost bad, but not in the way they are in the stories of Guido Martina, but in a crushed way.
I've known Pat and Carol for 25 years. Pat was an actor and playwrite/script writer. I knew him and Dave Rawson from our mutual membership in The Comics Creators' Society in Hollywood, where I also met Sergio Aragones, Jeff Smith, Bob Foster, and many other US comics artists and writers, while living in Los Angeles and working in the feature animation studios. He was NOT a fan of Disney Comics when young. He didn't know the characters, at all. He came to Disney Comics as a writer under Bob Foster's crew, when Disney took over the franchise from Gladstone, because Bob was also a fan of human character comics. Pat, who also was well-versed on the classic requirements of adventure stories. He read some Barks stories, and set off with his then-partner, Dave Rawson, to adapt the classic heroic adventure tale to Disney's Ducks and Mice. His stories are good, but, somehow, don't remind me, at all, of the '40s and '50s Disney Comics' stories, similarly to those of The British writers from Jack Sutter's stable of writers, who also had no grounding as a child fan in Disney Comics, and their characters.
I can't really understand this, I almost always find their work bad. There Ducks are acting very out of character. They're almost bad, but not in the way they are in the stories of Guido Martina, but in a crushed way.
I've known Pat and Carol for 25 years. Pat was an actor and playwrite/script writer. I knew him and Dave Rawson from our mutual membership in The Comics Creators' Society in Hollywood, where I also met Sergio Aragones, Jeff Smith, Bob Foster, and many other US comics artists and writers, while living in Los Angeles and working in the feature animation studios. He was NOT a fan of Disney Comics when young. He didn't know the characters, at all. He came to Disney Comics as a writer under Bob Foster's crew, when Disney took over the franchise from Gladstone, because Bob was also a fan of human character comics. Pat, who also was well-versed on the classic requirements of adventure stories. He read some Barks stories, and set off with his then-partner, Dave Rawson, to adapt the classic heroic adventure tale to Disney's Ducks and Mice. His stories are good, but, somehow, don't remind me, at all, of the '40s and '50s Disney Comics' stories, similarly to those of The British writers from Jack Sutter's stable of writers, who also had no grounding as a child fan in Disney Comics, and their characters.
It's true that their stories don't have the "feel" of the classical Dell era but I never felt that their characterization of the ducks was that off. I've always found their stories interesting and with a somewhat fresh perspective and original ideas that some Egmont scriptwriters often lack. Maybe it has to do with their different backgrounds. There are a lot of stories by the McGreals that I've enjoyed over the years, like Little Helper Lost, one of the rare stories with Gyro's Helper as a protagonist, or Fool For A Day, my favourite April Fool's Day story ever, or Little Gyro In Quarkland, a story with a really imaginative script (by Pat McGreal alone). I could list many more but I think it would be off topic.
I'm with Zantaf. There are some stories by the McGreals that have made it onto my favorites-to-re-read list, including the wonderful "Little Helper Lost" (art by Rota) and "The Secret of Goblin Valley" (art by Vicar), an end-of-summer/back-to-school story.
Barks' first use of "Grandma" was in the 1945 Goodyear Christmas Giveaway. But that character didn't look like Grandma Duck, who lives on the farm. And there's no evidence of her living on a farm in that story, and the full name, "Grandma Duck" was not used. So, THIS Grandma MAY be Donald's grandmother, Donald's OTHER grandmother (If the Grandma on the farm IS, indeed, Donald's grandmother), or, she could be one of Donald's nephews' grandmothers.
I agree that it seems very unlikely that Barks intended this character to be the same as Grandma Duck from Taliaferro's strips--it is even specified that this Grandma lives in a regular house, not a farm.
My answer is to both RobbK1 and Scroogerello:
I think there is a scholarly consensus on the fact that "Grandma" from the 1945 Goodyear Christmas Giveaway is meant to be the one and only Grandma Duck; however, it was her debut in a comic book, and Barks did not remember how she looked like in the comic strips, so that's why her character design is off.
We should also keep in mind that the first story showing Grandma living in a farm is 1950's Donald's Grandma Duck. Before that, the farm was only mentioned in a single Taliaferro strip, meaning that an author who had read many Taliaferro strips with Grandma but missed that specific one would ignore the fact that she lives in a farm. But notice how even after Donald's Grandma Duck, Barks created You Can't Guess!, in which Grandma lives in a regular house and not in a farm: that's because Barks wrote the latter but not the former. Anyway, Barks would later accept that Grandma lives in a farm even in stories he wrote himself.
Plus, Donald's Grandma Duck is the first story in which she is called "Grandma Duck": before that, she was called just "Grandma" in both the comic strips and the comic books.
I'll add something to this message I wrote almost two months ago. It is true, like I said, that the first story in which Donald's grandmother is called "Grandma Duck" is Donald's Grandma Duck (July 1950). However, there's more to that, as I just discovered that the character was mentioned in several "stories" (i.e., just text with an illustration at the top) that were published in "Walt Disney's Comics and Stories" (which had this title because it published stories in addition to comics). In these stories the character is called "Grandma Duck", and the first story in which this happens is this one from October 1948, predating Donald's Grandma Duck by one year and nine months. The scan is not HQ, but it is clear enough that we can read the name "Grandma Duck" used multiple times:
So, I was wrong in thinking that the name "Grandma Duck" was not used until July 1950, but my original point (that is, the name "Grandma Duck" was not established yet when Barks used Grandma in a 1945 Goodyear Christmas Giveaway) is still valid.
All classics from me: 1. Carl Barks, the true, one and only Duck man 2 . Don Rosa, okay just for the Life and times saga he is in the pantheon of creators. 3. Floyd Gottfredson since his MM epics are purely epic 4. Al Talliaferro, for the creation of HDL and GD and all the laugh out loud moments his strips cause. 5. This position is extremely volatile and keeps changing -depending on the most recent story from the two creators I read- between two master Italians, Casty and Cavazzano. Right now it would probably be Cavazzano since I recently (re)read Casablanca, which is just minblowing.
Somewhere in the top ten there would also be Romano Scarpa and Marco Rota. Perhaps Martina or Carpi for Duck Avenger, but that's another story!☺
My personal favourites, more than "the greatest ever," though they do overlap, somewhat;
Writing; - Carl Barks - Tito Faraci (nice to see him getting so much respect ^^) - Francesco Artibani - Don Rosa - Casty
Art; - Lorenzo Pastrovicchio - Don Rosa (Sorry, but I can't help it, I just love that style) - Paolo Mottura (I'm not sure how many here are familiar with him, but he has a lovely - albeit, alternative style) - Floyd Gottfredson - Casty
Honourable mentions in both categories for Cavazzano, & thanks to the bloke above for reminding me of him
To be fair, I honestly did try to avoid putting in too many Italians, but yeah, wat can I say, I just spend too much time with them.