Post by Fergus McDuck on Apr 11, 2021 23:55:45 GMT
Dec 7, 2020 1:35:04 GMT djnyr said:
Rosa's chief strengths are his thorough grounding in classic movies (which gives a sweepingly cinematic style to some of his action scenes--the final showdown in "A Letter from Home" is a particularly memorable example), his knack for using his engineering background to come up with some truly clever and unique plots ("A Matter of Some Gravity," "Treasure Under Glass," the various Omnisolve stories), and his sheer enthusiasm for the Duck characters. Rosa's chief weaknesses, which I've belabored on multiple occasions, include his his relentless preoccupation with continuity and with character "consistency," which got worse and worse as he became more self-conscious of his international reputation as the One True Guardian of the Ducks. By insisting that Donald must always be depressed and frustrated, that Scrooge must always be tough and cranky, and the Nephews must always be noble to the point of self-righteousness, he harmed his stories by making his character dynamics grindingly predictable, and ironically made the characters seem less real than they would have if he had allowed them to be a little more changeable--like real people are.
Rosa's distractingly and often grotesquely over-detailed artwork is another weakness of his, although during his pre-Life-of-Scrooge period at Egmont he managed to reach a pretty good artistic balance--stories like "Treasure Under Glass" and "Island at the Edge of Time" are lacking in the stiffer and more Barks-imitative look of his earliest Gladstone stories, and also haven't veered as far into excessive shading, weird anatomical detail, and other off-putting artistic quirks that marked his later stories.
Rosa's wordiness is another of his weaknesses; his Mad-Magazine-influenced sense of verbal humor (elaborate and long-winded build-up to a brief punch-line) can be pretty funny at times, but it also causes him to take multiple panels and/or a painful excess of dialogue to execute many of his gags (like the "It'll take more than bullets before it's time for me to run" bit in "The Empire-Builder from Calisota" or the "instrument of destruction" lawyer joke in "Lost Charts of Columbus"). However, his wordiness is a lot worse in his "serious" scenes--whether it's his long, long paragraphs of quasi-historical exposition, or his attempts at meaningful character-building dialogue--Scrooge's supposed apotheosis at the end of the "Richest Duck in the World" (Rosa's extended version), where he's speechifying about great men staying active, visions, etc., is one of the absolute worst examples (and one of the most fanfic-y scenes in all of Rosa's work).
In short, Rosa is to Duck comics what Kenneth Branagh is to Shakespeare: a talented guy with sadly limited artistic discipline, a flair for the dramatic, an obsession with heavy-handedly spelling out his characters' inner lives, and a burning desire to provide the "definitive" interpretation of someone else's work.