Post by RobbK1 on Jan 5, 2017 17:33:30 GMT
Coincidentally, a series of Dutch DD one-pagers is now being published (in the 2017 Dutch Donald Duck Weeklies), centered around Donald's youth with a younger Grandma Duck, in a similar fashion as the Italian Donny Duck stories. However, in these one-page comics, Dumbella does actually appear with a young Donald (or at least, she's appeared in 1 so far):
coa.inducks.org/story.php?c=H+2016-230
I agree with Matilda that Grandma Duck did not raise Donald and Della ("This is Your Life, Donald Duck" notwithstanding). I believe that Hortense and Quackmore were alive until very recently (vis-a-vis "modern day Duckburg", that is), possibly even after HD&L were born. I can't help but imagine some major tragedy that took out large swaths of the Duck family at once; there's no other acceptable explanation for the absences of Della, Hortense, and Quackmore (how unlucky can one family be?). Maybe a car accident? A plane crash? HD&L's comment that they know what having relatives disappear feels like in the last chapter of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck suggests as much. It would also explain why HD&L live with Donald, rather than with Hortense and Quackmore, who at this stage would be in their late seventies had they still been alive. There's also the question of why HD&L's paternal grandparents aren't in the picture, but in my headcanon Della was a single mother so that's easily explainable (it also explains why their last name is 'Duck" better than inventing yet another family with that name).
Rosa's decision to have Matilda McDuck be alive in the present day is the only part of his canon that I disagree with. There's no way I can justify her decision to be absent from the lives of her nephew and grandnephews. She was estranged from Scrooge, not Hortense or Hortense's family. Given that the McDuck sisters appeared to be inseparable in Rosa's stories, it seems far more likely that she would have been actively involved in the lives of Donald and Della, and had she been alive, even been the one to raise HD&L. She had many years before Scrooge reconnected with his family on Bear Mountain in 1947 (if he's the reason she was keeping her distance from the other members of her family) to be a big part of the lives of Hortense's progeny. Given all this, I'm very surprised that Rosa was planning to have even Hortense be alive in "Letter from Home"! I'm not sure how that would have worked.
On a related note, how old is Grandma Duck? She's a generation older than Scrooge, and must be in her early nineties, at least! Pretty sprightly for a nonagenarian!