I actually just got a mail by the "Die tollsten Geschichten von Donald Duck Sonderheft"-editorial office (that was fast...), in which they apologized for the mistake and said it was a mistake that nobody saw. Well, that should clear things up.
That's kind of strange, actually, considering how quickly they responded to you. How did they know it was a mistake? Did they contact Mr. Fuchs, who realized he had made an error purely from his recollection? Or did they contact Mr. Rosa, who clarified that that statement did not represent his position? It just seems to have happened so fast that it's hard to see how they could have researched it thoroughly enough to have realized they made an error.
Maybe they just didn't want to argue with a hardcore fan. I don't know.
That's kind of strange, actually, considering how quickly they responded to you. How did they know it was a mistake? Did they contact Mr. Fuchs, who realized he had made an error purely from his recollection? Or did they contact Mr. Rosa, who clarified that that statement did not represent his position? It just seems to have happened so fast that it's hard to see how they could have researched it thoroughly enough to have realized they made an error.
Maybe they just didn't want to argue with a hardcore fan. I don't know.
That seems to be about the size of it . But I think our hypothesis is correct anyway.
1 No, the English language versions always refer to coins as "it". But the Dutch printings have Scrooge and Donald and Magica refer to Old Number One as "he".
In Italy the Number One Dime is called "Numero Uno" ("Number One"). Older stories regarded it as an abbreviation of "Decino Numero Uno" (Number One Dime), while modern stories regard it as an abbreviation of "Moneta Numero Uno" (Number One Coin). "Decino" is a male word, while "moneta" is a female word, so that's why in older stories the Number One Dime was referred to as a "he" and in modern stories it is referred to as a "she".
It's strange to think that this may be the only English-language publication in which the coin is a "she" instead f an "it".
2 I prefer to think that The Beagle Boys numbers on their chests are stains from their shirts. However, that doesn't really seem to work well, as their numbers are normally on some sort of a white paper or card, sitting IN FRONT of their sweatshirts.
That's a valid point. I don't know what was Barks' intention, but I think the idea I had when first reading it was that it must be a tatoo. But then, if I remember correctly, that was written on an introductory article placed before the story, so I was conditioned by it.
3 No, Wolfgang is NOT related to Erika. Fuchs (English "fox") is a VERY common name in The German speaking lands. But both those people lived in Muenchen (where I live part of each year). Jan Gulbransson introduced me to Erika many years ago.
I don't think Barks was inconsistent: the image of the left seems to show the Beagle Boys without gloves, but for some reason the colorist thought they were wearing gloves and left their hands white. In the image of the right, they are wearing gloves, but only because they were handling explosives: we are not supposed to think that they wear them 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.
I don't really think you need gloves to handle explosives. You do need them to handle corrosive or toxic chemicals, but the components of a bomb may not necessarily be corrosive.
Maybe in comics it looks good to have gloves when handling explosives?
Can someone post a panel of the scenes in "A Case of Sticky Money" where the Beagle Boys have their numbers tattooed on their chests?
I have images of the whole story in English... minus the page in question. Really, it's not a joke, and looks like a situation Donald may find himself into. Well, at least I have the Italian edition of the story (including that page) from our equivalent of the Barks Library:
With regards to the Barks scene where the Beagle Boys are wearing gloves after handing explosives, does the rest of the story seem to show them wearing gloves? I don't know what story it's from.
That panel is from "The Heedless Horseman", page 15. Here is the full page (the coloring is inconsistent):
I agree that the posted page from "The Doom Diamond" is confusing with regards to whether Barks meant to have the Beagle Boys wear gloves or not. The three lines seem to indicate they are, but there are several occasions in which their sleeves ride high up their forearms (for example, the first and second panels) and there's no evidence of gloves where there clearly should have been if they were wearing them. I suppose the editors could have added the three lines, but it seems pointless and not something they consistently did.
I agree on both points: several panels seems to indicate they wear no gloves, and adding three lines (if the editors did add them, something that is possible but dubious) would have been really pointless.
By the way, how about this colored Barks illustration, in which a Beagle Boy's hands are not white (despite having the three lines that supposedly indicate cartoon gloves) and seem to be of the same color as his face:
Anyway, maybe the next stage of our discussion could be about listing examples of Beagle Boys without their masks.
I hate to say this, but I clearly recall a thread from the old DCF that dealt with this very topic. Actually, I would divide this discussion into two separate categories: Beagle Boys intentionally shown without masks, and Beagle Boys unintentionally shown without masks.
Don't feel sorry about mentioning that: this is one of the few DCF threads which can be accessed through the Wayback Machine: Beagle Boys... without mask! I don't know how many messages were written, but the archived version has 32 messages (including two written by you), published between 2010 and 2012.
I actually found that archived thread the last time we discussed about surviving DCF archives, but I was waiting to see if my idea of discussing the subject would have some follow up before posting that link here. By the way, what do you mean by mentioning the Beagle Boys shown without masks "intentionally" vs "unintentionally"? If they are shown without masks, then obviously the artist intentionally drew them without masks. Or am I missing something?
By the way, how about this colored Barks illustration, in which a Beagle Boy's hands are not white (despite having the three lines that supposedly indicate cartoon gloves) and seem to be of the same color as his face?
To me, it looks as though the hand are more yellowish than his face, which would fit with the standard of cream-colored cartoon gloves that existed before chalk-white became the norm. Like the ones they gave Scrooge in the 1967 short Scrooge McDuck and Money:
By the way, how about this colored Barks illustration, in which a Beagle Boy's hands are not white (despite having the three lines that supposedly indicate cartoon gloves) and seem to be of the same color as his face:
I agree with Scrooge MacDuck here ... the hands are a different color from the Beagle Boy's face. This one looks like a win for Team Gloves.
Jun 23, 2017 16:30:57 GMT -4 drakeborough said:
Don't feel sorry about mentioning that: this is one of the few DCF threads which can be accessed through the Wayback Machine: Beagle Boys... without mask! I don't know how many messages were written, but the archived version has 32 messages (including two written by you), published between 2010 and 2012.
I'm pretty sure there were more pages. Also, it's unfortunate that the images weren't archived ... but it's a good starting point for a discussion here.
And I maintain what I said there ... I think the Beagle Boys should always wear masks, even when in disguise. It's such a silly convention that it deserves to be honored (Barks himself delighted in this in interviews). A little like how I intensely dislike, but for a different reason, the Phantom Blot being shown unhooded ... I think if Gottfredson knew the Blot was going to be a recurring character, he would never have unmasked him at the end of "Mickey Mouse Outwits the Phantom Blot". If I had my way, we would all pretend we don't know what the Blot looks like under his hood ... especially Disney artists and writers. That way he maintains his air of mystery and malevolence.
Jun 23, 2017 16:30:57 GMT -4 drakeborough said:
By the way, what do you mean by mentioning the Beagle Boys shown without masks "intentionally" vs "unintentionally"? If they are shown without masks, then obviously the artist intentionally drew them without masks. Or am I missing something?
By "unintentional" I mean a mistake on the part of the artist ... for example, a mask not being drawn in a panel, while being present in the preceding or succeeding ones, or missing for a frame ... a "blooper", if you will. "Intentional", of course, is when the artist meant to leave the mask out.
I agree that the Beagle Boy in the Barks sketch, above, is wearing gloves, as his hands have a solid yellowish tint, while his face is very light pink. Those colours don't look at all the same. And it would be very strange for him to have been scratched by 3 toes of a cat just down the middle of the back of both his hands, and on no other part of his body.
By the way, how about this colored Barks illustration, in which a Beagle Boy's hands are not white (despite having the three lines that supposedly indicate cartoon gloves) and seem to be of the same color as his face?
To me, it looks as though the hand are more yellowish than his face, which would fit with the standard of cream-colored cartoon gloves that existed before chalk-white became the norm. Like the ones they gave Scrooge in the 1967 short Scrooge McDuck and Money:
I didn't remember Scrooge having yellow gloves in that short, and it's weird that they would give gloves to a character like Scrooge which, and this time I can say it for sure, was never portrayed as wearing cartoon gloves (which for him are about as pointless as Gyro's gloves in a scan I previously posted).
Equally surprising is that the gloves are yellow: you talked about "the standard of cream-colored cartoon gloves that existed before chalk-white became the norm", but I thought white gloves have always been the norm, at least in animation (Italian comics had yellow gloves until 1996, and even early American comics and early merchandising had yellow gloves).
Don't feel sorry about mentioning that: this is one of the few DCF threads which can be accessed through the Wayback Machine: Beagle Boys... without mask! I don't know how many messages were written, but the archived version has 32 messages (including two written by you), published between 2010 and 2012.
I'm pretty sure there were more pages. Also, it's unfortunate that the images weren't archived ... but it's a good starting point for a discussion here.
Too bad the most recent pages are lost, but those 32 messages are better that nothing, and as you said are a good starting point for continuing the discussion here. And even though the images weren't archived, we can still find them because we know from which stories they are from.
And I maintain what I said there ... I think the Beagle Boys should always wear masks, even when in disguise. It's such a silly convention that it deserves to be honored (Barks himself delighted in this in interviews).
Where can I find these interviews? I am curious to hear what he said on the matter. And it's true, that silly convention is really funny, though at the moment I can't think an example of it in Barks' work: their disguises that I have in mind now involve either sunglasses so big they they cover (and thus hide) their masks, or full face latex masks (like in "The Strange Shipwrecks", though they still had thier domino masks under the latex masks).
A little like how I intensely dislike, but for a different reason, the Phantom Blot being shown unhooded ... I think if Gottfredson knew the Blot was going to be a recurring character, he would never have unmasked him at the end of "Mickey Mouse Outwits the Phantom Blot". If I had my way, we would all pretend we don't know what the Blot looks like under his hood ... especially Disney artists and writers. That way he maintains his air of mystery and malevolence.
About this, I am on the opposite end of the spectrum (we briefly discussed this on GeoX's website): "Mickey Mouse Outwits the Phantom Blot" is possibly the most famous and iconic of Mickey's comics, and the final capture and unmasking it's an essential part of it, since it's the satisfying deserved payoff after the whole story was spent with Mickey trying to do both things.
Having him wear his cloak and hood 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, even when at home, or on the street in broad daylight and even in prison really puts me off, since for me it doesn't maintain his air of mystery and malevolence at all, but rather it makes me see him as a clown who is obsessed in always wearing those things even when there's no point of doing that. In fact, in his first story he wore them for two reasons: protecting his secret identity (since at the time nobody knew who the Blot really was) and blending with the shadows when he acted in the night (basically, the same reasons Don Diego wears black clothes and a mask when becoming Zorro). I don't like when he is impersonating someone with a latex mask, and then removes the mask to reveal his hood under it: I like it better when they show his face under a latex mask. And I can't stand when they have everyone in his family (his daughter, his nephews, his parents) always wearing a cloak and hood as if they are all freaks, which wasn't at all the reason he was wearing them in the original story. I don't know what Gottfredson would or would not have done if he new the Blot was going to be a recurring character, but I cannot really ignore the ending of the original story based on a "what if"-type thought.
I guess it's a matter of imprinting: I first met the character in Italian stories, in which it is the context to decide if he is going to appear masked for the whole story, unmasked for the whole story, or masked in some scenes and unmasked in other scenes. At any rate, while I dislike (as I said above) to see him masked even in prison (despite the fact that I don't mind the Beagle Boys keeping their domino masks in prison), I at least like the fact that many stories (like the ones in his short-lived comic title published by Western) had him actually go to prison: in fact, all the stories of his title start with him getting out of jail and end with him being captured, the implication being that Mickey, O'Hara etc. know his face and just let him keep his hood to assecondate his quirk. It's a quirk that I dislike, since it defies the reason the hood was introduced in the first place, but it's still better than those stories in which it is said the Blot was never captured and his identity is still a mystery. And I don't like than in some countries the masked Blot and the unmasked Blot are given different names and are regarded as different characters.
By the way, do you think he really looks like Disney as it is often said? And do you think that this may be the reason Western authors waited so long to use him and/or the reason they never drew him unmasked?
By the way, what do you mean by mentioning the Beagle Boys shown without masks "intentionally" vs "unintentionally"? If they are shown without masks, then obviously the artist intentionally drew them without masks. Or am I missing something?
By "unintentional" I mean a mistake on the part of the artist ... for example, a mask not being drawn in a panel, while being present in the preceding or succeeding ones, or missing for a frame ... a "blooper", if you will. "Intentional", of course, is when the artist meant to leave the mask out.
Ah, ok, I get what you mean with "unintentional", it's just that I can't think of any example in which an artist forgot to draw the mask in one panel.
A related topic (I know, this thread already has too many topics): do Egmont comics really portray the Beagle Boys as having different personalities? This is what I read in this DCML page which is their character profile:
Now Egmont has a personality guide for the three «leading» Beagle Boys stating that 176-167 is the smarter and generally tougher leader of the band, 176-671 is the dumber one who often tends to foul up the plans, and 176-761 is the epicure of the gang with a special liking for prunes.
I don't like this: I mean, it's bad enough to standardize their number as three (Rosa also standardized their number, but I'm fine with that as seven is a more reasonable number for them), but giving them individual personalities, DuckTales-style, is just a bad idea since one of the main jokes about them is that you can't tell them apart. Plus, even though they apparently used Barks' only character trait for a single Beagle (liking prunes), it seems that they got it wrong since the one who likes prunes is 176-167, not 176-761.
Do authors actually follow that guideline? Rosa worked for Egmont an yet he never gave them separate personalities (not to mention he never limited himself to just three Beagles) and the same is true for the Blum/Mota story which we previously discussed (the one where Grandpa Blackheart Beagle is called "Sherman") which is also an Egmont production.
Last Edit: Jun 24, 2017 19:03:20 GMT by drakeborough
By the way, how about this colored Barks illustration, in which a Beagle Boy's hands are not white (despite having the three lines that supposedly indicate cartoon gloves) and seem to be of the same color as his face:
As a lot of people have pointed out, the two colors are different. The Beagle boy's face has the color #e3ded0: While the glove has the color #e3d49d:. The colors are different, but not very different. The red values are the same (227), the green is ten values apart (222, 212), and the blue values' difference is 51 (208, 157). The interesting thing here is that the face color is closer to white than the glove color. This could be because of the scan, since Scrooge's "skin" color isn't really white (it is closer to clean white than the two other colors though). To conclude the colors are similar, but not identical, and Barks was most likely trying to differentiate the color of the face and the glove.
And I maintain what I said there ... I think the Beagle Boys should always wear masks, even when in disguise. It's such a silly convention that it deserves to be honored (Barks himself delighted in this in interviews).
Where can I find these interviews? I am curious to hear what he said on the matter. And it's true, that silly convention is really funny, though at the moment I can't think an example of it in Barks' work: their disguises that I have in mind now involve either sunglasses so big they they cover (and thus hide) their masks, or full face latex masks (like in "The Strange Shipwrecks", though they still had thier domino masks under the latex masks).
I found this interview from 1994:
At around two minutes, Barks makes fun of how ridiculous it is the idea of the Beagle Boys mingling with the Duckburg society while going around with their bandit masks and prison numbers.
He doesn't talk about them keeping their masks even when diguised, though.
Do we know for sure that three lines on the back of the hand always indicate a glove? Couldn't they also indicate the knuckles of the hand? I have in front of me a version of the story ("The Doom Diamond") in which their hands are colored pink (implying that they have no gloves), though at the moment I can't make a scan of it. Should I assume that the version I have is the one where the colorist made a mistake and the image below is the one correctly colored?
I find the "knuckle" theory rather hard to believe. Usually, lines indicating the palm bones are only drawn when it is meant to emphasize that the character has skinny, skeletal hands, which isn't at all the case with the Beagle Boys. Find me one other example of a character anywhere in Disney comics whose knuckles are drawn in this fashion even though he isn't old, supernatural or skinny.
Here are two examples of a character having three lines in a pink hand: the first one is from the Cornelius Coot statue story...
... and the second one is from "Dangerous Disguise":
Of course, I guess that there's no much point in posting such kind of images, since it may be argued that the pink hands don't prove the lack of gloves as they could be the result of a coloring mistake.
Last Edit: Jun 28, 2017 12:26:36 GMT by drakeborough
Post by Baar Baar Jinx on Jun 28, 2017 13:03:00 GMT
drakeborough said:
At around two minutes, Barks makes fun of how ridiculous it is the idea of the Beagle Boys mingling with the Duckburg society while going around with their bandit masks and prison numbers.
He doesn't talk about them keeping their masks even when diguised, though.
That's probably the interview I remember. I recall Barks' childlike glee at the preposterousness of the Beagle Boys' open criminality. While searching for the interview in question in response to your original query, I found another interesting Barks interview with several points worth discussing here, but I will start another thread as it would all be off-topic for this one.
drakeborough said:
Of course, I guess that there's no much point in posting such kind of images, since it may be argued that the pink hands don't prove the lack of gloves as they could be the result of a coloring mistake.
Yes, but I doubt Barks meant for his very human character in "Dangerous Disguise" to be wearing gloves. I would almost argue that those were tendons in the back of the hand, but I had earlier disagreed with you when you made that suggestion with regards to the Beagle Boys. So, I don't really know what to think here.
For the second, it's a rare case where I do think it's meant to be the tendons. Why for them and not the Beagles? Simple, the humans are drawn to be more detailed. Look at how he details his face to look gaunt and shaded heavily in the cheeks.
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Jun 28, 2017 18:13:24 GMT
Back to Beagle Boy physiques, however… It has just struck me that the historical Beagle Boys counterparts seen in Mickey, Donald and Goofy: The Three Musketeers have a thin, Italian, Cavazzano-like appearance (aside from their midget brother):
Combined with the movie generally looking like an animated version of a Grandi Parodie story, I'm now seriously wondering if there was some Italian influence at work there.