Ludwig Von Drake

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Nov 4, 2019 14:47:28 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

(although how he got along till then is surprising).

Let's not forget that Barks drew young-Scrooge as already wearing glasses, as, indeed, did most everyone until Rosa misread a line in The Money Well and thought it necessary for Scrooge to only have started wearing them around the time of New Laird of Castle McDuck (which is ridiculous; Money Well states that the 1880's is when he bought those particular glasses, but especially if we take Scrooge to be myopic, that could simply mean he bought a new pair due to his old spectacles no longer being useful to him). 

[Fethryfan]

Nov 4, 2019 18:08:05 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

Nov 4, 2019 14:47:28 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

(although how he got along till then is surprising).

Let's not forget that Barks drew young-Scrooge as already wearing glasses, as, indeed, did most everyone until Rosa misread a line in The Money Well and thought it necessary for Scrooge to only have started wearing them around the time of New Laird of Castle McDuck (which is ridiculous; Money Well states that the 1880's is when he bought those particular glasses, but especially if we take Scrooge to be myopic, that could simply mean he bought a new pair due to his old spectacles no longer being useful to him). 

In chapter 5 of Life and Times, Matilda was surprised Scrooge had glasses, hinting that he never used glasses before. All right, Barks' young Scrooge used glasses, but since i see Rosa as a more reliable source than Barks, i will stick with the idea he never used glasses until 1885

[Dr Ivo G Bombastus]

Nov 4, 2019 18:08:05 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

Let's not forget that Barks drew young-Scrooge as already wearing glasses

Well, yes, in a story written by Vic Lockman.

In the flashbacks from Back to the Klondike and Only a Poor Old Man he depicts a young adult $crooge as not wearing glasses, and while hypothetically $crooge could have still needed glasses at the time and just wasn't wearing them, the idea that he wore glasses as a child is hardly intuitive in light of those stories.

[crazycatlord]

Nov 4, 2019 14:47:28 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

Nov 4, 2019 14:43:21 GMT crazycatlord said:

In the 11th chapter of Alla ricerca della pietra zodiacale, Scrooge seems to have a very bad memory )although about issues that occured almost a century before...).

About the glasses - at least in Uncle Scrooge's Glasses, he seems to see almost nothing without glasses.

As to the former ... was he forgetting historical facts?

No; what he and an associate did during a gold rush.

[Baar Baar Jinx]

Nov 5, 2019 0:57:54 GMT crazycatlord said:

Nov 4, 2019 14:47:28 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

As to the former ... was he forgetting historical facts?

No; what he and an associate did during a gold rush.

A century before? How old was Scrooge said to be here?

[crazycatlord]

Nov 5, 2019 1:03:29 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

Nov 5, 2019 0:57:54 GMT crazycatlord said:

No; what he and an associate did during a gold rush.

A century before? How old was Scrooge said to be here?

Probably an exageration of mine - no specifical year was given (neiter for the year of the events, nor - as usual - for the present year); but the events had a end-of-19th-century/beginning-of-the-20th-century feel, and I bought the book at 1991, then...

[Baar Baar Jinx]

Nov 5, 2019 12:10:44 GMT crazycatlord said:

Nov 5, 2019 1:03:29 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

A century before? How old was Scrooge said to be here?

Probably an exageration of mine - no specifical year was given (neiter for the year of the events, nor - as usual - for the present year); but the events had a end-of-19th-century/beginning-of-the-20th-century feel, and I bought the book at 1991, then...

I see. Well, that's probably normal; at least, not as egregious as forgetting a safe combination you just created or not recognizing a nephew you see every day.

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Nov 4, 2019 20:27:45 GMT Dr Ivo G Bombastus said:

Well, yes, in a story written by Vic Lockman.

In the flashbacks from Back to the Klondike and Only a Poor Old Man he depicts a young adult $crooge as not wearing glasses, and while hypothetically $crooge could have still needed glasses at the time and just wasn't wearing them, the idea that he wore glasses as a child is hardly intuitive in light of those stories.

True, there's Back to the Klondike, but it and Only A Poor Old Man are very much outliers in this regard, I think. In The Fantastic River Rate, as well as in basically every painting Don Rosa ever did of Scrooge's life, he has his glasses — and per Rosa himself, River Race takes place before Scrooge's Klondike days. 

Also, the fact that The Invisible Enemy was written by Lockman is neither here nor there. I doubt his script specified what Young-Scrooge would look like, if his scripts were so imprecise that Barks and Strobl could independently draw Lockman's "Si Bumpkin" as an eagle or a dognose.

[drakeborough]

Oct 26, 2019 19:31:29 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

And, not that I include anything from "80 is Prachtig!" in my headcanon, but one thing that bugged me about that story was how Donald seemed surprised to learn that Della had kids. How could he not be aware of something as important as that, considering that by all accounts he and Della were quite close?

I asked Geradts about the same thing:

Also, even if it was the first time Donald saw his nephews, is really possible that he didn't even knew he had nephews? Surely his sister would tell him she has become a mother.

This was his answer:

Third: didn’t Donald know he had nephews? It’s possible he didn’t. There was no Internet in those days, so contacts could have been wide apart. Also, the story gets more of a kick if Donald is surprised!

I told him this:

It's true there was no Internet in those days, but telephone existed since the 19th century, and Donald already had a telephone in his first appearances. Of course, you are the author of the story, so if you decided Donald needed to be surprised by her sister havin children then that's what happened in your story.

He further commented:

Another point revisited: didn’t Donald know he had nephews? On page 7 of the story in panel 3 Donald says: “Op een dag kwam ik terug van een lange zeereis…” (“One day I came back from a long sea-journey”). This explains why he didn’t know. I am a master of my trade…

Although I wasn't convinced by his answers on other points of the story, this one seemed feasible, and I told him that:

The sea-journey may have been so long that Della couldn't contact Donald to tell him she had three sons... well, that's a clever answer.

Still, in my headcanon HDL were older when Donald got custody of them, and Donald had already seen them before.

More surprising than Donald not knowing he had nephews is the 1941 book "The Life of Donald Duck" in which, according to Gilles Maurice, "Donald receives a postcard from his unnamed sister (he didn't even know he had a family!)". That had always felt stupid to me, though I see that on page 9 of this thread there was a mention of Donald having being abandoned because he refused to hatch, and this already starts to make some sense, even though one has to explain how his unnamed sister knew about him if he was abandoned. Needless to say, in my headcanon Donald was not abandoned, he didn't hatch from an egg, Hortense McDuck and Quackmore Duck were married only once and never had any affair, and they lived at least long enough to see their sons become adults regardless of whether they are alive or not in the present.

Nov 4, 2019 0:00:33 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

As for Scrooge and his glasses, it seems at first that he needed them for reading but in 1885, when he bought them, he was only 18, far too young to be presbyopic. Maybe he was mildly myopic and needed them since he was a child but never realized it until his late teens (not unusual at all; my sister, for example, started wearing glasses, for myopia, when she was in her late twenties. She somehow just got by until then).

If we want to go by "Life and Times", Scrooge gives the following reasons why he is wearing glasses: "the sunny skies and snowy plains of Montana played hod with my eyebulbs! Someday I may need to wear them all the time!"

Nov 4, 2019 1:31:06 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

Nov 4, 2019 1:26:33 GMT TheMidgetMoose said:

I think Scrooge suffers from some other health issues as well, mostly dealing with memory troubles. Back to the Klondike makes this pretty clear. Scrooge doesn't even remember Donald's name at one point in the story, and he is prescribed capsules to take every 12 hours to help him with his memory.

That's a good point. Scrooge's "Blinkus of the Thinkus" (Barks' comic-book name for dementia) is never brought up in another Barks story. Rosa hardly ever acknowledges it, and it seems out of character for Scrooge otherwise.  I'm not sure what to make of it, but I wish we had that medication in our universe!

Personally, I wouldn't take Scrooge's "Blinkus of the Thinkus" too seriously in the long-term continuity, since it was just a one-time plot device never used before or after it.

Nov 5, 2019 16:35:06 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

Nov 4, 2019 20:27:45 GMT Dr Ivo G Bombastus said:

Nov 4, 2019 18:08:05 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

Let's not forget that Barks drew young-Scrooge as already wearing glasses, as, indeed, did most everyone until Rosa misread a line in The Money Well and thought it necessary for Scrooge to only have started wearing them around the time of New Laird of Castle McDuck

Well, yes, in a story written by Vic Lockman.

In the flashbacks from Back to the Klondike and Only a Poor Old Man he depicts a young adult $crooge as not wearing glasses, and while hypothetically $crooge could have still needed glasses at the time and just wasn't wearing them, the idea that he wore glasses as a child is hardly intuitive in light of those stories.

True, there's Back to the Klondike, but it and Only A Poor Old Man are very much outliers in this regard, I think. In The Fantastic River Rate, as well as in basically every painting Don Rosa ever did of Scrooge's life, he has his glasses — and per Rosa himself, River Race takes place before Scrooge's Klondike days. 

Also, the fact that The Invisible Enemy was written by Lockman is neither here nor there. I doubt his script specified what Young-Scrooge would look like, if his scripts were so imprecise that Barks and Strobl could independently draw Lockman's "Si Bumpkin" as an eagle or a dognose.

On the matter of young-Scrooge's design, there in an interesting post on Rosa's Facebook page from 2013:

As promised, here's the first answer from Don to questions that YOU sent in! More to follow within the next days. -- Jano

Jon Sletto: The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, how important were previous art of the younger Scrooge McDuck for background material, inspiration etc... when you planned the series?

--------------------------------------------------------------

Don: Okay, I hope we don't have a language barrier working here -- but when you ask about the "art" I'm taking that to mean the physical appearance of young $crooge as originally drawn on a few occasions by (of course) Carl Barks.

Naturally, I wanted to base my version of $crooge in various stages of his youth as closely to Barks *as possible*. But that was not always possible since there were conflicts over the years in how Barks drew him. Barks could have made sure all his stories were consistent, but he had no reason to since he never imagined anyone was paying close attention, or would ever see one of his old stories again after it was first published. I, on the other hand, have always known that everything I do is being watched and scrutinized by a gazillion Barks fans, and would be reprinted for decades at least.

When Barks drew the first images of the Yukon Gold Rush $crooge in the first two issues of UNCLE $CROOGE comics, $crooge at that age had no eyeglasses as those had been intended as a symbol of old age when Barks created a wealthy OLD uncle for Donald 5 years earlier. But about another ten years later Barks illustrated a lame story, "Invisible Intruder", as a back-up feature in the UNCLE $CROOGE title. The script was by another writer, and I'm guessing the editor probably directed Barks to portray young $crooge with glasses and even whiskers even though he was supposed to be 6 or 7 years old. It was Barks who most respected the readers, so perhaps the editor wanted to be sure readers would recognize who the youngster was without even reading the story. So I was very willing to ignore how young $crooge was drawn here.

However, this same story contained a scene of the young shoeshine-boy $crooge inventing a way to shine several customers' shoes at once by utilizing elastic suspenders. And yet, based on Barks' other stories concerning $crooge's youth and what historical period this scene would need to have taken place, I knew that elastic was not invented yet. Also, according to other Barks' stories, he would have still lived in Scotland even though the story showed a "5 cents" sign. However, it was a cute scene, and showed $crooge's industrious personality even as a child, so I *did* use that scene in my first chapter, though I changed the "cents" to "pence".

Likewise, when I did the story about $crooge as a riverboat captain on the Mississippi which would have been in the 1880's, long before the Yukon Gold Rush, I made sure it matched Barks' depiction of $crooge perfectly... all *except* that I removed the glasses with which Barks had drawn him in his Mississippi adventure.

So, that's how I did it. I remained as close to Barks' (few) versions of how the young $crooge looked, but at times I would have to interpolate between conflicting versions using my own best judgment.

Though I would have preferred otherwise, I was compelled to "create" the look of the shoeshine boy $crooge from scratch for chapter 1 of the "Life of $crooge". There was no Barks version to base it on, at least none that I trusted. So, I drew him as a shaggy-headed Huey (or Dewey or Louie) with those same floating oval eyes. I decided that as these characters grew older (be they talking ducks as some people see them, or caricatures of humans as I see them) those floating eyes would grow larger and attach themselves to the "beak" during... um... puberty? When I drew a teen-age $crooge in chapter 2, "Master of the Mississippi", I made him taller than a Huey, shorter than a Donald, and with the newly anchored eyeballs. And only at that tender age with tiny tufts of whiskers starting to sprout on his cheeks.

Although he only talked about the Yukon flashbacks in "Only a Poor Old Man" and "Back to the Klondike", in the former he is also shown in a flashback from an even earlier stage of life, his Montana days, and he had no glasses. Since "Only a Poor Old Man" and "Back to the Klondike" are arguably the two most famous Scrooge stories, and even appeared in the first two Uncle Scrooge issues, I am not surprised that he chose to give them the most importance as opposed to other stories, even by Barks, in which a young Scrooge wears glasses. The fact that the eariler "Voodoo Hoodoo" not only portrayed young Scrooge as not wearing glasses "70 years ago" but even as not having whiskers may also have influenced Rosa's choice, even though as we know Rosa placed that event several years later and decided that Scrooge's appearance was a disguise.

I think it was a good choice: even though many people in real life wear glasses since they are young, it makes sense that in a visual medium like comics you give an old character glasses as a sign of old age, and if you have a young Scrooge with glasses you may have trouble telling him apart from his present self.

By the way, the quote above mentions "Invisible Intruder", but unlike other Rosa articles it doesn't mention "Getting That Healthy, Wealthy Feeling" by Fallberg/Strobl, which is where Rosa got the idea of Scrooge earning his Number One Dime as a shoeshine boy, as well as an inspiration for Scrooge's design:



He first used this idea in "Of Ducks and Dimes and Destinies", which was created before "The Last of the Clan McDuck" even though it was published after it. He obviously didn't like the way Strobl drew Scrooge's face (whiskers, glasses, and eyes attached to the beak), but he nevertheless adopted the sweater and cap for his design of young Scrooge. And he came up with an idea of why it was an American dime, since like "The Invisible Intruder" this story also doesn't explain why a Scottish kid would be payed in American dollars (DuckTales had already come up with the same explanation, even though Rosa didn't knew it). Even some dialogue is lifted from the story above:



It's worth mentioning that "Of Ducks and Dimes and Destinies" doesn't reference "The Invisible Intruder" at all, which is probably why he didn't copy young Scrooge's clothes for that story. It's only in "The Last of the Clan McDuck" that he added the gag about using suspenders to shine more shoes, since it was compatible with what he had shown in ODaDaD. Of course, Rosa was already aware of the existance of "The Invisible Intruder" since he made a visual reference to it as early as his second story:



Anyway, I don't think he misread the line in The Money Well: he probably decided that he didn't want to have Scrooge wear glasses permanently until his post-Klondike days, but he still wanted to keep the fact that his current glasses were bought in 1885, thus justifying the occasional use of them between 1885 and 1902, all while choosing to ignore any pre-1885 Scrooge with glasses.

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Nov 6, 2019 16:13:42 GMT drakeborough said:

DuckTales had already come up with the same explanation, even though Rosa didn't knew it. 

That's not it. DuckTales's Once Upon A Dime and Rosa's Life and Times very likely share a common ancestor in the form of Jack L. Chalker's An Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck, which predates both; the biggest smoking gun is that the idea that immediately upon arriving un America, Scrooge helped out his riverboat-captain Uncle with the original “Great Steamboat Race”. It's often cited as one of the apparent lifts from DuckTales to Rosa, which would belie Rosa's claim that he never watched Once Upon A Dime; but it's actually a Chalker invention with both the cartoon and the L&T poached independently.

So on the subject of the Number One Dime being an American coin even though Scrooge lived in Scotland, we find this in the Informal Biography:

«  It took him a half an hour to chip the mud off his boots; and, when it was over, the ditchdigger paid him with an American silver dime, which almost precisely looks like an 1860 British twopenny piece. Scrooge didn't care, "When he pressed that dime into my sweaty little palm, I was the happiest young duck in the world."50 For the first time, Scrooge had earned something by his own labor.

But an American dime wasn't really all that negotiable in Scotland, so he kept it. The pride of it alone would have made him keep it, one suspects, even so. It also proved to be a powerful good luck charm—just to touch it always has brought him good luck, and the temporary loss of it has often been devastating. »

[Baar Baar Jinx]

Nov 6, 2019 17:56:00 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

That's not it. DuckTales's Once Upon A Dime and Rosa's Life and Times very likely share a common ancestor in the form of Jack L. Chalker's An Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck, which predates both; the biggest smoking gun is that the idea that immediately upon arriving un America, Scrooge helped out his riverboat-captain Uncle with the original “Great Steamboat Race”. It's often cited as one of the apparent lifts from DuckTales to Rosa, which would belie Rosa's claim that he never watched Once Upon A Dime; but it's actually a Chalker invention with both the cartoon and the L&T poached independently.

Did Rosa ever cite Chalker as a source for Life of Scrooge?

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Nov 6, 2019 18:00:11 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

Nov 6, 2019 17:56:00 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

That's not it. DuckTales's Once Upon A Dime and Rosa's Life and Times very likely share a common ancestor in the form of Jack L. Chalker's An Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck, which predates both; the biggest smoking gun is that the idea that immediately upon arriving un America, Scrooge helped out his riverboat-captain Uncle with the original “Great Steamboat Race”. It's often cited as one of the apparent lifts from DuckTales to Rosa, which would belie Rosa's claim that he never watched Once Upon A Dime; but it's actually a Chalker invention with both the cartoon and the L&T poached independently.

Did Rosa ever cite Chalker as a source for Life of Scrooge?

Fairly sure he does in the foreword of some collected edition or other, or something like that.

[drakeborough]

Nov 6, 2019 17:56:00 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

Nov 6, 2019 16:13:42 GMT drakeborough said:

DuckTales had already come up with the same explanation, even though Rosa didn't knew it. 

That's not it. DuckTales's Once Upon A Dime and Rosa's Life and Times very likely share a common ancestor in the form of Jack L. Chalker's An Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck, which predates both; the biggest smoking gun is that the idea that immediately upon arriving un America, Scrooge helped out his riverboat-captain Uncle with the original “Great Steamboat Race”. It's often cited as one of the apparent lifts from DuckTales to Rosa, which would belie Rosa's claim that he never watched Once Upon A Dime; but it's actually a Chalker invention with both the cartoon and the L&T poached independently.

So on the subject of the Number One Dime being an American coin even though Scrooge lived in Scotland, we find this in the Informal Biography:

«  It took him a half an hour to chip the mud off his boots; and, when it was over, the ditchdigger paid him with an American silver dime, which almost precisely looks like an 1860 British twopenny piece. Scrooge didn't care, "When he pressed that dime into my sweaty little palm, I was the happiest young duck in the world."50 For the first time, Scrooge had earned something by his own labor.

But an American dime wasn't really all that negotiable in Scotland, so he kept it. The pride of it alone would have made him keep it, one suspects, even so. It also proved to be a powerful good luck charm—just to touch it always has brought him good luck, and the temporary loss of it has often been devastating. »

Thanks for that info. I was actually vaguely aware of that book mentioning that Scrooge got his dime as a shoeshine boy as in the Fallberg/Strobl story, and I was actually writing that in my previous message before I decided to remove it to make it shorter, and to avoid making mistakes. I haven't actually read the book (though three months ago I read the review you have written about it), so it's good to see a full quote from it.

By the way, does the book mention the elastic shoeshine gag from "The Invisible Intruder", which is also repeated in both "Once Upon a Dime" and "The Last of The Clan McDuck"? Well, even if it doesn't, it's less surprising that both DuckTales and Rosa would decided to re-use it, since an only-drawn-by Barks story is somewhat "more barksian" than a Fallberg/Strobl story, not to mention that the former fits perfectly with the latter.

I wonder if Barks becoming convinced that he had created a story in which Scrooge earned his Number One Dime by polishing shoes may also have influenced Rosa, especially as Barks had expanded upon it adn suggested that Scrooge could have used his shoeshine talents to pay his way to America rather than buying a ticket. At any rate, early in his career Rosa hadn't decided yet that he would adopt the shoeshine idea, since at the beginning of 1987's "Cash Flow" Scrooge only said "I started as a boy in Scotland, gathering and selling firewood until I saved enough money to come to the land of opportunity, America!". The reference is only to "King of the Golden River".

By the way, what does it say in the part before the one you quoted? Does it says the client was Scottish or American? And if it was Scottish, why did he have an American coin in the first place? DuckTales and Rosa imply Scrooge was cheated, with the latter elaborating from it, but in Chalker's book Scrooge "didn't care"... does this mean that the client proposed to pay him with that coin and Scrooge acepted because he didn't care if he was not paid with local currency? Or is it also a cheat implied but Scrooge didn't care because he was so proud of having earned his first money?

I strongly dislike, however, the whole "brought him good luck" concept.

Nov 6, 2019 18:00:11 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

Nov 6, 2019 17:56:00 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

That's not it. DuckTales's Once Upon A Dime and Rosa's Life and Times very likely share a common ancestor in the form of Jack L. Chalker's An Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck, which predates both; the biggest smoking gun is that the idea that immediately upon arriving un America, Scrooge helped out his riverboat-captain Uncle with the original “Great Steamboat Race”. It's often cited as one of the apparent lifts from DuckTales to Rosa, which would belie Rosa's claim that he never watched Once Upon A Dime; but it's actually a Chalker invention with both the cartoon and the L&T poached independently.

Did Rosa ever cite Chalker as a source for Life of Scrooge?

He did, for example in this 1994 DCML message:

JACK CHALKER'S "INFORMAL BIOGRAPHY OF $CROOGE McDUCK":

I certainly have this lil' booklet. And, asamatterafack, the cover artist, Ron Miller< was visiting me last week and signed my copy.

The booklet is both a help and a hindrance. Jack did exactly what I did -- take all the Barksian "facts" and construct a biography. But what I used his book for were the footnotes. It was invaluable in telling me in which stories were found all those many, many "facts", which I then dug out, made notes on, and proceeded to construct my own history, regardless of Jack's. The HINDRANCE comes from the very
puzzling fact that, even though Chalkers makes it quite clear that he only uses Barks' stories as a source for his info, this is actually not true at all! He uses ANY story that appears in U$ #1-71, regardless of
who wrote or drew the tale. I can't figure this out, but that's the case. So I needed to weed out his many "FALSE facts". He also seemed to ignore lots of stuff that did NOT happen to appear in U$ comics. One might guess that he had the idea that the only $crooge stories that Barks did were those in U$, and that someone had told him that Barks wrote everything in the first 71 issues (though I assume he could see there were different artists). I know the guy must have known better than this, so I can't guess what was really going on here.

But I DO always have my Chalkers book near at hand, if only to use the footnotes.

The other book that is never more than a foor from my elbow is Mark Worden's similarly sized complete Barks index. It is SO much handier than any other because it is simply an index and is handbook-sized. I've never seen (nor really could there BE) a better Barks handbook.

[Fethryfan]

Nov 6, 2019 19:36:41 GMT drakeborough said:

Nov 6, 2019 17:56:00 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

That's not it. DuckTales's Once Upon A Dime and Rosa's Life and Times very likely share a common ancestor in the form of Jack L. Chalker's An Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck, which predates both; the biggest smoking gun is that the idea that immediately upon arriving un America, Scrooge helped out his riverboat-captain Uncle with the original “Great Steamboat Race”. It's often cited as one of the apparent lifts from DuckTales to Rosa, which would belie Rosa's claim that he never watched Once Upon A Dime; but it's actually a Chalker invention with both the cartoon and the L&T poached independently.

So on the subject of the Number One Dime being an American coin even though Scrooge lived in Scotland, we find this in the Informal Biography:

«  It took him a half an hour to chip the mud off his boots; and, when it was over, the ditchdigger paid him with an American silver dime, which almost precisely looks like an 1860 British twopenny piece. Scrooge didn't care, "When he pressed that dime into my sweaty little palm, I was the happiest young duck in the world."50 For the first time, Scrooge had earned something by his own labor.

But an American dime wasn't really all that negotiable in Scotland, so he kept it. The pride of it alone would have made him keep it, one suspects, even so. It also proved to be a powerful good luck charm—just to touch it always has brought him good luck, and the temporary loss of it has often been devastating. »

Thanks for that info. I was actually vaguely aware of that book mentioning that Scrooge got his dime as a shoeshine boy as in the Fallberg/Strobl story, and I was actually writing that in my previous message before I decided to remove it to make it shorter, and to avoid making mistakes. I haven't actually read the book (though three months ago I read the review you have written about it), so it's good to see a full quote from it.

By the way, does the book mention the elastic shoeshine gag from "The Invisible Intruder", which is also repeated in both "Once Upon a Dime" and "The Last of The Clan McDuck"? Well, even if it doesn't, it's less surprising that both DuckTales and Rosa would decided to re-use it, since an only-drawn-by Barks story is somewhat "more barksian" than a Fallberg/Strobl story, not to mention that the former fits perfectly with the latter.

I wonder if Barks becoming convinced that he had created a story in which Scrooge earned his Number One Dime by polishing shoes may also have influenced Rosa, especially as Barks has epanded upon it an suggested that Scrooge could have used his shoeshine talents to pay his way to America rather than buying a ticket. At any rate, early in his career Rosa hadn't already decided that he would adopt the shoeshine idea, since at the beginning of 1987's "Cash Flow" Scrooge only said "I started as a boy in Scotland, gathering and selling firewood until I saved enough money to come to the land of opportunity, America!".

By the way, what does it say in the part before the one you quoted? Does it says the client was Scottish or American? And if it was Scottish, why did he have an American coin in the first place? DuckTales and Rosa imply Scrooge was cheated, with the latter elaborating from it, but in Chalker's book Scrooge "didn't care"... does this mean that the client proposed to pay him with that coin and Scrooge acepted because he didn't care if he was not paid with local currency? Or is it also a cheat implied but Scrooge didn't care because he was so proud of having earned his first money?

I strongly dislike, however, the whole "brought him good luck" concept.

Nov 6, 2019 18:00:11 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

Did Rosa ever cite Chalker as a source for Life of Scrooge?

He did, for example in this 1994 DCML message:

JACK CHALKER'S "INFORMAL BIOGRAPHY OF $CROOGE McDUCK":


I certainly have this lil' booklet. And, asamatterafack, the
cover artist, Ron Miller< was visiting me last week and signed my copy.


The booklet is both a help and a hindrance. Jack did exactly
what I did -- take all the Barksian "facts" and construct a biography.
But what I used his book for were the footnotes. It was invaluable in
telling me in which stories were found all those many, many "facts",
which I then dug out, made notes on, and proceeded to construct my own
history, regardless of Jack's. The HINDRANCE comes from the very
puzzling fact that, even though Chalkers makes it quite clear that he
only uses Barks' stories as a source for his info, this is actually not
true at all! He uses ANY story that appears in U$ #1-71, regardless of
who wrote or drew the tale. I can't figure this out, but that's the
case. So I needed to weed out his many "FALSE facts". He also seemed to
ignore lots of stuff that did NOT happen to appear in U$ comics. One might guess that he had the idea that the only $crooge stories that
Barks did were those in U$, and that someone had told him that Barks wrote everything in the first 71 issues (though I assume he could see
there were different artists). I know the guy must have known better
than this, so I can't guess what was really going on here.


But I DO always have my Chalkers book near at hand, if only to
use the footnotes.


The other book that is never more than a foor from my elbow is
Mark Worden's similarly sized complete Barks index. It is SO much
handier than any other because it is simply an index and is
handbook-sized. I've never seen (nor really could there BE) a better
Barks handbook.

Does someone knows if Chalker is still alive?

[drakeborough]

Nov 6, 2019 19:40:02 GMT Fethryfan said:

Does someone knows if Chalker is still alive?

He died on February 11, 2005.