The Farewell of Don Rosa to Creating Comics

The Second Coming of The Man of the Ducks

OK, I see your faces, a blank stare and a question printed in capital letters on your brow:

"Who the ... is Don Rosa?" 

Don Rosa is arguably the best creator of comics with Disney's Ducks Family, after Carl Barks.

Not the greatest artist to have drawn "The Ducks" after Barks - I think Giorgio Cavazzano is the one -
and maybe not the best writer - and here, I draw a blank -  but the best author.

He did both art and stories, with a meticulousness in the art that betrayed his origins as a fan of Carl Barks and a thoroughness in straightening up pending plot threads - left dangling from Carl Barks stories, usually - that betrayed his training as a civil engineer. Or the reverse.     

I discovered the guy only a few years ago, as I had stopped reading the Ducks - (I do not really care for Mickey Mouse, crypto-fascist law&order bastard that he is) - long years before his stories started filtering into Italian publications.

But my nephew was a huge fan and so I had occasion of reading some of Don's seminal "The Life And Times of Scrooge McDuck" - it is, indeed, a reading well worth its time (and, no, "Fifty shades" definitively IS NOT!).

Also, apparently, Don created the basic plot of Inception for one of his Ducks tales in the early '90s - no, he ain't got nor going to get a dime for it - he is that kind of good, as a storyteller. 

Anyway, Don Rosa is probably also the last great comic artist to have run all of his career inside the so-called "Disney System" -  read: slavery for artists. 

He knew he was surrendering a lot of money and some authorial control, to keep working with the characters he loves the most in the world, and over time that knowledge took its toll.

And yet it took something worse than that, to knock him off the drawing board...

Before leaving you to the man and his farewell words, one last note from yours truly:

Get it, boyo, Disney's ain't no "Rebel Alliance" -  it's the F...ing Empire.

Also, keep the Kleenex at hand - for one of their explicitly intended uses, for a change.  

And now, 


The Farewell of Don Rosa to Creating Comics


- sniff, I am crying again...

What We Are in the Dark

From "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck", by Don Rosa

Here, Scrooge is still a duck in search of his luck, little more
than scraping by while he chases a "big affair" after the other.
He could just steal the opal and be rich
- nobody, but him, would know.

To troll or not to troll? - this is [not] a question.

On-line life [supposedly] allows for a fair amount of anonymity and, as a consequence, of freedom from social pressure.

Apparently, for some this means the freedom to troll, to be the jerks that they cannot fully be in their off-line life.

If that is the way in which you consistently use the freedom afforded you by the technological miracle of Internet - consistently; we all have our three minutes of jerkiness - then I refer you to the title of this.


We are what we are in the dark, where the power of social pressure does not reach us and, apparently, what you are is A Jerk.

F...book

A couple of days ago, one of my on-line friends has landed on this blog - he was struck by the fact that I tend to digress in a lot of odd directions, and to employ something that looks a lot like forthright honesty in doing so. *(I hope you do not mind, Dr. B.H. )*.

Essentially, he did not expect from me to wrote about "Mr. Rodgers Neighborhood" amidst post-human gods filling the universe with masochist lesbians, BDSM tarots and ternary counting system's foibles.

He knew I was complicated, but I think he hoped - being complicated not being a recipe for happiness, or for mechanical reliability for that matter - I was a little less twisty.

He is as dear a friend as one I can make on-line, i.e. someone with whom I can share some facets of myself that I dare not to share with my immediate social environment - because, you know, lynching mobs are always ready and eager to have fun.

To be honest, I also suspect that landing on the blog of someone you got to know through his drawings of - cough - pretty unrealistically extreme consensual SM porn, and discover that he can cry for a couple of days  because of a phrase from Mr. Rodgers, does not make the same effect as discovering that the principal of your daughter's kindergarten has the complete "No Fun Limits"  collection in his hard drive.

That said, "going out there and telling what I want to tell" is my main reason to be on-line (OK, the second -  the first is self-advertising for the aforementioned drawings).

If I have to beat around the bush, and construct a social façade to prompt up my ego - it simply isn't worth it.

No matter how much plaster you put on it, it doesn't really change the rotten below.

Trust me, I worked as a mason till I was 27 (and then went back to college because, uh, I was fed of my fellow masons calling me haughty for, well, using words like "haughty" - I know, I know).

So, I really do not get those that have a Facebook account with their name, "connected" to their off-line friends and who tend it with the same obsessive care many use in tending to their house gardens.

Trying to "impress their neighbours" - so to speak - with dazzling images of their magnificent successes, in order to project a calculated impression of happiness and personal fulfilment.

Why? Why do they bother?

We already have to go through life wearing masks, caving in to social pressures that require us to conform, perform and do our bit to uphold the status quo - I'd say, especially when said "status quo" is unfavourable to us; Of course, if it was favourable we would not need to be press-ganged into keeping it running, right?   

Why should we open a Facebook account, with our legal name?  - the wet dream of Facebook founder, and they push and push and push to get it at every occasion.

To keep doing the same stupid dance, only on a somewhat grander scale? Really?

Delenda Facebook!

If I go on-line, it is too enjoy some freedom from social pressure, not to participate to new and more pervasive forms of it (*).





Ceterum censeo Facebook esse delendam...



* By the way ,the first available studies on the matter seems to indicate that it is already  fucking up nicely with our youngest generations' mental health, developing social anxiety, depression and other nice idiosyncrasies; Old guys being old guys, we tend to say it is them kids being gutless, as our parents did with us and theirs with them and so forth ever since our species managed speech and to keep old people around.  

I like her

... sweet dreams are made of her ...

I like A.

She is a nice kid, solid with no wild dreams, but still with some dreams of a down-to-Earth nature - the salt of the Earth, they used to say in my language.

In my mind I can clearly see her in a takate kote, curled on the bed with the legs tied to the wall, high above her head, while I eat and frolick her cunt.

Unfortunately, I can also see her nice boobs well squeezed as she dangles from them, tied with ropes to another hook in the wall.

Much more unfortunately, I can't really see me asking her to play that way.

She doesn't give me the vibe that it may be in her chords - no pun intended.

It's just shit going on in my head, and it would be impolite to laden her thoughts with some of it.


- Sigh 
                 (long and hard)