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...