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Prequel Problems: The Duck Universe of Carl Barks and Don Rosa, Part 3

Lad at work is the biggest PicsouMag fan, so I had to explain to him why the character has, to him, a weird name in the originals, and why it would be immediately identifiable as a character trait for any English speaker.
 
Also, I'd be interested in knowing whether you have read Lucky Luke's Le Klondike, featuring Soapy Smith, and if not, do pick it up! @Alex Richards knows it, as I was leading him through the serried ranks of BDs in the Fnac Les Halles when I stopped in front of it and helped a couple settle on which Lucky Lukes to buy. It's also a rare one in that it has a recurring character who is not the Daltons or Rantanplan, but Waldo Badminton, archetypal English aristocrat, from a much earlier album (how much earlier? Goscinny was alive and penned it) Le Pied-Tendre.
 
Lad at work is the biggest PicsouMag fan, so I had to explain to him why the character has, to him, a weird name in the originals, and why it would be immediately identifiable as a character trait for any English speaker.
As a kid I always assumed he was just made up for the Disney version of A Christmas Carol (which I was exposed to via an, er, "novelisation" in mostly picture book form) and then got confused when I saw him used in other contexts. Though I never saw or heard of DuckTales growing up; for some reason they way I saw TV growing up seemed to include one part of a stable of cartoons without the other. For example, TaleSpin yes DuckTales no; Spider-Man yes X-Men no, and so on.
 
Lad at work is the biggest PicsouMag fan, so I had to explain to him why the character has, to him, a weird name in the originals, and why it would be immediately identifiable as a character trait for any English speaker.

They just call him Joakim von Anka in Swedish. Since Donald is called Kalle Anka, with Anka meaning Duck, I suppose they just went with von to give it an aristocratic-sounding tinge in the original translation of Christmas on Bear Mountain. (The von in particular being shorthand for aristocratic in Sweden and Denmark dates back to the fact that many aristocratic families, even if they had no German ancestry whatsoever, upon being ennobled decided to just prepend von to their already pre-existing surnames, even when said surnames were pure patronymics, leading to names that etymologically are ridiculous like von Hermansson, von Axelsson, von Carlsson, von Jacobsson (all of the aforementioned are real Swedish noble families!).)

Now, already the second story makes a point of the McDucks being this proud old clan from the highlands, so the translators could have fixed their mistake their and just changed his name to Joakim McAnka, but, nope, they decided to just keep going with the original translation, and they have kept it up to this very day, so much so that now it would be impossible to change his official Swedish name. Which leads to the ridiculousness in the Swedish translation of there being this old clan from the Highlands with this incredibly German-sounding name.

Also, I'd be interested in knowing whether you have read Lucky Luke's Le Klondike, featuring Soapy Smith, and if not, do pick it up! @Alex Richards knows it, as I was leading him through the serried ranks of BDs in the Fnac Les Halles when I stopped in front of it and helped a couple settle on which Lucky Lukes to buy. It's also a rare one in that it has a recurring character who is not the Daltons or Rantanplan, but Waldo Badminton, archetypal English aristocrat, from a much earlier album (how much earlier? Goscinny was alive and penned it) Le Pied-Tendre.

I'm afraid I've never read any Lucky Luke. Cowboys just never really interested me when I was a kid. Granted, I found native Americans to be fascinating, but when it came to the cowboys, because I was simply never exposed to Westerns and the like, when I heard cowboy, the word did not conjure up this image of Clint Eastwood and gunslingers and saloons and bandits and sheriffs and everything. I just imagined a farmer on a ranch somewhere. Someone who quite literally worked with cattle the whole day. And having at some point been on a cattle farm in my youth and found the whole thing fairly boring, I just imagined cowboys as being "well that, only people wear these widebrimmed hats and spit a lot for some reason".

@Ares96 might be able to understand when I say that when your mind insta-translates cowboy into kopojk, then the whole thing loses its appeal.
 
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There must be five stories where Lucky Luke actually drives cattle, at best. The one that immediately springs to mind is Le Juge, where he meets Roy Bean, and he gets his herd confiscated within the first few pages and spends the rest of the album trying to get it back. It's mostly an exploration of the American West.
 
I'm a bit disappointed that I couldn't go more into detail about Vic Lockman, who came up with the story that Scrooge earned his first dime as a ditch digger. By means of Google, I got a hold of some panels from his comics about Apartheid, and they're just, well... Have a look for yourself.
 
There must be five stories where Lucky Luke actually drives cattle, at best. The one that immediately springs to mind is Le Juge, where he meets Roy Bean, and he gets his herd confiscated within the first few pages and spends the rest of the album trying to get it back. It's mostly an exploration of the American West.
As previously mentioned, I have that 1986 charity compilation of just about every comic in the Western world which introduced me to a lot of European comics (notably, it includes the entirety of The Black Island and got me into Tintin). That one includes a Lucky Luke story where the joke is basically that surely some of the Oregon Trail pioneers must have got fed up halfway and just set up shop in the middle of one of the flyover states, and he ends up having to help them both across a river and then back again in the same day.
 
Do you have a name for it?

Puts me in mind of La Caravane, but this one they actually go all the way to the Pacific.
 
It's fascinating reading these articles, because I never read any Disney comics (or many comics at all) as a child, so my knowledge of the Ducks comes from reading the Dutch Donald Duck booklets (they're very popular in the Netherlands, such that you can find lots of them in almost every newsagent). As a result, I don't know most of the English names, only the Dutch ones: Dagobert Duck (Scrooge); Kwik, Kwek and Kwak (the nephews); Katrien (Donald's sort-of-girlfriend); Guus Geluk (the lucky cousin); etc.
 
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It's fascinating reading these articles, because I never read any Disney comics (or many comics at all) as a child, so my knowledge of the Ducks comes from reading the Dutch Donald Duck booklets (they're very popular in the Netherlands, such that you can find lots of them in almost every newsagent). As a result, I don't know most of the English names, only the Dutch ones: Dagobert Duck (Scrooge); Kwik, Kwek and Kwak (the nephews); Katrien (Donald's sort-of-girlfriend); Guus Geluk (the lucky cousin); etc.

No, I know what you mean. They'll never truly be Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck to me, they'll always be Kalle Anka and Joakim von Anka.
 
(Now, mathematically speaking, the figure of a billion dollars would seem to indicate that Scrooge as a general rule imposes an interest rate of just under 32% per annum, which in turn means that it probably was for the better that Scrooge did not go into the banking business, as he’d never have gotten any customers charging those kinds of fees, but again, I digress.)

Makemakean level: substantial.
 
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