- Pronouns
- he/him
Discuss this Article by @Makemakean here
I'm quite convinced that had I been more exposed to DC and Marvel at an early age and in a proper setting, I would have been a great fan. While I certainly was aware of the main lines of superheroes (Superman, Batman, and Spider Man), I remember that one thing that drove me away from the genre at the time I got into Duck comics was that I felt that they took themselves far too seriously, that it was all this brooding stuff over it that just didn't appeal to me. Plus, I was a terrible prude by the time that I was 8-10, and I remember feeling that there was something very erotic about these comparatively realistic depictions of muscular men in spandex suits that just struck me as deeply inappropriate.Great article, Max. It's always fun listening to you speak about the interesting ways Disney had to look about intellectual property and of your love of Barks and Rosa and Oncle Picsou. Stan who?
Well it certainly seems to be the business model that works best for both readers and authors and artists, and I don't see the publishing companies complaining, so, err-... yeah, it is the best way to do things.Of course the Franco-Belgian way (all three of them and then the indie variants) is the one true way.
This is ridiculous, I remember checking up on whether the noun was masculine or feminine and so should have an additional e at the end of dessiné, but somehow managed to miss that I also needed to add a further e at the end of band! Oh well, clearly I need to get back to my French soon!Minor remark, it's Bande Dessinée, with an E at the end of bande.
There are a number of issues currently bubbling or erupting, so it's not all roses either.Well it certainly seems to be the business model that works best for both readers and authors and artists, and I don't see the publishing companies complaining, so, err-... yeah, it is the best way to do things.
Well as I will later detail in upcoming installments, while Carl Barks over time established certain fixed points about Scrooge's backstory that he would reference again and again:Great work Max.
Not having direct experience of this media myself and only hearing about it through report, it felt like the only comparable attempt to tie together disparate stories about one character into a coherent backstory was AC Crispin's Han Solo novels, which I've previously written about. Crispin had to deal with works of multiple authors rather than just one, but OTOH I get the impression Rosa had a lot more material he had to reconcile.
Yes and no - the characters sometimes were, but the backstories were often as throwaway as you make most of these background gags sound.I get the impression that A. C. Crispin really had to work with far more fleshed out scenarios and backstories and there it was far more difficult to make the pieces fit one another.
The only really contradictory aspect of most of the backstories was that despite Barks having established that Scrooge made his fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush, which took place 1896-99, he would still mention having been in the gold, copper, diamond, silver, oil businesses in so many other places in the 1880s and 1890s (not to mentioned having worked as a riverboat captain in the late 1870s), which would seem to indicate that he was already something of a wealthy man by then.Yes and no - the characters sometimes were, but the backstories were often as throwaway as you make most of these background gags sound.
Plenty of dirt-poor Scottish aristocrats, that part's not hard!Well, that, and the question of how Scrooge McDuck can both be a Scottish aristocrat and heir to one of the most illustrious clans in Scottish history, and how he could have started out so incredibly poor, but I'm really getting ahead of myself.
I like them dripping "what? How old IS he?" for a bit before just going "yeah Scrooge is just supernaturally old"The DuckTales reboot of 2017 (which features David Tennant in the voice of Uncle Scrooge) which takes place in modern times and features latops and smartphones and everything still has Scrooge earning his first dime as a Dickensian street urchin shoeshiner:
The case I wish to make is that I genuinely do not think that Barks really had in mind a grand narrative for Uncle Scrooge's life.A lot of comics doing 'continuity cop' end up lifeless inside unless they have something to say with it, and Life & Times is impressive with how Scrooge strives and strives and strives but doesn't become rich for decades, becoming a worn-down and bitter duck in the process once he makes it. It's exactly what you want from a prequel.
It is amazing!(The Mail Pilot sounds AMAZING)
Whatever else may be said of Batman and Spider Man, they fortunately don't have much in common with a hundred year old pedophile.Heh! I suppose you might well say that in retrospect, the reason I was turned off from Batman and Spider Man was because I assumed them both to be characters very similar in nature to Edward Cullen from Twilight.