Don Rosa, ducks, and Kentucky.
The first fanzine I ever read was The Comic Reader… here’s a page with a sample issue from ’77 that, coincidentally, is using the descriptive text I wrote for the eBay auction mentioned there. In the early 80s, this fanzine was reprinting a comic strip called “Captain Kentucky” by Don Rosa. Well, I just loved this strip…I enjoyed the way every square millimeter of the page was filled with something, and the whole one-man-operation, rough around the edges, “let’s put on a show!” feel to it.
I snapped up Don Rosa’s Comics and Stories #1 when it came out in ’83, which reprinted his earlier “Pertwillaby Papers” humor-adventure strips. I never did see the second issue of this series on the stands, and I looked for the darn thing for nearly 20 years before a friend of mine found a copy for me in Los Angeles not too long ago. (Of course, all the “Pertwillaby Papers” material, including the spin-off “Captain Kentucky” strips, has since been collected in two nice hardcovers.)
When the announcement was made that Rosa was going to be doing a new Uncle Scrooge McDuck adventure for Gladstone Comics’ Disney line in ’87, I found myself looking at Disney comics for the first time since the early ’70s. Reading Rosa’s story, “The Son of the Sun,” got me hooked back into reading Duck comics, which of course brought me to the work of Carl Barks, which then resulted in my buying all several dozen Complete Carl Barks albums over a period of a decade, at a rate of about 2 a month (so the Complete Peanuts series, at two volumes a year for just over 12 years, should be a cakewalk).
And now Disney comics are coming out in the U.S. once again. Rosa stories that had only been available overseas are now being released in small doses…just in the $6.95 issues, not the $2.95 ones, of course. But hey, I’m not complaining…at least they’re available. And while I’m glad that Disney comics of any kind are available in the U.S. now, I’m also afraid that they’re selling mostly to adult Disney fans like me, and not enough to the younger potential fans.
Additional linkage:
DUCKhunt links to lots of Rosa articles and artwork all over the web.
A gallery of sketches, alternate pages, fanzine art, and more by Rosa.
This page has one of the most distressing Duck images you will ever see. Actually, this whole article on the history of Duckburg is good reading.
