Vito:
>>>>>I admit that your idea appears to be really bizarre and complicated to me, but I can accept that because the italian Disney culture and views are different from the american ones, ... And also because apart from Carl Barks and a few other ones (with less influence) famous Disney comics were come to an end before you start your career.
One (of many) reasons I enjoy talking to other comic fans is that sometimes they have an insight into my own work that I never realized. Vito has something here. In Italia, indeed all over Europe, Duck comics are never-ending. They have existed nonstop for 60 years (and longer in Italia). Everybody reads them. They are one of life's sweet constants.
Here, when comic book sales plummeted in the late 1960's & early 1970's, the Disney publisher lost interest. Western Publishing (Dell, Gold Key) had MANY other industries and didn't bother to figure out how to deal with a collapsing comic market. For some years they published really *wretched* stuff, then switched to trying to only sell the comics in bags in toy stores, then ceased publication of comics entirely. So between about 1975 & 1986 (and based on quality, more like 1967-1987), Disney comics... Donald Duck of the comic books (THE Donald Duck)... CEASED TO EXIST in North America. To me he was dead. $crooge was dead. Duckburg was gone. I and other American fans only had our memories. We had no idea that Barks' Ducks were still published in other parts of the world, and indeed were STILL the world's most popular comics!!!
When I went to work for Gladstone in 1987, I thought those were the world's only Duck comics. I thought I was resurrecting lost characters. (I soon learned there were Duck comics still published in Europe because Gladstone printed them, but I still had no idea how popular or how well they still sold in Europe!)
So, you see, in my mind I was writing stories of past glories! My personal image of what I was doing was creating new Duck adventures based on Barks' characters and sending them *back in a time machine* to myself in 1954 to read on the green sofa in the house where I grew up and where I first learned to love comics. So naturally I set the stories in the years when I was reading them, when they were new. I knew there wouldn't be many readers in America, and I had no idea there was any other continents where the Ducks had been in *continuous* existence. So... I was writing and drawing the stories just for myself. My 1954 self. A dream come true.
That anyone else outside of North America would ever see one of my Duck stories never occured to me in my wildest dreams.
And maybe that explains why I write stories that I know take place in the past about characters that I don't consider to be alive (or young) in the present. In America these characters exist only in the past.