After some weeks mostly away from this forum, it has been a great happy surprise to find that Don Rosa himself had joined it.
Dear Don, first of all I want to thank you for all the wonderful stories you gave us: I have passionately loved many of them, fiercely quarreled with a few others, enjoyed all.
Some personal memories closely related to my perception of your work. My first encounter with it was in the last page of some Gladstone issue of the late 80's (randomly bought in a visit to England - the shop in front of the British Museum), announcing the forthcoming publication of Last sled to Dawson. Unfortunately I could read that story only many years later, but the advertisement came with a beautiful drawing of yours, showing Scrooge against a mountain landscape in Klondike: I was quite impressed, because that really looked like the "real" Scrooge, much more than the somewhat mollified character appearing in most Italian stories at the time. And in my college years a magnified photocopy of that drawing was the most important poster in my room, as a source of inspiration.
When Lo$ started to appear in Italy, I was preparing to leave for Canada for my Ph.D: your work being published just in that moment provided me with a pleasant parallel with young Scrooge departing from Scotland - a little fact that I found extremely nice. Also, after my arrival in Montreal (in time to buy the last available Gladstone issue of your wonderful Hearts of Yukon: such a pleasant welcome!), it was quite disheartening to find out the ghastly (if compared to Italy) reality of North-American "Disney" comics: let's say that for my spiritual well-being I needed to read regularly a certain amount of new Duck stories, and that was quite hard there, with so few publications, many of them being just reprints of adventures I knew too well. But there were your stories appearing, if maybe not every month, at least often enough: so that, relatively to this (minor, but extremely important in my mind) aspect of my life, discovering your work was the best thing happening in those years.
Because of all of this I want to thank you (and, for the Canadian years, Gladstone, for their heroic efforts at keeping alive the publishing tradition).
I wrote above that, even if I enjoyed all of your stories, I "fiercely quarreled" with some of them. I won't be very specific for the moment, in order to keep this message to reasonable length; just to point the main reason behind my occasional problem, let's say it was an instance of what happens when both writer and reader are passionate fans, with a very different "Duck" background. After reading your answers in the previous pages, I understand better how you were lead to some peculiarities (from my Italian-reader viewpoint) of yours. Of course you have a very strong idea of the characters, how they are defined, what makes them tick and so on - and so have I and most of the people in this forum (probably everyone). But our ideas are based mostly on what we have read (especially in the critical period of our "education" as Duck fans) - and there was a huge difference between what I could get in Italy in the '80's and you some decade earlier in USA. (In particular, about the timelessness mentioned earlier by various people and that seemed hard for you to grasp: it is a natural way of seeing the ducks if you grow up in the middle of a living tradition of new stories and reprints, reading for years, and in random order, hundreds of adventures written decades apart, but mostly set in what was the present when they were written.)
To conclude, a question about your story Mythological Menagerie: when I first read it, most of the strange animals were already known to me thanks to Borges' Manual de zoología fantástica (Book of Imaginary Beings, Wikipedia tells me). I always wondered: was that book your source of inspiration?
Italian summary follows.
Riassunto italiano: ringrazio Don per le sue meravigliose avventure, con qualche aneddoto su come le scoprii. Aggiungo che, pur avendo apprezzato tutta la sua opera, con alcune storie mi sono trovato a "litigare" (senza specificare con quali, per ora): dalla lettura dei suoi interventi capisco che in parte e' dovuto al fatto che abbiamo tutti un'idea molto forte del mondo dei paperi, ma che puo' essere alquanto diversa a seconda della nostra formazione (la produzione USA praticamente nulla dopo il pensionamento di Barks, mentre in Italia restava fiorente). E faccio il mio tentativo di spiegare con questo quell'atemporalita' in cui molti di noi vedono il mondo Disney e che sembra incomprensibile al Don. Infine, domando se per la storia Paperino e il serraglio mitologico sia stato ispirato dal Manuale di Zoologia fantastica di Borges.
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