Don Rosa January 2008, part 3

A few more months have passed and here I am at last with a new chunk of the January 2008 interview with Don Rosa. Meanwhile I am collecting lots more audio material to be published on this podcast: I visited Don once again in June and we devoted several more hours to interviews, to the point that he later said (what honour!) that he considers me his official biographer.

I have been interviewing other Disney authors as well: Abramo Barosso, the recipient, with his brother Giampaolo, of the 2008 Papersera award; and Carlo Chendi, another pillar of the first generation of Italian Disney storytellers. All fascinating stuff that will make its way to future posts. (On a related note, in the intervening period I also interviewed free software guru Richard Stallman; but that has nothing to do with comics so it will appear elsewhere.)

Meanwhile, this third section of the January 2008 interview reveals how much Don has always been “one of us”, that is to say a totally dedicated and obsessively passionate comics enthusiast rather than a “one of them” distant comics author. This is reflected in many aspects of his work, from his care and attention for the most minute detail to his uncompromising drive never to spare any effort to give his fellow comics fans the best they can get, whether he is researching a story plot, drawing a complex scene or contributing to a “hall of fame” volume.

Personally, one of the insights I most resonate with from this transcript, and on which we expanded later on in our conversation, is the realization that we enthusiasts engage in all these meta-activities (indexing, researching, commenting, posting on newsgroups, even interviewing the authors as I'm doing here) ultimately in order to create new opportunities for us to go back and re-read and enjoy the comics we love. So, take this as your clue to go back and re-read your favourite Rosa story, and share that enjoyment with like-minded people by leaving a comment to this blog post!

As usual, you may download the audio of the interview in mp3 format and you may also play it directly from this web page if the Flash gadget below this sentence works in your browser.

FS: So you were saying that you had published the Son of the Sun's second run with another editor...

DR: Oh yeah! New editor. You were asking me if the first editors ever knew that they were... I thought you were going to ask me what they ever went on to do.

No, that was an aside. I just wondered if they were aware of the fact that... [you later became a famous comics author]

I don't know. At least they've never expressed it to me, but... So anyway the next editor was interested in a more generally rounded newspaper so he was willing to let me do both the editorial, meaningful cartoons, and something entertaining. And that's when I did the Son of the Sun. I remember having a lot of fun! The guy who helped me write that first... skip that... I'm giving you more information than you really want! I just heard from him in email. I had lost contact with him and I heard from him just yesterday, while you were still here, so he's retired and he's in Hawaii. [His name is Ron Weinberg.]

Good for him!

Yeah! So that's when I did the Son of the Sun and I would have done another story but that was my last semester in college. I graduated and went to work for the family company.

So how did this Lancelot then turn... revive into the Captain Kentucky?

Well, let's see. I got out of college in about '74 and in a year or so, since I had a little more spare time, I started working for these fan magazines, comic book collector, fanzines. The biggest one of the day was the Rocket's Blast ComiCollector. The first thing I did was contribute indexes. I was always an archivist, indexer, assembling full sets, writing reports... I first started contributing indexes of comic book series. One of them being Uncle Scrooge, it's one of the first ones I did.

So the index would include which issue contains which story, how many pages there are...

Right, and the artist, that of course for Uncle Scrooge would be Carl Barks, but I did lots of other titles; and page counts...

So, a precursor to what the INDUCKS is now doing electronically.

Yeah, but in those days I was the only person doing that sort of thing. I was also, it turned out, well I'll get to that in a moment... and I did that for maybe a year and then the person who was writing this biggest question and answer column in comic fandom, Ray Miller, he was getting tired of it, he wanted to quit, so I said I'd take it over. And this was ideal! Everything that I enjoyed! I took over his information center. It was the Information Center, the RBCC Information Center. And he accepted questions about the history of comic books. Mostly comic books, not comic strips so much, mostly comic books. And I could do that. I've always admitted this: not that I am such an expert, like you Italians, I don't have it all up in my head at all time but I had a huge collection, because I'm such an avid collector. And I had all different genres. I didn't collect just one thing: I collected everything! In those days you didn't have to specialize: everything was cheap. So I was fascinated by all comics, so I collected everything! And I had a good job...

This is a collection in the sense that you'd bought them and read all of them. You knew everything that was in each of them?

No. I started collecting them because I loved the ones that I did read and as I collected the old ones there were many of them I'd read, very fervently, like the ECs and the other Disneys [that had] the old Carl Barks stories that I had never read yet [because they were the ones] that my sister didn't have, and Superman etc etc , many I did read, but also many I didn't read, that I was buying just because I liked the artwork, and historical, you know, social commentary, it was just very interesting. [Especially] the old horror comics...

And to have a complete set of course, like we all do.

And to have a complete set! It was a fun challenge. Like one type I'm thinking of was the horror comics. Lots of them were good, like the Ace Comics and the EC Comics, the DC comics; and lots of them were just utter trash. And I'd never buy one and not even open it: I'd look at the art, I'd look at every page, but I was not going to read it because they were really bad. But I'd appreciate there's some bad comics and nice ones. And that it was fun to try and accumulate a complete collection. They were not valuable! We were talking about this this morning. Nobody wanted them, because they were so bad. But I enjoyed the artwork, and the covers, just to see if I could build a complete collection of something that was not valuable but was difficult to track down and took some diligence and knowledge and perseverance, and meet other collectors, trade information... so I had all these but I didn't know everything there was to know about them. But the beauty of this Information Center column was [...] when people were asking me questions that caused me to go back down and get boxes of comics down and open them and go through them page by page, some of them that I never paid close attention to and I was learning, when people asked me things about their favourite comics, I'd get them down and maybe I'd find something I hadn't noticed, and I did, and it was very enjoyable in that sense. It made me explore even more into my comic book collection. Secondly, it gave me a way to do illustrations. I'd do funny illustrations to illustrate...

To go with your column?

Yeah! They would ask me a question about Superman, and I'd answer the question seriously, I mean I'd joke around, but I'd give them a direct answer, a serious answer, and then I'd do a funny cartoon that had nothing to do with what they were asking me maybe, but it was just funny. And it was fun. But what else I did, I expanded it to include everything I was interested in. I wasn't doing this just for the good of all mankind: I wanted to entertain myself too and maybe help lots of other people in addition. I expanded it to all forms of entertainment: I included movies and television. So I would answer any question about the history of comics, television or movies because I was also, from my earliest memory, a huge movie buff and I was also a big fan of old television. I had a full set of TV guides, that was something else that I collected. So I could answer any question anybody could ask me from my collection. Now this was in the days... and in these days I was the only person on the face of the Earth that could answer a question about old television. I was the only person who would write an index to a TV series about... I'd do the title of each episode, the director, the writer, the cast of characters, with the names of the characters, each actor and every episode of a TV show because not only that I pay attention to that sort of thing but TV GUIDEs, old TV GUIDEs of the Fifties and early Sixties, they had all that information in every entry! Partly because there wasn't a lot of television! We didn't have 500 channels, we had 3 [networks].

You were doing that in the Sixties and Seventies, right?

I was doing that in the early Seventies... I did indexes of dozens of TV shows and it was the only place in the world [where you could get that information], I mean literally, unless you travelled out to Los Angeles and managed to be allowed into the vaults of the production companies where they might have the stuff written down but publicly nobody was doing that sort of thing. Of course nowadays, if we have a question about a movie, or a TV show or a comic, you just type it into Google and you go to a web site! Here, here is another example that just came up, just yesterday. Another thing I did in the early Seventies was I would record TV themes off my television, my little television set with a little tiny cassette recorder. And this was a project that went on year after year. It would take a lot of time.

The theme is the opening song?

The opening tune of all the TV shows. Not just my favourites: of every TV show I could get. I'd have to keep a list of what I needed, I'd have to plan ahead... I didn't have any other life: I lived for comics and movies and television. I'd set the microphone up in front of the TV and right at the right moment I'd press the button and at the right moment I'd turn it off and keep all these things in order and indexed and by the time I was done... and sometimes they'd do reruns of old shows and sometimes I'd trade with friends and other friends in different parts of the country and within a few years I had a collection of sixteen hours of TV themes. Now if you mention each theme is only a minute, and sixteen solid hours of them! And the reason this came up in the last couple of days is I was just talking to Dan Shane, that's a name that's always going to come up a lot in conversations with me, we were talking about how he has transferred all of my LP record collections on CDs. His last job, maybe the most complicated, was he said that he would transfer my old cassette tapes of my TV theme collection onto CDs. So I could listen to them again sometime, and also preserve them: I don't know how much longer those tapes are going to last.

And you were going to index all of them!

Of course, mine were just in random order. They'd be put on the tape in the order that I happened to catch them, which was totally random: new shows, old shows, and certainly not in alphabetical order. And he sends me back an email and says: when I do these, you want them in alphabetical order? And I said: but you're crazy, how can you put those in alphabetical order and when I'm typing that I'm realizing... because... you're going to put them in a computer file, with the title, and then you're going to tell the computer to put them in alphabetical order and then the computer is going to record them in alphabetical order just like that! That's great! And then he said something like... and then I said, you do something like that, and if you go to all that trouble, and you have them in alphabetical order on CDs, why don't you go ahead and see if you can sell them on Ebay for yourself. You know, just keep the money, because you're doing such a wonderful thing for me, you could make an extra copy and see if you can sell them. And I said, again, while I'm typing that, I'm thinking, this is the year 2008 now, this isn't 1971; I said: unless there's people who've already done that! [Laughs!] And he said: let me check. And a few hours later he sent me back, he said, check this web site. And it comes up, TV themes dot com. [Actually televisiontunes.com.] And this guy has got... a guy just like me only who's got nothing else to do, took his collection and put it and it's a bigger collection because

[Ann calls us downstairs for lunch via the interphone]

She's making rice. Well, maybe we'll just stop.

[The pictures scattered throughout the interview are an anachronism: I took them a few months later, during my June visit, while Don and Ann were driving me back to the airport. They show the not-yet-existing-way-back-in-January multi-CD version of Don's collection of TV themes, as lovingly digitized, indexed and packaged by Don's longtime friend Dan Shane.]

Don Rosa January 2008, part 2

At least I clearly said in the first post of this blog that, knowing my other commitments, I would not be able to post very frequently, so I make no apologies for that. For me this is a labour of love towards Don and it must be done properly or not at all. It's taken me two months to find the time to transcribe, annotate and illustrate the next piece. Oh well. If only I were retired...

A suggestion for the esteemed members of this small audience of comics lovers: load the audio chunks of the interview in a corner of your mp3 player, keep them there and listen to them again and again, when you feel like. I've been doing that myself, with the interview in my headphones as I cycle to the university, and I find it really enjoyable! First, it's a bit like being back in Don's studio with him, which for me is always great even if I've listened to (or indeed taken part in) the conversation before. Second, there's always some extra bit you only discover on a second and third and fourth pass, or maybe a point you made a mental note of looking up but which you later forgot about. I find it well worth listening to Don again and again.

When I posted the first part of the interview in April, Don had recently undergone surgery for retinal detachment. The resulting gas bubble took many weeks to shrink and disappear but it finally did so just in time for him to attend a comics festival in Copenhagen last weekend. (There are photos of the event on Sigvald Grøsfjeld's site; me, I was in New York at the time.) I'm so happy that he is getting better and he can now even fly! I hope his eyesight will continue to improve and that his recovery will be complete.

I'll visit Don again at the end of the month (June 2008). Although I am quite sure I won't have finished to transcribe the January interview by then, if you have any questions for him then feel free to post them as comments on this blog. If he allows me, I'll ask him to answer them in his own voice then, and I'll post them here in a future issue of the podcast.

Anyway, without further ado, here is the second installment of the January interview. Download the audio as mp3 or play it directly from the browser using the flash gadget below.

FS: You were not new to thinking to yourself of Carl Barks adventures in terms of adventures with other human people that you would draw, like [the ones] we dug out when I came 10 years ago for the book...

DR: Oh! Yeah! You mean in the sense that back when I was still in grade school, 13 or 14 years old, is when the first Carl Barks reprint comic books came out, the Best of Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge editions in the mid-60s, and that's when I had already gotten rid of all my childhood comics because it's... it's not the sort of thing I would have done, I have met at least one friend who knew not to get rid of the things from his childhood, he knew those would be important to him his whole life. I did not know that. I thought the things you enjoy when you're a kid, you enjoy because you are simple-minded [laughs]. Plus the comics, I should point out, like I said, that the comics by the late 60s weren't as good as they were when I was... they really weren't as good, even the Carl Barks stories weren't as good as they were 10 years earlier.

Plus you were reading older comics because of your sister, you weren't really reading in real time.

Well, my sister was not buying the comics any more, so I had started buying comics; and when I went out to look at them for myself I could see that the Disney comics didn't look as good as they used to. But now I was interested in Superman comics and these were comics with a... they were adventure comics and well drawn but they also had a continuity... Ah, that's always a dangerous thing to talk about: people nowadays think of Marvel comic style of continuity where the whole universe is tightly bound. It wasn't that sort of continuity, it was simply that when something was mentioned in one story, it might be mentioned again in another story, simply that! And that was more interesting to me than the way even Carl Barks would do a comic where an adventure that the ducks would have would never be mentioned again. Whereas, in a Superman comic, [something] like the bottle city of Kandor could be used again a year later, or the kryptonite could be referred to again or... generally Superman would sometimes make a reference to when he did this, when he went back in the time machine to Krypton the last time. I really enjoyed that! I actually don't enjoy the Marvel style, tight, strict continuity, which these critics, the few of them, always think they want to accuse me of. Because I think even though they know they are wrong, I just do the... it's some Mort Weisinger, he was the editor of Superman in the 50s, it's that style of just very loose continuity, is just normal, what you'd expect, because the total lack of continuity in a Disney comic is unnatural. I thought it was unnatural even when I was reading them as a kid! [Uhm, how did we get here?] Oh, I was talking about how I lost interest in the comics because I had moved on to other ones so I got rid of all the comics I grew up with when I started collecting the... okay that's the main reason I got rid of them: because when I went down to the used comics store, the used magazine store that's always down in the slums of the city, since my father grew up down there he'd be glad to take me down to the ghetto or the slum; shh, go on, it's not that bad but, you know, it's the really sleazy part of town, you know, right next to this used comic magazine store was the follies, what do you call them, the strip joints, all in that whole area, but I mean he was a city boy so he knew it was okay if he took me down there, we weren't going to get killed; I don't think he would have let me go into the strip joint but he wouldn't mind if I went into the comic book store or the bookstore next to it. Anyway, the reason I got rid of my sister's comics I guess was not so much that I was trying to purge myself of them but that, when I went in there to buy some used Superman comics, I found out you could get two for one, or rather one for two: if I brought in two comics, I could get one for free. So that's when I downloaded my sister's comics: I carried them down there, then I could get half as many comics in exchange and I didn't have to spend any money! So that I guess is the main reason I got rid of my sister's comics. Anyway, in 1965 I think it was, Gold Key published the Best of Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. And in fact I didn't see that on the newsstand: I actually saw it used, it was just a month old, at this used magazine store, while I was looking for Superman comics. And I picked this up and, unless I'm mistaken, it was those two stories in it: the reason it caught my eye is it had the Golden Helmet which was my favourite Donald Duck story. In fact when I got rid of all of my sister's comics, there were two that I just couldn't bear to part with: one was the Golden Helmet and one was Only a Poor Old Man. My two favourite Donald Duck comics!

And that's the one we found earlier on; so we might talk about that later.

Yeah! But anyway, the golden helmet was one that was being reprinted and that caught my attention because it was my favourite comic and am looking at this and it said the editor's choice or something, you know, the most classic story of Donald Duck and I'm thinking: so, other people like that story? Maybe I'm... maybe I liked it for more than... that I was just a stupid kid. Maybe it was a good story, and I've got good taste... and then I looked at what else was in the issue and it was the Old Castle's Secret and that was actually an older comic than my sister had, she started maybe a year or two after that one was published, in 1948, and I looked at that and... I had never seen a Donald Duck comic like that! It had an atmosphere like an old movie, it was scary, it was not cute and a lot more detailed than even Barks's later art was! So I took that comic home and what you just handed me here in the magazine [page 29 of the Italian Rosa book] is an example of... all I wanted to do was the joy of telling that story myself. But I went about it in a strange way, you know, ideas that occur to kids, you can't explain them, but I thought if I just copied that story, with my own characters into my own little comic books, that would be fun and I would participate in telling the story, even though I was copying the story. I was creating new parts, there would be parts that I would tell differently, I think the villain would get killed, like in a movie.

Maybe it's a bit like some 14 or 16-year-old kid who listens to some music on the radio and it's really good and he wants to pick up the guitar and play it again and maybe do some variations, just like that...

Okay, sure! And I never did that, I was never interested in music, like rock 'n' roll, but lots of people did that, they wanted... just for the pure fun of creating that same sound, they weren't so much interested right away (that would come later) in creating their own music, they wanted the joy of hearing those sounds come out of their hands and then that would inspire them to say "oh that's so cool, what if I change a little bit here, and add this" and then later on they got some... that's very good! But to me it was comics that I enjoyed.

Are these the things that were in ledgers that your father brought from work we can see and they were only for your own amusement? Nobody ever saw them?

Right! Nobody saw them.

The first guy to see these is me, 10 years ago when I was writing the book?

You'd be one of the first people. I imagine I'd show them to Ray, my friends, my comic book collector friends, I'd show them what I do and still nobody has ever sat down and looked all the way through any of them.

Would you show them as in: "here's the thing, have a look" and flick the pages, or would you give it to them and "give it to me next time"?

No, nobody has ever read any of those. And I'm sure the ones I did when I was eight or nine years old, those are impossible to read. I mean, they make sense to me because I knew what was going on. And if I look at them now maybe I can get a sense of where I'm going and I can maybe understand them but if I look at some of them I'll have no idea what the story is about because, you know, it's not being explained properly. But yeah, my father from the office would get these blank business ledgers, they were like diaries, daily appointment diaries, but the thing was the pages were blank instead of ruled, you know, there were no lines on the pages so each page was blank and it was already a bound book so that was fun to be able to put... I started out originally doing them on separate pieces of paper and then stapling the pages together but I don't think I had a stapler, I think I sewed them together.

We had seen them, some of them were sewn, yes!

They were sewn with yarn, not even with thread! But then my father showed me one of these books and from then on I would always use one of these blank business diaries and it was like we had in America Big Little Books, that was a comic book but with one illustration on each page. They were small, they were not giant books, so there was one comic book panel per page, but they were thick books, you should point out they were not thin books like a comic, they were big, thick, hundreds of pages. So I did one book of the Golden Helmet with my characters and a few of my own plot twists and then I did another book with the Old Castle's Secret with my characters and maybe a couple of extra scenes and so on.

Right. So, we started on all this backward trip because we were going to talk about you getting to the Son of the Sun, right?

Okay.

So we have seen the first version of the Son of the Sun, then you were doing Lancelot, then you got another...

The first version was in the school [newspaper]; we had talked to the point where I was leading up to it and then they told me they didn't want it, so I sat out the rest of that year; that was the second semester of junior or senior year. And then in the next semester they had a new editor! So I went back and I said, I would like to do your political cartoons and I'd like to do a comic strip, and at that time they said "okay!". And this was an editor who wasn't so serious: he wanted to be maybe a different type of editor. Maybe the first editor wanted to be the "editorial page" editor, so he had a much too serious outlook as far as I was concerned; and this next editor was more general, like "put together a nice newspaper", because there should be parts with serious news commentary and then serious news reporting and maybe a little bit of fluff...

Now, just as a curiosity, do you remember who these people were?

Yeah!

Do you know if they ever knew that they were grooming the Don Rosa that would become world-famous?

No! One funny thing though: I've never heard back from the University of Kentucky! And I would think that somebody has pointed out to them that one of the world's apparently most famous Uncle Scrooge stories, my very first story (and whatever you can call my career came from that), was first published in their newspaper. I would think that college-aged editors would think that was an interesting story and they'd want to interview me, especially nowadays that comic books are supposed to be hip. Even though not many people read them, they are still considered to be hip and businessy: all the Superman and Batman and Spiderman movies... Of course I'm not doing Spiderman, I'm doing Donald damn Duck! Which is probably what they [think]; if anybody ever showed it to them, they would say: "Donald Duck! Who wants to read that!". You know, in America, nobody reads those kinds of comics or even knows they ever existed. But I'm surprised that nobody from the Kentucky Kernel, that's what it was called, a play on words, it's a kernel of information and it's also the Kentucky Colonel, c-o-l-o-n-e-l [as opposed to] k-e-r-n-e-l...

The one of the Kentucky Fried Chicken?

Yeah, Colonel Sanders is an imitation of an old Kentucky Colonel. Then there is the kernel, like a corn kernel, of information; anyway, I'm surprised that nobody has ever wanted to interview me about that.

The cover of the BDDUS comic is from outducks.org and is © Disney. The images of Don's early comics are from photocopies given to me by him in 1996 and are © Don Rosa.

Don Rosa January 2008, part 1

I have had the privilege of being a guest of Don Rosa in his Louisville home three times: in 1996, 2000 and most recently 2008. Last January I had a very pleasant weekend with Don and Ann and their menagerie of pets, of whom my favourite is the white cockatoo called Gyro.

It was wonderful to be able to admire Don's creations in glorious full size and to play "find the D.U.C.K." with him looking over my shoulder and complaining when I was too quick ("I spent so much time hiding that one and you find it in a few seconds!"; but there were others I couldn't find without his hint...). I guess at some point I'll have to write something about Don's latest work, his magnificent composite Uncle Scrooge posters, all based on events described in Barks stories, that have recently been published in some European countries, for example on a 2008 calendar in Finland. But, before I get sidetracked, let me get to the topic of today's podcast.

When I visited Don in 1996, I was collecting material for the book about him that I was writing with Leonardo Gori and Alberto Becattini, Don Rosa e il rinascimento disneyano (Comic Art, 1997). For that book, I interviewed Don several times: once in his living room while we were looking at some of his old pre-Disney works, once in his library (Don and I in Louisville and Leonardo in Florence, using a text-based chat program on Don's computer) and then two more times via email after getting back to Cambridge. All four of these interviews appeared in the book. However the book is now out of print, the publisher no longer exists, and the text wasn't even in English to start with; in summary, I don't expect many of you to have much of a chance to read it.

So this time, more than ten years later, we sat in the comfy chairs in Don's studio and started the recorder, having agreed on my plan of publishing the interview on the web as both text and audio. I started with some questions about his lesser known pre-Disney beginnings, of course without worrying if some of this material had already appeared in the book. In fact, I'll take this as a chance to complement and illustrate the interview with some of the material I collected from Don for the book back in 1996 (particularly items that could not be included in the book and that are therefore being published for the first time on this blog).

We chatted for quite a long time; so, for listening and transcribing convenience, I'll have to break the interview up into chunks of about 10 minutes each. (Remember, each episode takes just 10 minutes to listen to, but several days of loving labour to prepare for publication...)

Here we go with the first installment! Download the audio as mp3 or play it directly from the browser using the flash gadget below.

FS: So, what's the date? Sunday the 20th of January 2008. We are here in Don Rosa's studio, where all the famous stories have been created, and we are having a nice chat together. That's the third time I'm here and I'm going to ask you a few things I've asked you many times before. I've interviewed you many times both in person and by e-mail and so on. You don't mind that I ask you some things again?

DR: Not at all!

...because I think it's going to be nice for people who hear this interview to be able to hear it from your voice instead of just seeing it written down.

Okay, if they are ...easily amused, I'll satisfy them!

Why don't we start at the beginning, with your first published duck story, the Son of the Sun?

Yes...

You came out as a comics author relatively late in life compared to most comics authors because you had been doing... many things!

Well, yeah, because I never intended to do it for a living: it was just a hobby! And I came out very early as being a cartoonist for a hobby; I mean, I was doing that since my earliest memory! And as you have seen I still have the actual comic books that I was doing when I was maybe five or six years old! I came out very early as an amateur cartoonist, probably earlier than anybody else; but, as you say, very late as a professional, since I thought I was only going to be an amateur.

So, these cartoons that you were doing for yourself, the fascinating things that we have here in the book, were [done] when you were at school; but, after that, you also started amateur cartoons that other people could see.

Right, the ones I did as a kid that you referred to just now, had been only for my own amusement: nobody would see them and I wouldn't show them to friends. My parents, you know, they thought it was a waste of time, I was just doing something to entertain myself. But then, by the time I got to... well even in grade school (I went to a Catholic boys private school so there was both the elementary school and high school in the same unit) I was working for the high school newspaper when I was still in grade school, because they didn't have any people in high school who could draw as good as I could, or as funny. So I was getting stuff published back when I was 10 or 11 years old.

What kind of stuff was that?

Illustrations in the school newspaper; have we ever looked at that stuff?

I don't think we did.

Oh, that's another box of stuff we need to dig into, some time. And then, of course, in the high school, I was all the way through or... I think I was the first ever freshman to work on the high school newspaper, because again they never had a freshman cartoonist... again I was tempted to say "about as good as I was", it's not that I was good but nobody else did it; so, what do they say, "in the valley of the blind, the one eyed man is king!" [laughter] And then again, when I went to college, I remember the first day I was on campus I walked over to the...

Sorry, so what was the comic you were drawing when you were a freshman?

There wasn't a comic strip, it was just illustrations, just to illustrate an article. They were doing one panel jokes, not a continuing character or anything, not a comic book.

So: someone would write an article, give it to you and say "illustrate that"?

Yeah.

"Draw something that goes with it."

Right.

Do you still have any of these?

Well, like I say, I believe so, it's just that you've never asked me for them!

Shall we dig for them later then?

Sure!

Okay, right, we'll do that.

And then, at the University of Louisville---whoops, I forgot where I went to college! At the University of Kentucky, civil engineering, the first day I was on campus, before school even started, I went over to the journalism building and went in and asked them if... of course I was just a freshman, but if they needed a political cartoonist. And I remember they were very, very anxious; you know, they don't have any trouble getting sports editors by any means or managing editors etc etc; but getting a cartoonist, they said it was a very rare thing! So the first issue of the first newspaper when I was just a rank freshman in college had a cartoon that I did. And I know I've got all of those: I've got every single one of those! But they were political cartoons and I, in those days, I was not that political. I was more or less still like comic books. And even today, I am not so much political as... the Republicans have forced me to be anti-Republican. I mean, I didn't get into the matters of different political parties when Republicans were just the wrong political party. But in the George Bush administration they became actually evil and I really have lots of animated discussions with friends and I'm not a political cartoonist any more but if I felt as feverish about it then as I do now, I would have been a really devoted political cartoonist, I would have gotten a lot more fun out of it, because I just hate Republicans. I'm not really pro-Democrat, I'm just anti-Republican. I wish I had been that politically minded in those days; but, in those days, I just liked to draw and I liked to have people see what I was drawing, because I was used to drawing, since my earliest memory, doing drawings that nobody ever saw! Now people were anxious to publish what I drew, so they would tell me what their editorial was about and they would suggest to me what the cartoon would be and I hope I had some contribution to the idea of what the cartoon would be, they might have told me what they wanted the idea to get across and I put it into my own way of expression but... certainly I was not drawing cartoons to profess a belief that I did not believe in, you know; I may not have believed in it as strongly as they did, I'll say so. So I was a political cartoonist, I would think a bad political cartoonist if I wasn't that politically minded, and yet I won a national award: sophomore or junior year, the best political cartoonist in the nation in a college paper, got that stashed around here somewhere.

That was at age 18 - 19?

Let's see, I went to... yeah, 19 and my early 20s, 1969 so I'd been, yeah... no, you're right, 18 [laughter]. No, that would be late 1969, so I'd be 19... 18... never mind!

And that was the same newspaper that later had your comic stories?

Yeah, that would be the same newspaper that, after the first couple of years I was used to doing cartoons for them, political cartoons, I wanted to do something that I wanted, you know, comic books! So that's what I did the Pertwillaby papers for, that's the newspaper I did the first "Son of Sun" version for.

You always said that they wanted "something more like Doonesbury".

Right, they hired me to do a Doonesbury-type strip and I think I started out...

They asked for that because you had already done political cartoons as little sketches and they said "if you wanna do comics, then do that"?

Sure! Plus, the editors of a college newspaper, I was there for fun, they were there for their future job! They were trying to impress, they had got to turn out a body of work that is going to impress some editors some day to hire them, so they were not interested in me doing comics for entertainment, I have to do comics that have social meanings to them, like Doonesbury! [That] was the first newspaper comics strip that has social meaning; in fact, in Louisville, they had never put Doonesbury on the comics page, because in this sort of backwards Southern climate (not that we are in the South), but they did not feel that comics should have any meaning: they were simply entertainment. Doonesbury was very popular, they couldn't ignore it, but it had political contents so they couldn't put something with opinion onto the comics page: that had to be on the editorial page. I'm not even sure if they don't still do it! Anyway, so, like you say, the editors at the college newspaper would allow me to do a newspaper comic strip only if it had political content. I started out introducing a cast of characters, strange characters, similar to the strange cast of characters that was already in Doonesbury, this was in the very early years of Doonesbury. But halfway through the first semester I turned it into an adventure story, very similar to an Uncle Scrooge adventure with Gyro Gearloose I guess. In fact, I'm sure I've shown it to you if you remember, there is a building where the plot involves that my main character has to break into it. The building was a vault of college records but I drew the McDuck money bin, without a dollar sign on the front---just, you know, for my own amusement: I was seeing it as a Beagle Boys caper, getting into the money bin.

And how was that received by the readers of this paper?

Uhmmm... the readers... as I recall, all the way through college and even when I did Captain Kentucky and even when I was doing stuff for the fan magazines, the reader reaction was tremendous apathy. I could never tell anybody was reading any of this stuff, I'd never get any feedback. But if you ask how the editors responded to it, they didn't like it, because it was just entertainment. They could see I didn't plan to put any social commentary into it so they were... at least they didn't cancel it, they let me finish that semester. I finished that story and then, when I came back the next semester, all ready to go with the new adventure... I was ready with the Son of the Sun, that's the one that I was leading up to; I was building my cast of characters in the first semester's worth of episodes and then there was the second semester that I was going to go into Uncle Scrooge type stories. And when I showed up with this, they said they didn't want it, because it was just entertaining (theoretically entertaining!) and so I quit. If they didn't want... I mean, I just lost interest: political cartoons didn't appeal to me that much.

So you had thought of this adventure as an Uncle Scrooge adventure in your heart?

Yeah; it's hard to remember exactly how I regarded it but certainly it was an Uncle Scrooge-type adventure. I can see Uncle Scrooge in the cast, in the characters. I certainly didn't think of it in that sense that I knew that some day I was going to turn it into an uncle Scrooge adventure, I knew that was impossible, I wasn't going to do this for a living, it was just something to do with college and I didn't work for a comics company, the very thought was superhuman! Comic book companies were something in New York City or something... Disney comics were already more or less out of business in America: they were all reprints by 1970 or 1971.

The images of "Pluto at the store" and the Pertwillaby Papers were from photocopies given to me by Don in 1996 and are © Don Rosa. The images of Disney characters in the Finnish calendar and on the cover of our book are © Disney.

Welcome to Frank Stajano's Comics Podcast!

Welcome to my podcast.

I love comics. During my life I have been fortunate enough to meet some of the great storytellers and artists who wrote and drew the comics I like best, including the greatest of them all, Carl Barks. In this podcast and blog I will share with you some of the magic of these meetings. Occasionally I shall also post some comics-related essays.

I am very busy professionally, and this is a labour-intensive and time-consuming side interest; I don't expect ever to become a regular or frequent blogger—consider it a period of high activity if there's one new podcast per month! But I promise I'll do my best to make every new contribution worthy of your visit.

The idea for this podcast ultimately goes back to the amazing thrill I once got when I found on the web an audio interview of one of my long-time heroes, Giorgio Cavazzano. Hearing his warm and friendly voice made it all come alive, so much more than a transcript could possibly do. I want to share this thrill with you. I already have some historical material to sort out and, assuming this initiative has a following, I plan to interview many more comics authors especially for this podcast.

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