“An entire ‘vault,’ like a Money Bin, filled with 40,000 comics.”

February 13, 2013 1:54 PM

“The DON ROSA COLLECTION is a deluxe 9-volume set of books published by Egmont that tells the story of my life with comics, particularly the $crooge McDuck and Donald Duck comics for which I have become best known... As part of the special texts in the series, I wrote an autobiography of my life, at least as it pertains to comic books. As a conclusion to those texts it was always planned that I would write a sort of ‘epilogue’ to my career, the subject of which would obviously be the reasons for why I quit... At the last moment the Disney Corporation refused to allow my text to appear in a book series that was published under their license... So I agreed to allow set #3 to go forward as long as I would be allowed in volume 9 to direct interested readers to the ‘epilogue’ as it is appearing on this private website.” Don Rosa: “WHY I QUIT”

A brief essay by the great cartoonist Don Rosa, Eisner-winning author of "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck." This piece includes some reminiscences and reflections on Rosa's life and personal work ethic, along with his thoughts on the unfortunate realities of the Disney comic system.

(Note that it sadly appears unlikely that "the Don Rosa Collection" will be published in English.)

posted by koeselitz (12 comments total)

> If there is something in my text that someone doesn’t wish to be known to the public, it seems to me that inclusion in an expensive book set that has only a few thousand buyers in several different countries would be a rather harmless revelation. But now that text will be on the INTERNET. That was never part of my original intention.

Funny how things work out.
posted by ardgedee at 2:09 PM on February 13, 2013 [2 favorites]

He went along with it for decades, then it suddenly became "an insidious worm that worked its way into my soul." Well, Don, that's how that works. Sort of like Minamata disease.
posted by Twang at 2:38 PM on February 13, 2013

TL;DR: The Disney System: worse than poking your eye out.
posted by chavenet at 2:41 PM on February 13, 2013 [4 favorites]

What an amazing story! I'm a Don Rosa reader, but not at the fan-level some people are, and I wasn't aware of this at all. Thanks
posted by mumimor at 3:19 PM on February 13, 2013

Aw man - I loved the Don Rosa comics back in the day. To find out that this exists and at the same time that it will probably never exist in English... dang.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:23 PM on February 13, 2013

Not to devalue Don Rosa's personal bad treatment. I just wanted to play a tiny violin for myself.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:24 PM on February 13, 2013

I've been having this odd jones for reading some Scrooge McDuck epics. I poked around on Amazon for a definitive collection and it looked like the best Carl Banks/Don Rosa compilations are out of print. Disney really needs to get its act together before boomers like me are too old to read this stuff.
posted by Ber at 3:27 PM on February 13, 2013

it looked like the best Carl Banks/Don Rosa compilations are out of print

Fantagraphics is publishing all of Carl Barks's stories (although all volumes haven't been released yet).
posted by martinrebas at 3:43 PM on February 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

I worked in a comic shop in Indianapolis and one of the regular customers was an animator who had worked on a few films like Bébé's Kids and his dream was to work for Disney. He finally got the opportunity with The Little Mermaid 2 which was one of the first direct-to-video sequels that Disney created. When he came back to the shop from working on that film, I asked him what it was like and he said that it felt like, "selling his soul to the Devil". That's always stuck with me.
posted by koavf at 4:54 PM on February 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

When I become Most Holy and Excellent Emperor of the Galaxy, inexpensive Don Rosa editions for all will be one of the first acts of my Glorious Rule (after ensuring World Peace and transferring the U.S. military budget to a two-part David Lynch/Alejandro Jodorowsky Dune film - think Rashomon).
posted by ersatz at 5:49 PM on February 13, 2013 [1 favorite]

"selling his soul to the Devil"

Well, it's no wonder.
posted by telstar at 8:16 PM on February 13, 2013

On a recent Absolute Infinite Crisis hardcover, I had 30-odd pages reprinted in there, a book that retailed for over a hundred dollars-- a book that DC never even gave me a copy of, and the royalty amounted to a few dollars, I couldn't buy a pizza on that windfall. I want to work, I don't want to be a nostalgia act, remembered only for what I did 20, 30 years ago.

Eighties and nineties DC Comics mainstay Jerry Ordway explains how he isn't getting any work from them anymore and why he can't live on the royalties for his older stuff.
posted by MartinWisse at 6:16 AM on March 5, 2013 [1 favorite]