in "The Pied Piper of Duckburg" [unfinished]

Excerpts from emails sent to the Disney comics Mailing List

Digest: Disney comics Digest Volume 96 : Issue 27
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 96 14:37 EST
From: Don Rosa
Subject: Re: Disney comics Digest V96 #26

      I hadn't mentioned in this Bin-location discussion that I completed that Gyro story a few years back that Barks had begun and abandonned around 1959... and it featured the Bin on a downtown street. They said they couldn't change a single thing in Barks' original pages, and well they shouldn't, but I told them that I HAD to change the Bin from being the Bin to it being a bank vault holding-tank for money headed for the Bin. Otherwise it would violate what I "knew" to be a "fact" -- that the Money Bin was up on that there 10-acre hill. So we changed that one itty-bitty fact and took it from there.




Digest: Disney comics Digest Volume 96 : Issue 33
Date: Mon, 12 Feb 96 00:13 EST
From: Don Rosa
Subject: Re: Disney comics Digest V96 #31

DANIEL V.E.:
      The "Pied Piper" story? In a nutshell:
      Bruce Hamilton sent me copies of 3 pencil-pages of a never-completed Gyro story from (as I later determined) the first Gyro FOUR COLOR from 1959. He wanted me to ink tracings of those pages then invent a plot so that I could complete the story. Hamilton said that Barks had begun the story with an ending in mind, but decided after three pages that he didn't want to draw scenes with thousands of swarming rats. I think I looked at the FOUR COLOR issue and decided the story was originally meant to be 8 pages. Then I wrote to Barks to see if he had any memory of how the story was supposed to end, and he replied that he didn't.
      So, I just thought of a plot that would complete the story at 8 pages and involve hoardes of rats. The only other detail that I recall was that I later read an old interview where Barks mentions that the story was to also involve crowds of children.
      I wrote a plot. But as it turned out, I never got around to doing the story for Hamilton/Gladstone since soon thereafter Disney told him to longer return my art, and I was forced to quit. But I later did the story for Oberon in Holland... even though when they printed it, they gave no explanation to the story's history. Of course, Gladstone later was able to use the story after that, the same way they now use my Egmont stuff.
      It was just a cute lil' idea Hamilton had. And it's a unique sort of team-up, apparently the only one I'll ever have with Barks. But I wonder if any other comic story was ever completed 30 years after it was begun?

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