Don Rosa
Keno Don Hugo Rosa, known as Don Rosa, is an American comic book writer and illustrator known for his comics about Scrooge McDuck and other Disney characters. Many of his stories are built on characters and locations created by Carl Barks.
Rosa created about 90 stories between 1987 and 2006, and in 1995 his 12-chapter work The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck won the Eisner Award for Best Serialized Story.
Career
''The Pertwillaby Papers'' and early non-ducks work
Rosa's first published comic was an adventure comic strip titled The Pertwillaby Papers created for his college newspaper The Kentucky Kernel in 1971. Rosa graduated from University of Kentucky in 1973 with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering. By the time he graduated, the comic had amassed 127 chapters.While making The Pertwillaby Papers Rosa also contributed art and articles to comic fanzines. One contribution was An Index of Uncle Scrooge Comics. According to his introduction: "Scrooge being my favorite character in comic history and Barks my favorite pure cartoonist, I'll try not to get carried away too much." In 1970, he drew a Donald Duck fancomic titled Return to Duckburg Place, depicting a dark and dystopian vision of the future of Duckburg, and unsuccessfully submitted it to a fanzine for publication.
After attaining his bachelor's degree, Rosa continued to draw comics purely as a hobby, his only income came from working in the Keno Rosa Tile and Terrazzo Company, a company founded by his paternal grandfather.
Rosa authored and illustrated the monthly Information Center column in the fanzine Rocket's Blast Comicollector from 1974 to 1979. This was a question-and-answer feature dealing with readers' queries on all forms of pop entertainment of which Rosa was a student, including comics, TV and movies. He also revived the Pertwillaby Papers in this "RBCC" fanzine as a comic book style story rather than a newspaper comic strip from 1976 to 1978.
Rosa accepted an offer from the editor of the local newspaper to create a weekly comic strip. This led to his creation of the comic strip character Captain Kentucky for the Saturday edition of the local newspaper Louisville Times. Captain Kentucky was the superhero alter ego of Lancelot Pertwillaby. The pay was $25/week and not worth the 12+ hours each week's strip entailed, but Rosa did it as part of his hobby. Publication started on October 6, 1979. The comic strip ended on August 15, 1982, after the publication of 150 episodes. After three years with Captain Kentucky, Don decided that it was not worth the effort. He retired from cartooning and did not draw a single line for the next four years. Years later, as his fame grew, his non-Disney work was published by the Norwegian publisher Gazette Bok in 2001, in the two hard cover "Don Rosa Archives" volumes, The Pertwillaby Papers and The Adventures of Captain Kentucky.
Gladstone
In 1986, Rosa discovered a Gladstone Comics comic book. This was the first American comic book that contained Disney characters since Western Publishing's discontinuation of their Whitman Comics in the 1970s. Since early childhood, Don Rosa had been fascinated by Carl Barks' stories about Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck. He immediately called the editor, Byron Erickson, and told him that he was the only American who was born to write and draw one Scrooge McDuck adventure. Erickson agreed to let him send a story, and Don Rosa started drawing his first Duck story, "The Son of the Sun," the very next day."The Son of the Sun" was a success and Rosa's very first professional comic story was nominated for a Harvey Award "Best Story of the Year". The plot of the story was the same as his earlier story, Lost in the Andes. As Don Rosa explained it, he was just " turning that old Pertwillaby Papers adventure back into the story it originally was in my head, starring Scrooge, Donald, the nephews, and Flintheart Glomgold."
Rosa created a few more comics for Gladstone until 1989. He then stopped working for them because the policies of their licensor, Disney, did not allow for the return of original art for a story to its creators.
After making some stories for the Dutch publisher Oberon, the publishers of an American Disney children's magazine called DuckTales offered Rosa employment. They even offered him much higher page rates than the one he received at Gladstone. Rosa made just one script. The publishers never asked him to make more, and due to problems with receiving the payment, he did not care.
Egmont
After working with the DuckTales magazine, Rosa found out that the Denmark-based International publisher Egmont was publishing reprints of his stories and wanted more. Rosa joined Egmont in 1990. Two years later, at Rosa's suggestion, Byron Erickson, the former editor at Gladstone, also went to work for Egmont and has been working there ever since as an editor and later as a freelancer.In 1991 Rosa started creating The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, a 12 chapter story about his favorite character. The series was a success, and in 1995 he won an Eisner Award for best continuing series. After the end of the original series, Rosa sometimes produced additional "missing" chapters. Some of the extra chapters were turned down by Egmont, because they were not interested in any more episodes. Fortunately, the French magazine Picsou was eager to publish the stories. From 1999, Rosa started working freelance for Picsou magazine as well. All of these chapters were compiled as The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion.
On strike
During early summer 2002, Rosa suddenly laid down work. As an artist, he could not live under the conditions Egmont was offering him but he did not want to give up making Scrooge McDuck comics either. So, his only choice was to go on hiatus and try to come to an agreement with Egmont. His main issues were that he had no control over his works. Rosa had discovered too often that his stories were printed with incorrect pages of art, improper colors, poor lettering, or pixelated computer conversions of the illustrations. Rosa has never, nor has any other artist working on Disney-licensed characters, received royalties for the use or multi-national reprinting of any of his stories worldwide.Rosa came to an agreement with Egmont in December of the same year, which gave him more control over the stories and the manner in which they were publicized.
Quitting
Rosa, who had poor eyesight since childhood, experienced a severe retinal detachment in March 2008, which required emergency eye surgery. However, the surgery was only partially successful, and Rosa had to undergo further surgery in both eyes, making drawing even more challenging. In an interview at the Danish Komiks.dk fair on June 2, 2008, Rosa announced his decision not to continue creating comics due to various reasons such as his eye troubles, low pay, and the use of his stories by international Disney licensees in special hardback or album editions without payment of royalties or permission for the use of his name.In 2012, Rosa wrote an essay about his retirement for Egmont's 9-volume Don Rosa Collection, which was to be published in Finland, Norway, Germany and Sweden. The essay, posted at career-end.donrosa.de, cites the above reasons, with special emphasis on the "Disney comics system" for paying writers and artists a flat per-page rate, and then allowing publishers around the world to print the stories without payment to the creators.
Rosa is more popular with readers in Europe than in his native United States. According to him, even his next-door neighbors do not know his profession.
Personal life
In 1980, Rosa married Ann Payne. Payne was a middle-school social studies teacher.Character
Don Rosa describes himself as an introvert due to being socially isolated as a child. Also, he thinks of himself as a workaholic.Rosa suffered from depression during the years before he quit. He believes that it was caused by working hard while taking little time for leisure, a result of his self-imposed work regimen due to his enthusiasm for Barks' characters.
Hobbies
Rosa is an avid collector of many things, including comic books, TV Guide, National Geographic, and movie magazines, fanzines, books, White Castle memorabilia, pinball machines and movies and more.Rosa also grows exotic chili plants and tends nearly 30 acres of a private nature preserve with wildflower fields and numerous forest trails. That and taking semi-annual European signing tours to visit his fellow BarksDucks fans, takes up all of his time. He is also working to complete his collections of all American comic books published between 1945 and 1970.
Work
In Europe, Rosa is recognized as one of the best Disney comics creators. Carl Barks and Rosa are among the few artists who have their name written on the covers of Disney magazines when their stories are published. Rosa enjoys including subtle references to his favourite movies and comics as well as his own previous work. He normally uses about twelve panels per page, instead of the more common eight.Rosa has an especially large following in Finland, and in 1999, he created a special 32-page adventure featuring Scrooge McDuck for his Finnish fans called; Sammon Salaisuus, based on the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala. The publication of this story created a national sensation in Finland where Donald Duck and the Kalevala are important aspects of culture. It was published in many other countries as well. The cover for the comic book was a spoof of a famous painting by Akseli Gallen-Kallela.
The latest work that Rosa has worked on is a cover for the album Music Inspired by the Life and Times of Scrooge by Tuomas Holopainen from Nightwish who is a fan of Rosa's comics.