No Title 1183

Supplement to ” A Destiny Drawing Ducks”

Out of the dozens of Scrooge comics that Don Rosa has drawn over the past 18 years or so, some stand out above the rest as his favorites. Three of these, Last Sled to Dawson, Hearts of the Yukon, and The Prisoner of White Agony Creek—his most recent comic, which will likely be published in Europe early next year—are related in that they take as their starting source the “lost love scenario” between Scrooge McDuck and Glittering Goldie.

Goldie, a dance hall girl in the Yukon, was first introduced by Carl Barks in his Back to the Klondike issue, published in the 1950s. In the original version of that issue, Barks had included a five-page flashback sequence that was omitted by the publisher, Rosa believes, because it was too risqué.

It wasn’t until the 1960s, as a comic collector, that Rosa saw a copy of the omitted flashback sequence—which included Scrooge’s kidnapping of Goldie and taking her as his prisoner to White Agony Creek to “live alone with him to show her how hard it is to earn the money she was trying to steal from him,” Rosa says.

“I still remember what a fabulous experience that was. It was like deleted footage from Citizen Kane or something,” he says.

Ever since then, Rosa has been intrigued with the notion of Scrooge and Goldie’s lost love. “When I did the Life of Scrooge, I couldn’t tell that same sequence (when Goldie and Scrooge met in Barks’ storyline), because it was in Barks’ story,” Rosa explains. “I could do the before and after, but I never wanted to do a story where Scrooge and Goldie interacted; they would only see each other from a distance…Otherwise, the lost love scenario would never have any appeal.”

Eventually, “as much as I loved these characters, there was no other story that I could tell” about them without having them meet, Rosa says. But then the idea struck him: he could tell the story about the missing month at White Agony Creek—the story that had been omitted from Barks’ earlier comic—and why they love each other so much.

“So that’s the story (told in The Prisoner of White Agony Creek) that I just finished,” he says. “And I don’t have any other stories left in me that I feel compelled to tell right now.”

To read the Kentucky Living October 2005 feature that goes along with this supplement, click here: A Destiny Drawing Ducks