HOW GRANDMA DUCK GOT THE FARM
Somewhere else in this column you can read an introduction about an album length story originally meant to be an epic about Grandma Duck winning the piece of land, where her farm was built. However this story did not come to be made with the Disney characters, but instead it now exists as an album in my Gnuff series.
Fate made it happen, though, that I did get involved once more in an attempt to tell that exciting piece of duck history. This time around it was a closely knit short story executed together with Gorm Transgaard.
The fate of my cooperation with the talented Gorm Transgaard can be read elsewhere in this column. But after the collapse of our first attempt we did get a chance to make some other Disney comics together. Some years later Gorm had accumulated a number of rejects from Egmont. Those ideas were in the form of scribbles that he had not been able to sell to them. Each of then had an element that was a bit too far out for the middle of the road Egmont story ambition. But mind you, those plots rank among the best he has accomplished, and I managed to sell them to my Dutch publishing office with me doing the artwork. In this process I then respected his layout as much as I could so they are presented much like he wanted them to be. This is not the case with most of Gorm’s other scribbles, where his clear layouts are mostly spoiled by fancy slick Barcelona hack artists having little feeling for a clarity in presentation.
Among these scribbles was a short story telling about Grandma Duck acquiring her farm estate. This was explained in a different way than the one I had originally in mind for my album length version. But my nostalgic feeling was aroused just the same so I set to work at it.
And finally we did succeed in selling a version of Grandmas past to the Dutch division of Disney Publications, Oberon in Holland, which had by then turned to become a division of the Finnish Sanoma Group.
Only they did not have the guts to establish our tale to be the canonized version of the famous Grandma Duck Farm origin story either. In the end those cowards changed the name of the leading character to be a mere relative of Grandma Duck. But in the version you read here things are as they were intended to be. So pay attention. Duck history is in the making in the following pages!