THE BROTHERHOOD OF MISFORTUNE

This story was the first of the episodes Gorm Transgaard and I made together for the Dutch duck office. We had an idea of making a number of stories where we focused on special important features of the different ducks, thus expanding my earlier venture with Daan Jippes, where we pondered upon the laziness of Gus Goose developing into a crimestory and the Knitting Club ambitions of Daisy Duck turning into pure melodrama. Gorm and I later made a story focusing on Uncle Scrooge’s personality of building a fortune from scratch and one about Grandma acquiring her farm.
We started out with Gladstone Gander, and for a story focusing on him the motive came natural. It had to be on luck. So Gorm went into analyzing the very nature of luck and Donald would form a natural counterpart in displaying the aspects and consequence of this special ability, to manage luck. Therefore it also came to be a story about the opposite, namely Donald’s total inabilities to handle luck. Some have it, others don’t. That’s the conditions of life. It came to become quite philosophical, at least as far as the entertainment purpose allowed us to be.
To no one’s surprise ‘The brotherhood of Misfortune’ ended up being an episode of no less than 13 pages, making it the longest of our stories, which normally was built around the effective 10 page tradition inherited from Carl Barks.
When the story was completed the publishing office decided to build an issue of the weekly magazine around that leading story, so it came to be an in issue centered on the theme of luck. It was scheduled as issue 13 from 1996. Daan came up with an appropriate cover for that magazine.
Inspired I believe from Franquin there was a little side story on luck appearing in the bottom corner of the pages.