In Europe, Rosa is recognized as one of the best Disney comics creators. Carl Barks and Rosa are some of the few artists who have their name written on the covers of Disney magazines when their stories are published. His stories are very easily recognized due to his unique drawing style, his pictures being extremely detailed. Rosa enjoys including subtle references to his favorite works of fiction as well as his own previous work. He normally uses about 12 frames per page, instead of the more common 8. He needs to use the extra frames because his stories usually are too long to be published if he does not minimize them.
Rosa has an especially large following in Finland, and in 1999, he created a special 32-page Donald, Scrooge, Gearloose & nephews strip for his Finnish fans;
Sammon Salaisuus (translates to
The secret of the Sampo, but it is officially named
The Quest for Kalevala Scoop - Where the Magic of Collecting Comes Alive! - Don Rosa and The Quest for Kalevala in English), 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.
Drawing style
With a bachelor of arts degree in civil engineering as his only real drawing education, Rosa has some unusual drawing methods, as he writes himself:
"I suspect 'nothing
I do is done the way anyone else does it." Because of being self-taught in making comics, Rosa relies mostly on the skills he learned in engineering school...which means using technical pens and templates a lot. He applies templates and other engineering tools to draw curves, circles and ovals. He usually drew just under a page per day, but that depended on the amount of detail he puts in the picture.Rosa's drawing style is considered much more detailed and "dirtier" than that of most other Disney artists, living or dead, and often likened to that of underground artists, and he is frequently compared to Robert Crumb. When Rosa was first told of this similarity, he said that he "drew that bad" long before he discovered underground comics during college. He went on to explain these similarities to underground artists with a similar background of making comics as a hobby:
- "I think that both my style and that of Robert Crumb are similar only because we both grew up making comics for our personal enjoyment, without ever taking drawing seriously, and without ever trying to attain a style that would please the average comics publisher. We drew comics for fun!"
Carl Barks
Rosa's idol when it comes to comics is Carl Barks. Rosa builds almost all his stories on characters and locations that Barks invented. Many of Rosa's stories contain references to some fact pointed out in a Barks story. At the request of publishers in response to reader demands, Rosa has even created sequels of old Barks stories. For example, his
Return To Xanadu is a sequel to
Tralla La, where the Ducks return to the same hidden country. To add more to his admiration and consistency to Barks and Barks' stories, Rosa makes all his ducks' stories set in the '50s. This is because Barks writes most of the stories about Scrooge, Donald and all people of Duckburg in the '50s (it also conveniently resolves potential continuity problems, such as Scrooge's age). As explained in text pages in the
Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck and its companion volume, Rosa does intense research of time periods to ensure not only that he gets the physical details right, but also to ensure that all characters could have been present.
Barks either created most of the characters used by Rosa or is credited for greatly developing their personalities. Rosa thus feels obliged to make his stories factually consistent. He has spent a lot of time in making lists of facts and anecdotes pointed out in different stories by his mentor. Especially
The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck was based mostly on the earlier works of Barks. Rosa admitted however that a scene of the first chapter was inspired by a story by Tony Strobl.
As most of the characters Rosa uses were created by Barks, and because Rosa considers Scrooge rather than Donald to be the main character of the Duck universe, he does not regard himself as a pure Disney artist, nor the characters really as Disney's. “Rosa prefers to say that the characters he uses are Barks’, Barks having reshaped Donald Duck’s personality and creating everything else we know of Duckburg while working as a freelancer in 1942—1967 for an independent licensed publisher (Dell/Western Comics). Barks even claimed to have also created Huey, Dewey and Louie while working as a writer on Donald Duck animated cartoons in 1937.” Because of his idolization of Barks, he repeatedly discourages his fans to use an absolutist way of saying his clearly different drawing style would be better than Barks's, and he found that notion confirmed when Barks himself spoke about Rosa's style in a critical tone though it is uncertain whether those comments were Barks' or those of his temporary "business managers" who filtered his communications.
Beside Rosa's constant effort to remain faithful to the universe Barks created, there is also a number of notable differences between the two artists. The most obvious of these is Rosa's much more detailed drawing style, often with many background gags, which has been credited as being a result of Rosa's love of the Will Elder stories of MAD comics and magazines.While Barks himself discouraged the use of extreme grimacing and gesturing in any other panel for comical or dramatic effect, Rosa's stories are rich with colorful and bizarre facial renditions and physical slapstick. Barks had over 600 Duck stories to his name while Rosa only created 85 until his eye trouble set in, but whereas Barks made many short one and two-pagers centered around a subtle, compact gag, Rosa's oeuvre consists almost exclusively of long adventure stories.
D.U.C.K.
Most Rosa stories have the letters
D.U.C.K. hidden in the first panel. Rosa's covers also usually have
D.U.C.K. in them. This is an acronym for
Dedicated to Unca Carl from Keno. Because Disney would not allow for personal signatures in the comics, and thought that D.U.C.K. looked too much like one, Don Rosa has made a habit of hiding the letters in various unlikely places. Many of his readers have made a sport out of finding them. D.U.C.K.' is in most cases hidden in the very first image, on the first page of the story.
D.U.C.K. is also often hidden in Rosa's cover-art, which he makes for his own stories and reprints of old Carl Barks stories.Almost every time Rosa gets an article about him in the weekly Disney comics (at least in European editions), the D.U.C.K. - dedication is mentioned.
Mickeys
Another curiosity is his Hidden Mickeys. Rosa is only interested in creating stories featuring the Duck family, but he often hides small Mickey Mouse heads or figures in the pictures, sometimes in a humiliating or unwanted situation. An example of this is in the story
The Terror of the Transvaal where a flat Mickey can be seen under an elephant's foot. This is mostly a gag done for the fun of it. Rosa has admitted to neither liking nor disliking Mickey Mouse, but being indifferent to him.
In the story
Attack of the Hideous Space-Varmints, the asteroid with Uncle Scrooge's money bin on it crashes into the Moon along with two missiles, creating a large Mickey Mouse head on the surface. When Huey, Dewey and Louie tell Donald that the missiles hit the "dark" (far) side of the Moon, Donald is thankful no one is going to see it - "For a minute there, I thought we were going to have some legal problems."
In the second Rosa story featuring The Three Caballeros, Donald Duck is shocked by the sight of a capybara standing on its hind legs, with shrubs, leaves and fruit in front of its body, coincidentally making it look like Mickey Mouse. José Carioca and Panchito Pistoles, never having seen Mickey Mouse, ask Donald what is wrong, but Donald replies he is just tired. Later in the same story the Caballeros free several animals from a poacher and one panel shows the animals flee. Mickey can be seen among them.
In
The Quest for Kalevala this running gag can be seen on the original, Akseli Gallen-Kallela -inspired cover art. In the original work, Louhi is depicted as bare-chested, but the Disneyfied version has been drawn a top, of fabric patterned with Mickey Mouse heads.