Don Rosa immigrated to Kentucky, the United States, around 1900, established a successful tile and terrazzo company, then returned to Italy to marry and start a family.
61 Facts About Don Rosa
2.
Ugo Don Rosa grew up and was later married in Kentucky.
3.
Don Rosa's wife was born to a German-American father and a mother with both Scottish and Irish ancestry.
4.
Don Rosa was born Keno Don Hugo Rosa on June 29,1951 in Louisville, Kentucky.
5.
Don Rosa was named after both his father and grandfather.
6.
Don's father was named Ugo Dante Rosa but used the name "Hugo Don" Rosa in America.
7.
At age 12, Don Rosa discovered the Superman titles of DC Comics, with particular attention to editor Mort Weisinger's period, drawn mostly by Superman artists Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger.
8.
Shortly after Don Rosa started to collect Superman comics, he began to trade in the comics he had inherited from his older sister for old Superman comics.
9.
Don Rosa graduated in 1973 with a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering.
10.
In 1969, while still in college, Don Rosa won an award as "best political cartoonist in the nation in a college paper".
11.
Don Rosa's first published comic was a comic strip featuring his own character, Lancelot Pertwillaby, titled The Pertwillaby Papers.
12.
Don Rosa created the strip in 1971 for The Kentucky Kernel, a college newspaper of the University of Kentucky, which wanted the strip to focus on political satire.
13.
Don Rosa later switched the strip to comedy-adventure, his favorite style of comics, and drew the story Lost in the Andes.
14.
Meanwhile, Don Rosa participated in contributing art and articles to comic collector fanzines.
15.
Don Rosa authored and illustrated the monthly Information Center column in the fanzine Rocket's Blast Comicollector from 1974 to 1979.
16.
Don Rosa revived the Pertwillaby Papers in this "RBCC" fanzine as a comic book style story rather than a newspaper comic strip from 1976 to 1978.
17.
Don Rosa accepted an offer from the editor of the local newspaper to create a weekly comic strip.
18.
Don Rosa retired from cartooning and did not draw a single line for the next four years.
19.
Since early childhood Don Rosa had been fascinated by Carl Barks' stories about Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck.
20.
Don Rosa 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.
21.
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.
22.
Don Rosa created a few more comics for Gladstone until 1989.
23.
Don Rosa 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.
24.
In 1991 Don Rosa started creating The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, a 12 chapter story about his favorite character.
25.
From 1999, Don Rosa started working freelance for Picsou magazine as well.
26.
Don 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.
27.
Don 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.
28.
Don Rosa, who had poor eyesight since childhood, experienced a severe retinal detachment in March 2008, which required emergency eye surgery.
29.
However, the surgery was only partially successful, and Don Rosa had to undergo further surgery in both eyes, making drawing even more challenging.
30.
Don Rosa is more popular with readers in Europe than in his native United States.
31.
Don Rosa describes himself as an introvert due to being socially isolated as a child.
32.
Don Rosa suffered from depression during the years before he quit.
33.
Don Rosa 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.
34.
Don 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.
35.
Don Rosa grows exotic chili plants and tends nearly 30 acres of a private nature preserve with wildflower fields and numerous forest trails.
36.
Don Rosa is working to complete his collections of all American comic books published between 1945 and 1970.
37.
In Europe, Don Rosa is recognized as one of the best Disney comics creators.
38.
Carl Barks and Don Rosa are among the few artists who have their name written on the covers of Disney magazines when their stories are published.
39.
Don Rosa enjoys including subtle references to his movies and comic as well as his own previous work.
40.
Don Rosa normally uses about twelve panels per page, instead of the more common eight.
41.
Don 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.
42.
The latest work that Don 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 Don Rosa's comics.
43.
Don Rosa applies templates and other engineering tools to draw what other artists draw freehand.
44.
Don Rosa usually drew just under a page per day, but that depended on the amount of detail he puts in the picture.
45.
Don Rosa's drawing style is considered much more detailed and "dirtier" than that of most Disney artists, living or dead, and often likened to that of underground artists, and he is frequently compared to Robert Crumb.
46.
When Don Rosa was first told of this similarity, he said that he "drew that bad" long before he discovered underground comics during college.
47.
Don Rosa went on to explain these similarities to underground artists with a similar background of making comics as a hobby:.
48.
Many of Don Rosa's stories contain references to some fact pointed out in a Barks story.
49.
At the request of publishers in response to reader demands, Don Rosa has even created sequels of old Barks stories.
50.
Barks either created most of the characters used by Don Rosa or is credited for greatly developing their personalities.
51.
Don Rosa thus feels obliged to make his stories factually consistent.
52.
Don Rosa has spent a lot of time in making lists of facts and anecdotes pointed out in different stories by his mentor.
53.
Don Rosa admitted however that a scene of the first chapter was inspired by a story by Tony Strobl.
54.
Beside Don Rosa's constant effort to remain faithful to the universe Barks created, there is a number of notable differences between the two artists.
55.
Barks had over 600 Duck stories to his name while Don 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, Don Rosa's oeuvre consists almost exclusively of long adventure stories.
56.
Later Don Rosa began hiding the dedication acronym from his editors in various and unlikely places within his drawings.
57.
Don 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.
58.
Don Rosa has admitted to neither liking nor disliking Mickey Mouse, but being indifferent to him.
59.
Don Rosa's work has won Rosa a great deal of recognition in the industry, including nominations for the Comics' Buyer's Guide Award for Favorite Writer in 1997,1998, and 1999.
60.
In 1995, Don Rosa was awarded the Eisner Award for Best Serialized Story for The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck.
61.
In 2009, Danish director Sebastian S Cordes shot a 75-minute documentary called The Life and Times of Don Rosa, consisting of exclusive interviews with Rosa himself on his farm near Louisville, Kentucky.