Somewhere in Nowhere

"Somewhere in Nowhere" is a Donald Duck comic book story that was commissioned by the Carl Barks Studio and that I scripted (in 1996) loosely based on a short synopsis by Disney comics legend Carl Barks.

Intended to be a 10-pager, the plot went through numerous revisions because of plot and gag suggestions from Carl as well as a member of the Barks Studio and Daan Jippes (the artist originally scheduled to draw the story.)

And, yes - to make everything fit together - I added a bunch of material too.

The result was a plot - about Donald delivering mail in Alaska via dogsled - that would've been far too long for a traditional Disney story. After massive cutting and revising, I got it down to a story that ended up taking 28 pages - with a cliffhanger at the end of Page 14 and a splash panel at the top of Page 15 in case the publisher wanted to run it as a two-part serialized story.

Frankly, I think the story would have been much better if we'd kept to Carl's original synopsis for a 10-page story.

In my opinion, the 28-page version (published by Gemstone on Nov. 2, 2005 in its WALT DISNEY PRESENTS DONALD DUCK AND UNCLE SCROOGE) is beautifully drawn by Pat Block and I hope readers like it. Re-reading it now, though, I think it's too heavy on plot. Even at 28 pages, there's too much story squeezed into too few pages. Quite simply, I cut too many corners to fit everything in and so the pacing is a bit off.

At the other extreme, I really like the much longer version of the plot.

Would this longer version have really been better? Judge for yourself. Read the original, long version of the synopsis*. One final note: When I wrote this plot up, I was obviously slightly deranged, because I actually mention the possibility that we could fit it all into a relatively modest 16-24 pages! Oh, brother!

To do it right, the story probably would've taken 50-60 pages - or more!

John Lustig, Nov. 4, 2005