VOICES
How on Earth can it be possible to
determine what the ducks' voices sound like from
reading a Barks story??? The only authentic duck
voices we do know come from the numerous animated
shorts in which f.i. Donald's voice is reduced to
being an undetermined squaking that mostly sounds
like gibberish.
But that cannot be the case in Barks' duck
universe! In the cartoons Donald's dialogue was
rarely significant, but in the comic book stories
it is essential to the plots, because we get most
of our information from the spoken words.
Therefore the ducks have to be speaking in clear
and understandable sentences.
Numerous times we have witnessed
Scrooge speak in foreign tongues and Donald and
the nephews singing Christmas carols, and in both
instances they have been understood without any
difficulty.
Barks did hint a few times that
Scrooge has a Scottish accent, but in one of his
last stories, U$71 King Scrooge the First
(manuscript and sketches only, art by Tony Strobl),
we finally get a genuine statement from Barks'
pen:
A fortuneteller hears Scrooge talking, and then
he ponders: That voice! I've heard it before!
The exact inflection! The unmistakable whirr of
vowels grinding the edges off consonants!
Well, there you are...
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