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