9 ms·

The Strange Story of Dagobert, the “DuckTales” Bandit

184 points by frb 5y ago

funkthenews 5y ago
Wow, great story!
ergot_vacation 5y ago
This stuff really was straight out of a cartoon: "Inside was a note ordering them to stuff two freezer bags with money and deposit them in a grit box—a kind of bin filled with sand for de-icing roads—in Britz, a section of Berlin...At 11:07 P.M., though no one had come to the box, the motion detector squealed. When the officers opened the box, they found a gaping hole that fell deep into the sewers below. Funke had built an exact replica of a city grit box and placed it over a manhole cover, then opened the cover to retrieve the package." Reading the article, I can't help thinking what a different era it's from. The guy extorted money from department stores with bombs for years, engaged in all kinds of Pink Panther shenanigans, and when he was finally caught he got 9 years, a work release, and the career in cartooning he'd always wanted. Nowadays in the US he'd probably be shot dead within a month, or barring that end up locked away for life. There's very little sense of proportionality left in the justice system these days for those who wrong the rich.
- andi999 5y ago
  The era is not different. Today probably he would also only get 9 years in Germany.
  - OakNinja 5y ago
    Same in Sweden.
  - froh 5y ago
    different approaches to resocialisation and reduction of crime rate? I don't fully understand the real goals of the US system. very recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27205726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27205726
    - bobthepanda 5y ago
      The real goals are to satisfy the belief systems of those who subscribe to “fire and brimstone”, where criminals are sinners who must be punished. It’s (sometimes) less religious in nature these days but the undercurrent has always been in the US since pre-colonial times.
      - josefx 5y ago
        It is closer to old testament style punishment in a country that pretends to be largely christian. Do they even know about that Jesus guy and the books written about him (new testament)? The amount of corruption, sheriffs getting to pocket the money for prison food, judges getting kickbacks for convictions, guaranteed prison quotas, exceptions from slavery laws, etc. don't help either.
        TeMPOraL 5y ago
        It's way past Old Testament, and closer to the scary stories Israelites were told about what their neighboring nations are doing. Laws given/described in Old Testament were harsh, but there was a sense of proportionality in them.
        paulryanrogers 5y ago
        Take care not to romanticize the Old Testament or its laws. Plenty of genocide and wives-of-jealous-husbands-must-drink-dusty-water misogyny in there. IME the excuses made for it and cherry picking from it have only reinforced bad habits. Stuff like appeal to authority, survivorship bias, and trusting intuition over data.
      - jquery 5y ago
        Penalties in Japan and China are often worse despite no tradition of fire and brimstone. Feels like you’re just taking your own personal biases and stretching them to explain complex phenomena.
        5y ago
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    But if he tried to pull the same tricks today, thanks to omnipresent CCTV he would be caught much faster. On the other hand, if he did the cash drops with Bitcoin instead, it would be much harder to catch him -- but there wouldn't be any Gyro Gearloose devices, so we'd never heard about it either.
    - arrrg 5y ago
      Surveillance cameras, especially overlooking public spaces, aren’t that common in Germany. Probably more common than they were thirty years ago but also not a constant presence. Any kind of private person or company cannot install cameras looking into public spaces at all (and yes, that includes Ring doorbells that can see the street or even just part of the sidewalk). While many of those illegal uses might fly under the radar the general ban of those uses also means that they are relatively rare and not something just anyone would do. Public institutions can install cameras seeing public spaces but they are limited by law (there needs to be a valid obvious reason for the camera to be there and the use needs to be proportionate), so blanket complete coverage of public spaces is just not happening (yeah, public institutions can probably find a bullshit excuse for any place but the culture these laws create mean that cameras are just used a lot less). Cameras in general are where you would expect them to be (e.g. around high profile government buildings), not in some random street somewhere.
      - tzekid 5y ago
        You need to visit Frankfurt. Here are CCTV cams all around public spaces and they installed even more cameras in the past two years or so...
    - st_goliath 5y ago
      > On the other hand, if he did the cash drops with Bitcoin instead, ... Actually, the most recent episode of "Aktenzeichen XY ... ungelöst"[0] (a German TV show that is basically the same as "Crimewatch" or "America's Most Wanted", but predating both of them) mentioned such a case [1]. Some guy in Berlin sent bombs via mail back in 2017/2018 and demanded a ransom paid in Bitcoin. They didn't explain the details, but apparently police did trace a transaction to that wallet back to some Bitcoin vending machine and got a nice picture from there. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktenzeichen_XY_…_ungelöst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktenzeichen_XY_…_ungelöst [1] https://wikixy.de/Sendung_vom_12.05.2021#Die_Studiof.C3.A4lle_der_Sendung https://wikixy.de/Sendung_vom_12.05.2021#Die_Studiof.C3.A4ll...
- why55 5y ago
  Here is one recent one who wasn't doing it for profit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_serial_bombings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_serial_bombings he wasn't killed by the police (directly) and he killed some people. The story of Dagobert wouldn't be as amusing if people died, but he did hurt people and caused psychological harm. Real people worked in those stores and other stores like them. The legal system has very little to do with justice, but I have no sympathy for someone placing explosives and hurting people, no matter the remorse.
  - crumpled 5y ago
    I respect your moral stance. It's hard to compare the serial bombings in your link to the Dagoberto ones. The Austin ones all seem to be attempted murders, not extortion of large companies. I suppose that could mean the Austin bomber should actually be more likely to be killed by police. But, another big difference is that the Austin bomber wasn't humiliating the police the way Dagobert was. Hard to speculate how it would go down, but I doubt the police would blast down a high profile suspect. The higher your profile, the more professional and high ranking your adversaries are going to be.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    That’s a violent murderer, not a good comparison. Colton Harris Moore may be a better analogue: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colton_Harris_Moore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colton_Harris_Moore
- marsven_422 5y ago
  No, if you bomb the White House you get to be the leader of BLM.
- st_goliath 5y ago
  > This stuff really was straight out of a cartoon: > ... > ...motion detector squealed. When the officers opened the box, they found a gaping hole... That line immediately had me thinking of the movie "Speed", but funny enough, this story actually pre-dates the movie by roughly 2 years. But it does make me wonder if they had the same source of inspiration.
  - jihadjihad 5y ago
    I was thinking of that exact sequence in Speed as I read the article. I guess instead of a frustrated artist, Dennis Hopper's character was a frustrated ex-cop, so it kind of fits.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
That's funny! In Dutch the character named Dagobert is the one named Scrooge in the English version.
- larusso 5y ago
  ? That is the same as in Germany.
  - stkdump 5y ago
    It says so in the sixth paragraph.
- mhd 5y ago
  Apparently in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland and Hungary. According to this neat map: https://mapologies.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/scrooge-01-3.png https://mapologies.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/scrooge-01-3....
  - rerx 5y ago
    Awesome, they included the Vatican with Latin.
    - mhd 5y ago
      There are latin Disney comics, just like Asterix. Probably more done for general educational purposes than for the Vatican market, but hey, you got to pin the name somewhere (and IIRC, for modern words in Latin the Vatican is often the official source) Incidentally, the article seems somewhat wrong in attributing the comics that inspired "Dagobert" to the US and Carl Barks. A lot, if not most of these, were Italian originals that got translated into German (pretty well, which at least the article gets right). One could even nitpick the "outselling superheroes", because Phantomias, Donald Duck's alter ego is a thing.
      - rerx 5y ago
gorgoiler 5y ago
> The state police eventually offered a hundred-thousand-mark reward for information that led to his capture. Astrologers and fortune tellers chimed in, and bored citizens called the phone lines with thousands of tips. Note to self: next time I’m on the run, post a bunch of fake reward notices so that the investigators get overwhelmed with noise.
underseacables 5y ago
I hope I’m not the only one that grinned a little bit reading that, sort of happy for the guy.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
"In fact, Funke did build a remote-controlled submarine that could whisk money packages away underwater, to scramble the signals from tracking devices, but he did not end up using it." He could have just sold that for money!
- galangalalgol 5y ago
  Yeah, all his plans took a lot of work, and that one is a serious amount of technology.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
endymi0n 5y ago
I had the pleasure of meeting him during a a rare inside seminar of the Berliner Unterwelten, where he did a tour of the train track used by his one rail battery car gadget for one of the failed attempts and had a beer with him afterward. He told lots of stories from his exploits which were truly brilliant and funny among others, a remote operated submarine and fake tunnel systems. Also from prison and even some of the social hacking he did in the upper circles inbetween (he was super famous and gave interviews to tabloids at day while still spending time in prison at night). Turns out he‘s a really nice and humble true nerd with a bad childhood and background. He‘s a cartoonist now, but eschews the limelight these days and his brain is pretty damaged from paint fumes when he worked as a car painter.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/6PfeI https://archive.is/6PfeI
kalonis 5y ago
This is his personal website with some of his caricatures: http://www.arnofunke.de/ http://www.arnofunke.de/
- Tarsul 5y ago
  huh, this site is blocked by our IT. Weird.
- FeepingCreature 5y ago
  Damn, he is actually really good.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
brazzy 5y ago
> The German translator of the comics made the Disney characters more complex: Dagobert speaks in grandiose language; his nephew Donald Duck often quotes the poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller. It's a shame they didn't mention the name of the translator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs - her creativity, together with the popularity of the comics has left a lasting impression on the German language. She basically invented a new grammatical form, named "Erikativ" in her honor.
- rerx 5y ago
  I love reading classic Carl Barks comics in Erika Fuchs's translations, but one should acknowledge that her very liberal variations did not always improve on the original text, but also resulted in some unnecessary obsfuscation. Still, her writing and editorial work made comics culturally acceptable in post-Nazi Germany and she really had an extreme impact on popular culture. Translations straying from the source material to make it more popular with German speaking audiences were very popular in dubbed movies and TV shows, too. I was kind of dismayed to learn that Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill aren't all that funny in the original Italian. This might be kind of interesting to non-German readers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_humour#Humorous_dubbing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_humour#Humorous_dubbing
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Translating humor often requires a license with the source material that isn’t present in adventure or technical translations - a perfect example would be Asterix and Obelix, where so many of the names are puns that have to be translated- do you preserve the literal meaning and lose the joke or do you preserve the joke and lose the literal meaning?
    - rerx 5y ago
      Sure, but Fuchs sometimes went to far. Nothing in the original should have triggered her to make Donald and Daisy cousins, who were dating after all. Relocating Duckburg, California, to Entenhausen, somewhere in Germany, also made things pretty awkward. I remember a picture of a map showing some kind of grand tour around towns spread over the entire continental USA. In Fuch's translation this turned into a few villages around some local hill in her neighborhood... You need to change quite a lot to cover up such a decision, but it will never be very convincing. :)
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
That was an awesome story! Fairly classic trope. I had never heard of him. The story reminds me a bit of the old Tim Hutton movie Turk 182.
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
How far the criminals have fallen. Nowadays, they just encrypt my disk and demand some bitcoins. Sigh.
duckfang 5y ago
Im honestly surprised that there aren't unemployed mech/elec/chem engineers out of a job, making and setting off bombs and demanding to be paid in cryptocurrency. We're already seeing a digital version of this terrorism with cryptolocking ransomware... And it's always been the most dangerous part of criminality is getting paid. cryptocurrency solves a lot of that problem.
pavel_lishin 5y ago
I always wonder about relationship dynamics in which a spouse can be completely unaware that their significant other is a wanted criminal actively committing crimes. Although, I guess by the time they were married, he wasn't actually making any money from his schemes.
lkramer 5y ago
Does the article only show the two first paragraphs for anyone else?
- wyattpeak 5y ago
  Yes, though it throws up a "sign up to read more" notice if I have JS turned on. You can read it here: https://archive.is/6PfeI https://archive.is/6PfeI
lqet 5y ago
> In Germany, Donald Duck comics are extremely popular, outselling even superheroes like Superman. I remember being shocked a few years ago when I learned that the hero of my childhood, and in my opinion one of the greatest comic book artist of all time (only surpassed by the master himself, Carl Barks, of course), is virtually unknown in the US: Don Rosa [0]. I read an interview once where he confessed that his neighbor doesn't know what he does. The death of Carl Barks also went largely unnoticed in the US, I think. In Germany, it was prime time national news. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Rosa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Rosa
- ebruchez 5y ago
  I recently bought the complete Don Rosa Library.[1] This is published in the US and it is really well done, with background information on all the works by Don Rosa himself. This is a good sign as it means that Don Rosa's works are not entirely neglected in the US. But of course (and unfortunately) this doesn't compete in popularity with many inferior comics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Don_Rosa_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Don_Rosa_Library
buescher 5y ago
That is somehow the most German thing I've read in a while. It's also really droll to see all these very typically German personalities given the high-middlebrow US magazine nonfiction "a thirty-two-year-old psychologist with blond hair and a steely demeanor" treatment.

184 points by frb 5y ago

Wow, great story!

This stuff really was straight out of a cartoon: "Inside was a note ordering them to stuff two freezer bags with money and deposit them in a grit box—a kind of bin filled with sand for de-icing roads—in Britz, a section of Berlin...At 11:07 P.M., though no one had come to the box, the motion detector squealed. When the officers opened the box, they found a gaping hole that fell deep into the sewers below. Funke had built an exact replica of a city grit box and placed it over a manhole cover, then opened the cover to retrieve the package." Reading the article, I can't help thinking what a different era it's from. The guy extorted money from department stores with bombs for years, engaged in all kinds of Pink Panther shenanigans, and when he was finally caught he got 9 years, a work release, and the career in cartooning he'd always wanted. Nowadays in the US he'd probably be shot dead within a month, or barring that end up locked away for life. There's very little sense of proportionality left in the justice system these days for those who wrong the rich.

andi999 5y ago
The era is not different. Today probably he would also only get 9 years in Germany.
- OakNinja 5y ago
  Same in Sweden.
- froh 5y ago
  different approaches to resocialisation and reduction of crime rate? I don't fully understand the real goals of the US system. very recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27205726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27205726
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    The real goals are to satisfy the belief systems of those who subscribe to “fire and brimstone”, where criminals are sinners who must be punished. It’s (sometimes) less religious in nature these days but the undercurrent has always been in the US since pre-colonial times.
    - josefx 5y ago
      It is closer to old testament style punishment in a country that pretends to be largely christian. Do they even know about that Jesus guy and the books written about him (new testament)? The amount of corruption, sheriffs getting to pocket the money for prison food, judges getting kickbacks for convictions, guaranteed prison quotas, exceptions from slavery laws, etc. don't help either.
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        It's way past Old Testament, and closer to the scary stories Israelites were told about what their neighboring nations are doing. Laws given/described in Old Testament were harsh, but there was a sense of proportionality in them.
        paulryanrogers 5y ago
        Take care not to romanticize the Old Testament or its laws. Plenty of genocide and wives-of-jealous-husbands-must-drink-dusty-water misogyny in there. IME the excuses made for it and cherry picking from it have only reinforced bad habits. Stuff like appeal to authority, survivorship bias, and trusting intuition over data.
    - jquery 5y ago
      Penalties in Japan and China are often worse despite no tradition of fire and brimstone. Feels like you’re just taking your own personal biases and stretching them to explain complex phenomena.
      - 5y ago
- Clewza313 5y ago
  But if he tried to pull the same tricks today, thanks to omnipresent CCTV he would be caught much faster. On the other hand, if he did the cash drops with Bitcoin instead, it would be much harder to catch him -- but there wouldn't be any Gyro Gearloose devices, so we'd never heard about it either.
  - arrrg 5y ago
    Surveillance cameras, especially overlooking public spaces, aren’t that common in Germany. Probably more common than they were thirty years ago but also not a constant presence. Any kind of private person or company cannot install cameras looking into public spaces at all (and yes, that includes Ring doorbells that can see the street or even just part of the sidewalk). While many of those illegal uses might fly under the radar the general ban of those uses also means that they are relatively rare and not something just anyone would do. Public institutions can install cameras seeing public spaces but they are limited by law (there needs to be a valid obvious reason for the camera to be there and the use needs to be proportionate), so blanket complete coverage of public spaces is just not happening (yeah, public institutions can probably find a bullshit excuse for any place but the culture these laws create mean that cameras are just used a lot less). Cameras in general are where you would expect them to be (e.g. around high profile government buildings), not in some random street somewhere.
    - tzekid 5y ago
      You need to visit Frankfurt. Here are CCTV cams all around public spaces and they installed even more cameras in the past two years or so...
  - st_goliath 5y ago
    > On the other hand, if he did the cash drops with Bitcoin instead, ... Actually, the most recent episode of "Aktenzeichen XY ... ungelöst"[0] (a German TV show that is basically the same as "Crimewatch" or "America's Most Wanted", but predating both of them) mentioned such a case [1]. Some guy in Berlin sent bombs via mail back in 2017/2018 and demanded a ransom paid in Bitcoin. They didn't explain the details, but apparently police did trace a transaction to that wallet back to some Bitcoin vending machine and got a nice picture from there. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktenzeichen_XY_…_ungelöst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktenzeichen_XY_…_ungelöst [1] https://wikixy.de/Sendung_vom_12.05.2021#Die_Studiof.C3.A4lle_der_Sendung https://wikixy.de/Sendung_vom_12.05.2021#Die_Studiof.C3.A4ll...
why55 5y ago
Here is one recent one who wasn't doing it for profit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_serial_bombings https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin_serial_bombings he wasn't killed by the police (directly) and he killed some people. The story of Dagobert wouldn't be as amusing if people died, but he did hurt people and caused psychological harm. Real people worked in those stores and other stores like them. The legal system has very little to do with justice, but I have no sympathy for someone placing explosives and hurting people, no matter the remorse.
- crumpled 5y ago
  I respect your moral stance. It's hard to compare the serial bombings in your link to the Dagoberto ones. The Austin ones all seem to be attempted murders, not extortion of large companies. I suppose that could mean the Austin bomber should actually be more likely to be killed by police. But, another big difference is that the Austin bomber wasn't humiliating the police the way Dagobert was. Hard to speculate how it would go down, but I doubt the police would blast down a high profile suspect. The higher your profile, the more professional and high ranking your adversaries are going to be.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  That’s a violent murderer, not a good comparison. Colton Harris Moore may be a better analogue: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colton_Harris_Moore https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colton_Harris_Moore
marsven_422 5y ago
No, if you bomb the White House you get to be the leader of BLM.
st_goliath 5y ago
> This stuff really was straight out of a cartoon: > ... > ...motion detector squealed. When the officers opened the box, they found a gaping hole... That line immediately had me thinking of the movie "Speed", but funny enough, this story actually pre-dates the movie by roughly 2 years. But it does make me wonder if they had the same source of inspiration.
- jihadjihad 5y ago
  I was thinking of that exact sequence in Speed as I read the article. I guess instead of a frustrated artist, Dennis Hopper's character was a frustrated ex-cop, so it kind of fits.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

That's funny! In Dutch the character named Dagobert is the one named Scrooge in the English version.

larusso 5y ago
? That is the same as in Germany.
- stkdump 5y ago
  It says so in the sixth paragraph.
mhd 5y ago
Apparently in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland and Hungary. According to this neat map: https://mapologies.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/scrooge-01-3.png https://mapologies.files.wordpress.com/2021/03/scrooge-01-3....
- rerx 5y ago
  Awesome, they included the Vatican with Latin.
  - mhd 5y ago
    There are latin Disney comics, just like Asterix. Probably more done for general educational purposes than for the Vatican market, but hey, you got to pin the name somewhere (and IIRC, for modern words in Latin the Vatican is often the official source) Incidentally, the article seems somewhat wrong in attributing the comics that inspired "Dagobert" to the US and Carl Barks. A lot, if not most of these, were Italian originals that got translated into German (pretty well, which at least the article gets right). One could even nitpick the "outselling superheroes", because Phantomias, Donald Duck's alter ego is a thing.
    - rerx 5y ago

gorgoiler 5y ago

> The state police eventually offered a hundred-thousand-mark reward for information that led to his capture. Astrologers and fortune tellers chimed in, and bored citizens called the phone lines with thousands of tips. Note to self: next time I’m on the run, post a bunch of fake reward notices so that the investigators get overwhelmed with noise.

underseacables 5y ago

I hope I’m not the only one that grinned a little bit reading that, sort of happy for the guy.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

"In fact, Funke did build a remote-controlled submarine that could whisk money packages away underwater, to scramble the signals from tracking devices, but he did not end up using it." He could have just sold that for money!

galangalalgol 5y ago
Yeah, all his plans took a lot of work, and that one is a serious amount of technology.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

endymi0n 5y ago

I had the pleasure of meeting him during a a rare inside seminar of the Berliner Unterwelten, where he did a tour of the train track used by his one rail battery car gadget for one of the failed attempts and had a beer with him afterward. He told lots of stories from his exploits which were truly brilliant and funny among others, a remote operated submarine and fake tunnel systems. Also from prison and even some of the social hacking he did in the upper circles inbetween (he was super famous and gave interviews to tabloids at day while still spending time in prison at night). Turns out he‘s a really nice and humble true nerd with a bad childhood and background. He‘s a cartoonist now, but eschews the limelight these days and his brain is pretty damaged from paint fumes when he worked as a car painter.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/6PfeI https://archive.is/6PfeI

kalonis 5y ago

This is his personal website with some of his caricatures: http://www.arnofunke.de/ http://www.arnofunke.de/

Tarsul 5y ago
huh, this site is blocked by our IT. Weird.
FeepingCreature 5y ago
Damn, he is actually really good.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

brazzy 5y ago

> The German translator of the comics made the Disney characters more complex: Dagobert speaks in grandiose language; his nephew Donald Duck often quotes the poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller. It's a shame they didn't mention the name of the translator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Fuchs - her creativity, together with the popularity of the comics has left a lasting impression on the German language. She basically invented a new grammatical form, named "Erikativ" in her honor.

rerx 5y ago
I love reading classic Carl Barks comics in Erika Fuchs's translations, but one should acknowledge that her very liberal variations did not always improve on the original text, but also resulted in some unnecessary obsfuscation. Still, her writing and editorial work made comics culturally acceptable in post-Nazi Germany and she really had an extreme impact on popular culture. Translations straying from the source material to make it more popular with German speaking audiences were very popular in dubbed movies and TV shows, too. I was kind of dismayed to learn that Bud Spencer and Terrence Hill aren't all that funny in the original Italian. This might be kind of interesting to non-German readers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_humour#Humorous_dubbing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_humour#Humorous_dubbing
- bombcar 5y ago
  Translating humor often requires a license with the source material that isn’t present in adventure or technical translations - a perfect example would be Asterix and Obelix, where so many of the names are puns that have to be translated- do you preserve the literal meaning and lose the joke or do you preserve the joke and lose the literal meaning?
  - rerx 5y ago
    Sure, but Fuchs sometimes went to far. Nothing in the original should have triggered her to make Donald and Daisy cousins, who were dating after all. Relocating Duckburg, California, to Entenhausen, somewhere in Germany, also made things pretty awkward. I remember a picture of a map showing some kind of grand tour around towns spread over the entire continental USA. In Fuch's translation this turned into a few villages around some local hill in her neighborhood... You need to change quite a lot to cover up such a decision, but it will never be very convincing. :)

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

That was an awesome story! Fairly classic trope. I had never heard of him. The story reminds me a bit of the old Tim Hutton movie Turk 182.

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

How far the criminals have fallen. Nowadays, they just encrypt my disk and demand some bitcoins. Sigh.

duckfang 5y ago

Im honestly surprised that there aren't unemployed mech/elec/chem engineers out of a job, making and setting off bombs and demanding to be paid in cryptocurrency. We're already seeing a digital version of this terrorism with cryptolocking ransomware... And it's always been the most dangerous part of criminality is getting paid. cryptocurrency solves a lot of that problem.

pavel_lishin 5y ago

I always wonder about relationship dynamics in which a spouse can be completely unaware that their significant other is a wanted criminal actively committing crimes. Although, I guess by the time they were married, he wasn't actually making any money from his schemes.

lkramer 5y ago

Does the article only show the two first paragraphs for anyone else?

wyattpeak 5y ago
Yes, though it throws up a "sign up to read more" notice if I have JS turned on. You can read it here: https://archive.is/6PfeI https://archive.is/6PfeI

lqet 5y ago

> In Germany, Donald Duck comics are extremely popular, outselling even superheroes like Superman. I remember being shocked a few years ago when I learned that the hero of my childhood, and in my opinion one of the greatest comic book artist of all time (only surpassed by the master himself, Carl Barks, of course), is virtually unknown in the US: Don Rosa [0]. I read an interview once where he confessed that his neighbor doesn't know what he does. The death of Carl Barks also went largely unnoticed in the US, I think. In Germany, it was prime time national news. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Rosa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Rosa

ebruchez 5y ago
I recently bought the complete Don Rosa Library.[1] This is published in the US and it is really well done, with background information on all the works by Don Rosa himself. This is a good sign as it means that Don Rosa's works are not entirely neglected in the US. But of course (and unfortunately) this doesn't compete in popularity with many inferior comics. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Don_Rosa_Library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Don_Rosa_Library

buescher 5y ago

That is somehow the most German thing I've read in a while. It's also really droll to see all these very typically German personalities given the high-middlebrow US magazine nonfiction "a thirty-two-year-old psychologist with blond hair and a steely demeanor" treatment.