Magida De Spell, personalized sketch by Don Rosa

This one came as a total surprise, and it almost gave me a heart attack when I saw it.

A Keno Don Rosa original, personalized with one of my favourite Disney duck characters and dedicated for me.

Gifted to me by my dear friend , this is a huge deal. As some of you know, I grew up reading Donald Duck comics written and illustrated by the great Carl Barks. As much as I enjoyed watching DuckTales on Disney Afternoon, it never got anywhere near the level of awesomeness that the original Barks ones did. Later on, I was also on a healthy diet of Italian Paperino stories, and while they were really very entertaining (they gave us Paperinik a.k.a. Duck Avenger and were illustrated by the likes of Romano Scarpa), they too failed to capture the scale of a typical Barks adventure. The only person who ever got close (and, in some cases, in some ways, exceeded Barks) is Don Rosa, who himself is probably the biggest Carl Barks fan on the planet.

A few years ago, I heard the news of Don Rosa's retirement from drawing Disney ducks, due to disagreements with the corportation as well as having health problems that made it difficult for him to do his job. While I was genuinely saddened of it all, and felt sympathy for the great man, there was also that selfish part of me who figured that I'd probably never get the chance to see any new art from him. I honestly had no clue that he was still touring cons, and that I would've probably gotten some of my Don Rosa albums signed. Then again, they don't organize that many cons where I live and the few that do happen and are reachable (usually after a 150 km drive) tend to have outrageous ticket/weekend pass prices.

However, those unsigned albums and unattended cons do not really matter anymore. This is something far greater.

I always did love the way Don Rosa drew Magica with a slight cleavage... and , that brilliant bastard, had the balls to ask the Maestro to "make it a little bit sexy".

And he did.

I have no idea how I'm ever going to top this one...