A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about an Uncle Scrooge story called "Cajun Gold", which I'd just finished writing, and which I was particularly pleased with. I mentioned that it went longer between gestation and final realization than any story of mine ever had before. Since then, I've recalled that almost wasn't true. The only thing that stopped "H.M.S. Pinfeather" from setting that record was that it never was quite finally realized. In the unlikely event it ever is, it'll more than double that record. The first glimmerings of that story were in 1973 — more than half my life ago.

Like "Cajun Gold", it's a Scrooge story. But I can't propose it to Egmont, where I've been proposing and then writing Disney stories for years, because Egmont translates its stories into more than two dozen languages before publishing them, and "H.M.S. Pinfeather" is really only worth publishing in English. Before Gemstone picked up the Disney license and started reprinting them, the only place Egmont stories got published in English during this century was India.

The basic idea was to parody what is possibly the most-parodied opera in history, Gilbert & Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore, as an office romance between members of Scrooge's accounting staff. It started when I was walking down the street one day, and a Scrooge version of "When I Was a Lad", the song where Sir Joseph explains how he rose to become head of the Royal Admiralty (or as he put it, "Ruler of the Queen's Navy"), began to form in my mind. I wrote the first verse shortly after arriving home:

When I was a lad, I spent my time
Shining miners' shoes for only one thin dime!
I cleaned the heel, and I scrubbed the toe,
And I scraped off all the mud that had encrusted so!

I scraped off so much dirt and muck
That now I am the universe's richest duck!

The second verse (a week or two later, as I recall) was about scouring the ground for firewood, to sell at monstrous prices when the rich dudes were cold. ("It cost so much when they were stuck that now I am the universe's richest duck!")

Needless to say, you need you won't "get it" unless you're good with inside references to both Scrooge and Pinafore. Which is why I held out little hope for eventually seeing it in print. But lo and behold, I managed to talk the guys at Gladstone, where I was writing dialog for European stories and which very seldom commissioned an original one, into letting me have 16 pages for it. Of course, this meant scuttling plans to cast Gladstone Gander in the Dick Deadeye role, because it was already a very crowded 16 pages even without that complication. But what the heck, you can't have everything.

That was in the mid-1990s, almost a quarter-century after the first glimmerings of it were set to paper. I got as far as plotting it and scripting up to the middle of Page 6, when word came down that Gladstone's fortunes had sunk to the point where, even if I were to finish writing it, they wouldn't be able to hire anyone to draw it. A couple of years later, Gladstone let its Disney license lapse, and it was more years before anyone picked it up again.

Every so often, I make a half-hearted attempt to interest the guys at Gemstone (where, again, I write dialog for European reprints). So far, not a nibble. But if it ever does see print, it'll easily oust "Cajun Gold" for the time-on-hold record.

— DDM