Don Rosa

He immigrated to Kentucky, the United States, around 1900, established a successful tile and terrazzo company, then returned to Italy to marry and start a family.

In 1915 just after the birth of his son Ugo Rosa, Gioachino returned to Kentucky with his wife, two daughters and two sons.

Ugo Rosa grew up and was later married in Kentucky.

His wife was born to a German-American father and a mother with both Scottish and Irish ancestry.

(The title is a reference to Lost in the Andes!, a Donald Duck story by Carl Barks, first published in April 1949.) The so-called Pertwillaby Papers included 127 published episodes by the time Rosa graduated in 1973.

Meanwhile, Rosa participated in contributing art and articles to comic collector fanzines.

One contribution was An Index of Uncle Scrooge Comics.

According to his introduction: "Scrooge being my favorite character in comic history and Barks my favorite pure cartoonist, I'll try not to get carried away too much."

After attaining his bachelor's degree, Rosa continued to draw comics purely as a hobby, his only income came from working in the Keno Rosa Tile and Terrazzo Company, a company founded by his paternal grandfather.

Later when Rosa became a serious collector of all comics of the post-war years, he particularly enjoyed and collected the classic E.C. Comics of the horror and science fiction genres published in the early 1950s, Will Eisner's The Spirit, Walt Kelly's Pogo, and virtually all other comics from 1945 and onward.

Keno Don Hugo Rosa, known as Don Rosa (born June 29, 1951), is an American comic book writer and illustrator known for his Disney comics stories about Scrooge McDuck, Donald Duck, and other characters which Carl Barks created for Disney-licensed comic books, first published in America by Dell Comics.

Don Rosa was born Keno Don Hugo Rosa on June 29, 1951, in Louisville, Kentucky.

He was named after both his father and grandfather.

Gioachino was called "Keno" for short.

Don's father was named Ugo Dante Rosa but used the name "Hugo Don" Rosa in America.

Rosa's older sister, Deanna, was an avid collector of comics and exposed Don to comics as a storytelling medium at a very early age, teaching him to “read the pictures.”

Rosa's favorite comic books while growing up were Uncle Scrooge and Little Lulu comics from Dell Comics, as well as his sister's collection of MAD magazines.

At age 12, Rosa discovered the Superman titles of DC Comics, with particular attention to editor Mort Weisinger's period, drawn mostly by Superman artists Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger.

Shortly after Rosa started to collect Superman comics, he also began to trade in the comics he had inherited from his older sister for old Superman comics.

Rosa entered the University of Kentucky in 1969.

In 1969, while still in college, Rosa won an award as "best political cartoonist in the nation in a college paper".

"I'm not really an editorial cartoonist. I'd much rather be doing comedy adventure. But I must have done something right, for at one point The Journal of Higher Education named me one of the five or six best college newspaper cartoonists in the nation."

Rosa's first published comic (besides the spot illustrations in his grade school and high school newspapers) was a comic strip featuring his own character, Lancelot Pertwillaby, titled The Pertwillaby Papers.

By the 1970s Rosa's comic trading had ended up with him only having two Barks duck comics issues left from the collection his sister originally passed on to him.

One of them being Dell Comics' Four Color Comics #386 (also known as Dell Comics' One shot's) issue titled: "Uncle Scrooge in Only a Poor Old Man", which was unknown to him to be the first issue of the new Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge Title.

The second issue is his other favorite Barks Comic from his youth, Dell's Donald Duck in "The Golden Helmet".

He created the strip in 1971 for The Kentucky Kernel, a college newspaper of the University of Kentucky, which wanted the strip to focus on political satire.

Rosa later switched the strip to comedy-adventure, his favorite style of comics, and drew the story Lost in (an alternative section of) the Andes.

He graduated in 1973 with a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering.

Rosa authored and illustrated the monthly Information Center column in the fanzine Rocket's Blast Comicollector from 1974 to 1979.

This was a question-and-answer feature dealing with readers' queries on all forms of pop entertainment of which Rosa was a student, including comics, TV and movies.

He also revived the Pertwillaby Papers in this "RBCC" fanzine as a comic book style story rather than a newspaper comic strip from 1976 to 1978.

Rosa accepted an offer from the editor of the local newspaper to create a weekly comic strip.

This led to his creation of the comic strip character Captain Kentucky for the Saturday edition of the local newspaper Louisville Times.

Captain Kentucky was the superhero alter ego of Lancelot Pertwillaby.

The pay was $25/week and not worth the 12+ hours each week's strip entailed, but Rosa did it as part of his hobby.

Many of his stories are built on characters and locations created by Barks; among these was his first Duck story, "The Son of the Sun" (1987), which was nominated for a Harvey Award in the "Best Story of the Year" category.

Rosa created about 90 stories between 1987 and 2006.

In 1995, his 12-chapter work The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck won the Eisner Award for Best Serialized Story.

Don Rosa's grandfather, Gioachino Rosa, lived in Maniago, a town at the foot of the Alps in Northern Italy, in the province of Pordenone.