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The Don Rosa Library #10

Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck: The Old Castle's Other Secret

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Scrooge is off to his family castle in Scotland to see if an impossible stash of cash is hidden there... but why is his feisty sister, Matilda, out to stop him? In “The Dream of a Lifetime,” Donald and the Beagle Boys take a trip through Scrooge’s subconscious mind, while in “The Prisoner of White Agony Creek,” Scrooge and Glittering Goldie have the ultimate showdown!

224 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2018

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About the author

Don Rosa

396 books395 followers
Keno Don Hugo Rosa, known as Don Rosa, 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. 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.

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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
Profile Image for Abeer Abdelhamid.
649 reviews33 followers
May 26, 2023
"رسالة من الوطن" أو "سر أخر من أسرار القلعة القديمة"
فى هذه القصة يعود دهب الى موطنه ومعه بطوط والاولاد متابعا للبحث عن كنز فرسان الهيكل
القصة تكملة لقصة "تاج ملوك الفرنجة" وتتحدق بتفاصيل لكثر عن فرسان الهيكل ودورهم وعن كنوز الملك سليمان ايضا
لو تعاملنا انهاا قصة خيالية تماما فستكون رائعة.. اما لو اعتمدنا على المعلومات الواردة بها فهنا يجب الحذر والبحث جيدا وراء ما يذكر فى القصة

يمكن قراءة القصة من هنا
https://wetransfer.com/downloads/08d8...
Profile Image for Rudi.
306 reviews7 followers
August 7, 2019
The last installment of the Don Rosa Library does not have any of my favorite stories from his, but all of the stories in it are among his best. But especially "A Letter From Home or The Old Castle's Other Secret" and "The Prisoner of White Agony Creek" shows how Don Rosa is able to treat his cast like actual characters, and not just puppets for his stories. Both stories made me teary eyed, just when Rosa intended me to be so. At the same time: I doubt these stories would have had the same effect on me if I had not gone through his previous stories first. Having (re)read all of Rosa's duck stories, it's his insistance of these silly animals being human persons (with all that goes with it) that makes him and unforgetable author. The silly animals makes the slapstick work, but the personalities makes the stories work on an emotional level (when he intends them to).

Don Rosa is still alive, so I hope he will some day return to telling stories (with Ducks or others).
Profile Image for Baal Of.
1,243 reviews79 followers
August 31, 2020
Rosa closed out his career on a series of strong stories, with a lot of character depth. I'm a little sad that this is the end of the journey, but grateful that these stories have been collected in these beautiful volumes and I've had the chance to read them.
Profile Image for Iamthesword.
315 reviews21 followers
January 6, 2021
I love Don Rosa. I love the humour he puts in his stories. I love all the little stories that go on in the background of the panels. I love how he created a universe of connected stories so thick that you think you can just enter it around the corner. But most of all, I love that he gave us Scrooge McDuck. Not as a character - I know that he didn't invent him. But as a person. He's is not that capitalist cliché, he's living and breathing, with fears and desires. With ambivalences. Someone who dreams of things different than money. Someone who regrets his mistakes and mourns his losses. Someone with a sense in life. And Rosa is so good in communicating so much of that in a single drawing. But the real depth comes from the combination of moments throughout all this stories, memories of earlier adventures and recognition of feelings felt before.

And while this is not my favourite volume of the series, it has everything. There is the reappearence of one of my favourite villains ("The Black Knight Glorps Again"), there are treasure hunts based on historic events ("A Letter From Home") and there are moments deep in the lore of the Don Rosa Cosmos ("The Dream of a Lifetime"). But most important, there are some of my favourite emotional moments of the whole McDuck-Saga in this volume. Where I feel his joy, his sadness, his helplessness. The weight of the life he's lived. And where I accompanied him - thanks to Don Rosa. I would not want to have missed it.

[I've not yet finished all volumes, but this being the last in the series, I thought it would be fitting leave the "important thoughts" here]
Profile Image for Max Urai.
Author 1 book35 followers
July 5, 2019
I thought I knew most later Don Rosa stuff from the Donald Duck Extra's I read as a child in the nineties. But apparently, I missed two of them, and those were two of the best: The Old Castle's Other Secret and The Prisoner of White Agony Creek. Both are, for lack of a better word, two of the most literary Duck comics ever made; in terms of theme and human depth, only maybe Barks The Golden Helmet comes close. Aside from great adventure stories, these are actually profound. Thank you Don Rosa, for making so many more of us fans like yourself.
7 reviews
May 20, 2020
long long time ago i remembered this one donald duck story about templars and lost treasures that i had read as a kid, which for some reason stuck with me more than other stories, and today i finally fkn read it again and it was alright
Profile Image for Emily.
860 reviews32 followers
May 1, 2023
This was the least good collection in the Don Rosa library. There were gags and bits and moments but the whole thing was rather an elegy to a man that Don Rosa already spent a career writing an elegy too.

The Old Castle's Other Secret felt implausible, which is saying a lot in an Uncle Scrooge comic, but it makes more sense for the treasures of the Inca or the halls of Atlantis to be lying around *somewhere* on this Earth than it does for the treasure of the Templars to be in the basement of a castle that our heroes have already gone over with a fine tooth comb twice.

The Three Companeros sequel was cute but it went on too long. I enjoyed the nostalgia and the respect Donald gets even though he knows he's the most useless member of the McDuck clan. I also appreciated Don Rosa's ability to thread the needle on a very squidgy bit of cultural representation.

I don't like the Black Knight. I haven't read the first Black Knight volume, but his mechanisms of power and destruction are overly complex in a boring way and he's a creeper. And his secret identity is pretty obvious.

Prisoner of White Agony Creek was BAD. I want to like Scrooge McDuck because I grew up with Scrooge McDuck and I fucking love Scrooge McDuck. Don't make me question that love by giving me a long-ass, pointless comic about young Scrooge kidnapping a sexually vulnerable young woman and forcibly imposing a Protestant work ethic on her. What the fuck? I can overlook the kidnapping when it's casually mentioned in Back to the Klondike but showing it and then making the only damn sex joke in the entire Barks/Rosa canon... Why would you...? I mean, it's obviously because Don Rosa is an old man and kidnapping a vulnerable and victimized sex worker (you know she is) in order for her to fall in love with the man who kidnapped her is something Rosa grew up with in the cowboy pictures and has never questioned. Namedropping a bunch of historic outlaws did not help this story. The chase scene was kinda cool. Harnessing a dog backwards doesn't get old. (Also, don't make me question my love of Scrooge McDuck by bringing up capitalism, monopoly, worker exploitation, environmental exploitation, sexism, the complete absence of women besides Miss Quackfaster and Magica DeSpell, and especially don't bring up colonialism and the the 1950's National Geographic lens of race.)

The dream comic was a banger. I liked the way we revisited the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck in a wacky flashback way, but with stakes.

"The entire barrel of waste oil from the oolated squigg plant fell onto my lap. The owner of that foul place should be sued for pollution."
"Don't threaten me, nephew! I don't have time! Find that box."
Profile Image for Kevin.
312 reviews4 followers
September 28, 2023
Final volume. The Dream of a Lifetime was a fun way to revisit Rosa’s best works and my son laughed so hard during it. A real delight. Prisoner of White Agony screen.

Rosa’s ideas for these characters is much stricter than anything Barks did. Which makes it funny to return to Barks (which I’m doing). The Nephews and Donald really antagonize each other there.

But that’s for another review. I love Rosa’s work. These books have exceptional back matter all by Rosa.
Profile Image for Francesco.
1,686 reviews7 followers
October 6, 2019
Nell'ultimo volume non potevano che esserci due delle storie più belle del Don: Una lettera da casa e La prigioniera del Fosso dell'Agonia Bianca.
Due storie che mettono i brividi per quanto sono belle.
Profile Image for Amritesh.
509 reviews34 followers
June 18, 2025
(This review covers the complete Don Rosa Library)

A reverent and meticulously researched continuation of the storytelling tradition established by Carl Barks, following Scrooge McDuck, Donald Duck, and the nephews through intricately plotted adventures that span history, mythology, and far-flung corners of the globe. Rosa builds on the foundation laid by Barks with denser layouts, elaborate continuity, and an almost obsessive attention to historical and geographical accuracy. At the heart of Rosa's body of work lies The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, an ambitious and deeply researched origin story that stands as the pinnacle of Disney comics, rich in heart, history, and narrative complexity.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews

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