INFO VAN HOOZOO:
Dickie Duck
GENUS PEDIGREE: Duckbill
KNOWN ALIASES: unknown
KNOWN RELATIVES: Glittering Goldie (grandmother/aunt)
KNOWN PETS: unknown
CITIZENSHIP: Duckburg, Calisota (USA).
KNOWN CONFIDANTS: Uncle $crooge; Glittering Goldie; Gideon McDuck, Brigitta MacBridge; Beckett (Clotilde/Foliao), Walter (Osvaldo), Nettunia, Olympia.
KNOWN RIVALS: unknown
PARAPHERNALIA: camera
1st PRINT APPEARANCE: "Topolino" #577 in "Arriva Paperetta YE-YE" ("Dickie Duck Arrives!"), Dec. 1966.
1st FILM APPEARANCE: none
VOICE ACTOR: none
SIGNATURE: unknown
BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS: Dickie Duck was created by Romano Scarpa for Italian book "Topolino" #577 in "Arriva Paperetta YE-YE" ("Dickie Duck Arrives!"). Her original Italian name is "Paperetta YE-YE", but in Brazil she is better known as "Pata Lee" (or "Ieie"), where she was supposedly named for a popular Brazilian disco icon, "Rita Lee." Her English name "Dickie Duck" is from Romano Scarpa's own model sheets for her, but it finally appeared in the USA in the editorial text page of the Gladstone comic "Mickey and Donald" #6, where she is said to be Glittering Goldie's niece (Italian uses the same word for granddaughter and niece, but in her debut story it's clear that granddaughter is meant). She even calls Uncle $crooge "grand-dad" several times, more as a joke than anything else, but the connection with Goldie has never been brought up again. No story with her has actually been published in English so far.
Scarpa created Dickie as a parody of what were back then "today's teenagers", all uncultivated hair, rock music, uncontrollable enthusiastic dynamism, etc. She has reappeared in several other Scarpa stories (not particularly memorable ones, though). Her first story relates that Dickie has been Goldie's charge for some time (what happened to her parents?) and that Goldie felt she was too old and frail to continue caring for her granddaughter. Coming to Duckburg for a reunion of sorts, Goldie requests that Uncle Scrooge please take care of Dickie. Scrooge accepts and places Dickie in a Boarding School, probably located in Duckburg. Dickie has appeared in lots of Italian stories, and is generally treated as an extended member of the Duck Family. Whether she is litterally related to the Duck clan or not is debatable. More recently she has appeared in many stories in the Brazilian publication "Ze Carioca" (a book primarily dedicated to Jose Carioca) as part of a series called "Os Adulescentes" ("The Teenagers") also known as "A Turma da Pata Lee" (Dickie Duck's friends).
In reality there appears to be two Dickies in comics, one which features her as approximately the same age as Huey, Dewey & Louie (probably a couple years older), and another which presents her as a teenager, approximately 13 or 14 years old. She still appears, though very rarely, in some Italian stories where she is an investigative reporter hired by $crooge's little known brother Gideon McDuck (Gedeon de' Paperoni) to work on his newspaper ("Duckburg's Trumpet" a.k.a. "The Jiminy Cricket").
Dickie's greater popularitly is in Brazil where she has been a regular since the 80s, together with a group of new teenager characters introduced in the B-coded stories to go with her. In this storyline Dickie lives in the Boarding School and her primary circle of friends consist of Beckett, an anthropomorphic Aracuan bird, also called Clotilde in Italy and Foliao in Brazil; an anthropomorphic pelican named Walter or Osvaldo in Italy and Parceiro in Brazil) and two other birdbeaks named Nettunia (a small brunette) and Olympia (a tall anthropomorphic crane with blonde or light brown hair). Their first tale was in "Ai, Meu Idolo", 1984 (B840090), written by Arthur Faria Jr. and drawn by Euclides K. Miyaura.
In most stories where Dickie appears, Goldie does not and the connection is generally ignored.
HISTORICAL FACTS: unknown
LITTLE KNOWN SECRETS: unknown
WORKING THEORIES: It is possible that Dickie's presence will never be translated into stories in the USA as it seems her mere existence is some what contentionable. It is probably easier for some to imagine Goldie as some sort of chase Gilded Lady, pining for her one true love, thriving only on the single thought that one day her Prince $crooge would return to seek her hand in marriage. However, if we are to believe Romano Scarpa's introduction of Dickie, then we are forced to accept that some time after $crooge rejected Goldie's love (in the Bark's classic "Back to the Klondike") one might suppose she waited a while, then finally began to live her life again. Otherwise, since he and Goldie met during the Gold Rush, she would have been pining for him for over a hundred years... She deserves to have had a "life" in the intervening years while she still waited. For Dickie to have been born, Goldie must have given birth to her own child. Possibly, after accepting that $crooge might never return, she settled down, married and raised a family. In time, perhaps her husband died, or her lover ran off, leaving her to raise the child/children alone (something very much in character for such a hearty woman such as Goldie). Eventually Goldie's child would have grown up and might have even married into the "Duck" Family (hence the surname in "Dickie Duck"). Now, it would seem that Goldie is still single (probably a widow), and she still holds a candle to the unrequited love of $crooge McDuck. Thus marriage ever remains a possiblity (if $crooge can ever get beyond his stubborn pride).
