One of my childhood heroes since I could read, and still today I fondly take one of my old comics and go through his adventures, all over again…

Donald Duck turned 80 today, having made his first appearance in Disney’s short animated film The Wise Little Hen on 9 June 1931.

Later on, Disney cartoonist Carl Barks took over the character, and made him human.

He created the town Duckburgh, the wealthiest duck in the world, Scrooge McDuck, the nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, inventor Gyro Gearloose, the persistent Beagle Boys, the sorceress Magica DeSpell…

The German editions were translated by a certain Dr. Erika Fuchs for about half a century, a woman who had the most profound impact on modernizing the German language and enriching it with many new, creative words, at a time when reading comics was regarded as somewhat low culture…

She even created a whole new grammatical form, the so called Erikativ, a shortened form of verbs or sounds, now so common among the texting and tweeting generation.