Comics Review: DONALD DUCK AND FRIENDS #349 (Boom! Kids, December 2009)

The preliminaries are over. Donald, alias Double Duck, finally gets to do some real, live spy work in this issue. And -- surprise of surprises -- he actually pulls it off! Well, with a bit of help from the sexy Kay K and an agent of... wait for it... SHUSH. (Though this may not be Darkwing's SHUSH, as I'll explain below.) In the guise of a waiter at supercrook Marlo Burke's party, Don does throw in a coincidental screw-up by accidentally queering a business deal that his Uncle Scrooge has got cooking. Even there, he has an excuse of sorts: he was reacting (violently, of course) to Gladstone's smug blowoff of his supposed "new job." I'm glad that writers Fausto Vitaliano and Marco Bosco avoided the obvious cliche and allowed Don to get away with the "Agency" laptop computer in Burke's possession. The problem, of course, is that now Burke is out for revenge. The whereabouts of rogue "Agency" agent B-Berry (who's revealed to have stolen the laptop in the first place) still need to be clarified -- I'm still leaving open the possibility that B-Berry turns out to be a Bourne-style antihero -- but the "Double Duck" saga continues to both entertain and intrigue.

We again get a somewhat clumsy "transition point" in this issue, with the "new chapter" being cut off after just five pages this time. Given what those pages contain, I'd almost have preferred five additional pages of ads. Having spied Donald and Kay K together in Don's car, a pissed-off Daisy shows up at Don's door demanding the proverbial "answers." She's a fine one to talk, having previously thrown Don over in favor of Gladstone. Given how well Don and Kay are getting along -- indeed, Kay slips in her most blatant "come-on" to date during the escape from Burke's mansion -- there is no longer any serious doubt in my mind that a major catfight lies in our future. I'd give the edge to Kay at this point; Daisy's acceptance of Don's improbable excuse for being with Kay caused me to mentally knock about 20 points off Daisy's purported IQ.

Kay describes SHUSH agent Wilson, who'd been serving as a double agent in Burke's gang, as a "federal agent." My memory may be faulty, but I don't recall the SHUSH of Darkwing Duck as being a "formal" government agency; it seemed more like the peculiarly "localized" Duckburg Intelligence Agency of DuckTales' "Double-O-Duck," an outfit based in one city that nonetheless battled international crooks. Maybe the feds swooped in and "nationalized" SHUSH in the years after Darkwing Duck aired?