Comics Review: UNCLE $CROOGE #389 (Boom! Kids, March 2010)

It seems a bit of a letdown that all but four pages of the action of "Around the World in 80 Bucks, part 2" take place in the confined space of a cruise ship. Were Scrooge and Donald truly akin to Phileas Fogg and Passepartout, they'd surely have preferred to fight natives or rescue princesses from being burned alive than face the relatively minor "crisis" of Donald carelessly spending money on a couple of ship-board babes while being egged on by John D. Rockerduck's badly-disguised lackey. (Well, perhaps Scrooge would equate Donald spending the Ducks' precious cache of funds with human sacrifice.) The crisis is short-circuited by the all-too-convenient intervention of a band of pirates with designs on robbing the passengers. Scrooge and Donald naturally take advantage of the "sitch" to foil the felony and pocket a nice reward. Gladstone comes along on the cruise (it's Gladdy's babes whom Donald pilfers) and is apparently going to be involved in the solution of the globe-trotting Ducks' next dilemma: how to get to India.

"80 Bucks" continues to bob along with its head just above the waterline of mediocrity, but better days lie ahead for $CROOGE, as this Newsarama piece indicates. I can't very well criticize Boom! for the decision to both include DuckTales material in $CROOGE and couple its debut in June with the start of a Darkwing Duck mini-series in that same month. Boom!'s track record may have been erratic to date, but the company appears to be launching these products out of genuine enthusiasm for the "Golden Age of Disney TV Animation" and the memorable characters and concepts introduced then. Of course, enthusiasm doesn't always translate into polished results, but I hardly expect to see Boom! display the slovenly indifference towards these properties that riddled the DISNEY AFTERNOON title of the Marvel-Disney era.