Comics Review: WALT DISNEY'S UNCLE $CROOGE: THE MYSTERIOUS STONE RAY by Carl Barks and CASH FLOW by Don Rosa (May 2011, kaboom!)

This double-barreled, handsomely-packaged release pairs one of Carl Barks' early UNCLE $CROOGE tales (U$ #8, December 1954) with one of Don Rosa's early $CROOGE adventures (U$ #224, September 1987) -- and, perhaps surprisingly, the Rosa story is much the superior one.

The sole link between these tales is the spindly-shanked, big-beaked figure of a Duckburgian professor with a creepy hankering for cabbage, a bent for misanthropy ("There are too many masters in the world already, and not enough friends!"), and a certain tendency to neglect "the big picture." In Barks' "Stone Ray," the prof is hunkered down on a remote island with his stone-strewing scintillator, petrifying The Beagle Boys when they come to pillage the island (in one of the earliest indications that they are not 100% devoted to attacking Scrooge's fortune all the time). One Beagle escapes and manages to send out a message in a bottle, which the Ducks improbably find at exactly the moment when Scrooge is ordered to "travel to a windy place" to flush the gold dust out of his feathers. This is but the first of a number of contrived points that make the story one of Barks' wobbliest early $CROOGE efforts. Deleted panels from the story, reprinted here with accompanying commentary by Geoffrey Blum, indicate just how difficult it must have been for Barks to piece his storyline together in anything like an adequate fashion. Unfortunately, he was unable to fix one really bad gaffe; the professor turns off his machine while talking to Scrooge, Donald, and HD&L, apparently forgetting that this will allow The Beagle Boys to recover and take over the ray. I'm sure that Barks didn't mean to send the message that single-minded paranoia is always preferable to friendliness insofar as keeping up one's guard is concerned. Of course, it could be that the professor knew all along that he had the ray's ignition key in his pocket, but couldn't The Beagles then have overpowered their foes by sheer physical force and gotten hold of it? I don't see any ingenious Money Bin-style traps in the vicinity to even the odds. The artwork is beautiful, but the content is lacking, and it's rare that one can say that about a mid-50s Barks story.

Rosa brings back the cabbage-loving prof at the start of "Cash Flow," but only as a means of helping The Beagle Boys get their paws on a new invention, the "Neutra-Friction Ray." The Beagles bribe the prof with promises of cabbage and run off with their new toy to slip-slide their way past Scrooge's Bin defenses. The prof's oversight in "Stone Ray" makes it a little easier to accept the fact that he's forgotten about The Beagles, but it's still a bit tough to buy; a character as hypersuspicious as he would surely have stored them in a somewhat more easily accessible sector of his memory bank. Once the contrived set-up is out of the way, however, the tale takes off as a classic Scrooge vs. Beagles battle, with Rosa taking full advantage of his engineering background to craft funny/plausible physical scenarios. In stark contrast to his approach in "The Universal Solvent," he also gives the Ducks themselves plenty to do as they desperately try to stop the greasy goons from hitting liquefied paydirt. There's a hint at the start that Scrooge has this particular challenge coming to him; he brags about his youthful exploits to HD&L (as a coin-shoveling Donald snorts in the shadows) with even more self-satisfaction than usual, and, after brushing aside a "more typical" assault by the frustrated Beagles, he describes the crooks' threat to him as "ancient history." In the friction-free fight that follows, Scrooge, of course, is reduced to begging for assistance from Donald -- who extracts a promise of a rich reward that, not surprisingly, is foiled in the end. This is Rosa at his early best -- crafting a traditionally-themed story with a decidedly novel approach and relying on characterization, rather than spectacle, to buttress his work.