Comics Review: DONALD DUCK #363 (February 2011, Boom! Kids)

(Hey Joe, you'll notice that I spelled "February" right the first time this time around. I read "Secret of Hondorica," too -- not to mention your recent post on the subject.)

I think it can now safely be said that the "Daan Jippes redraws Carl Barks stories" enterprise has "jumped the shark." Oh, it's not that Jippes' 2010 "reimagining" of "Somewhere Beyond Nowhere" -- a tale spun by John Lustig out of a Barks story outline and drawn by Pat Block under the heading "Somewhere IN Nowhere" (Gemstone DONALD DUCK AND UNCLE $CROOGE One-Shot, November 2005) -- is actually poor. Indeed, as those who have read Barks' typewritten precis will attest, it is a more literal translation of Barks' original suggestion than was the earlier version. The problem is that "SIN" was a markedly better, and even markedly more Barksian, effort than is the putatively more faithful "SBN." Let us count the why's:

(1) "SIN" had a much stronger "philosophical underpinning," so to speak. Donald's desire to prove that he can, too, be a success despite his faults, and the corresponding wager with Scrooge that leads to him taking a job in far-off Bearflanks, Alaska, makes perfect sense in light of what we know about Barks' Donald's character. In "SBN," by contrast, Don tires of his sidewalk-inspecting job and searches for more excitement in... Bearflanks, Alaska? It is easy to think of a hundred far more accessible places in which Don could have tested his courage to the fullest.

(2) Bearflanks postmistress (and would-be freezer tycoon) Sourdough Sally of "SIN" is a far more interesting character than any of the ephemeral supporting players in "SBN." Sally is fully worthy to stand with the likes of Katie Mallard and "Ducky Bird" of Barks' "Mystery of the Ghost Town Railroad" as a female one-shotter who really ought to have been given another chance.

(3) Donald's chaotic first day as mailman in "SIN" is not only more believable than his slick-as-a-goose opening-day performance in "SBN," it quietly stirs up pleasant memories of a Barks story from the late 50s. Likewise, Donald's odyssey in "The Frozen Nowhere" brings to mind the Ducks' Arctic ordeal in Barks' "Luck of the North." These homages seem quite appropriate in what, after all, was meant to be a sort of coda to Barks' career. In a similar vein, Block's cleaner, more traditional art style compliments the story's strongly nostalgic tone in a manner that Jippes' action-packed, "busy" art does not.

(4) HD&L appear in "SBN" but basically encumber the ground, whereas "SIN" is entirely Donald's show -- which is as it should be. The core of this story is about Donald trying to prove his mettle against all obstacles, both self-imposed and otherwise.

(5) "SIN" features a healthy slug of what one might call the "Barks weirdness factor." Not that Barks went out of his way to be off-the-wall, but a number of his stories -- especially the $CROOGE adventures of the 60s -- feature odd plot contrivances that cause the head to shake on occasion. (Think about those 17-foot-tall Venusian teenagers.) Suffice it to say that "blubbersicle tycoon" Hamalot McSwine's scheme to stop Sourdough Sally from selling freezers to Eskimos in "SIN" is considerably closer to the "classically weird" tradition than is "banker" Hamfist McSwine's desire to foreclose on Widow Brokepenny in "SBN." Hamalot's over-the-top, almost ridiculous ruthlessness also rings truer, in a Barksian sense, than Hamfist's point-to-point greediness.

(6) Donald's return to his sidewalk job is more satisfying in "SIN" than it is in "SBN," because it is his own decision to go back to the tried and true. This nicely completes the circle which began with Donald tiring of his constant failures and pressing the issue with Scrooge. "SBN," by contrast, ends with the familiar "Don-gets-run-out-of-town" business, which is especially hard to take here in light of the fact that Donald's troubles are not really of his own making.

Over time, I've grown to enjoy Jippes' redrawings of Barks' scripts for HD&L JUNIOR WOODCHUCKS, and I'm sure I'll like Jippes' revamping of Barks' last DONALD DUCK script, "A Day in a Duck's Life," which has just appeared in this week's WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES. "Somewhere Beyond Nowhere," by contrast, feels... well, pointless. I don't know the whole story behind this do-over, but I honestly doubt that I'd change my mind even if I did know all the details. And it strikes me that redrawing a long Block story is more than a little insulting to Block.

Carl Barks was also very much on the mind of Geoffrey Blum when he wrote the 2009 Egmont story "The Saga of Captain Duckburg." This story, illustrated in accomplished style by Carlos Mota, could be considered the more cynical (shading into bitter, in fact) flip-side to the sunny, idyllic "Uncle $crooge and the Man Who Drew Ducks." Here, the Barks-physiognomened "Temecula Sam," the hermit-like, legendary "Captain Duckburg" artist whom Donald is tasked with interviewing for Scrooge's gossip magazine (!), wants less than nothing to do with reporters, fans, and other pains in the rear. He's even tricked up his house in "San Jacaranda" with all manner of anti-snooper devices, many of which bear suspicious resemblances to gizmos from comics and cartoons on which Barks worked. It wouldn't surprise me if Barks himself had a couple of "I-feel-like-Sam" moments during the more-troubled-than-they-had-to-be last few years of his life, the era of The Carl Barks Studio and the lengthy pilgrimages to Europe. It's hard not to interpret Donald's convincing Sam into returning to comic-bookery -- a plan that backfires on Don in a BIG way -- as a comment on the whole Barks Studio experience. Fer gosh sakes, Blum even makes reference to Barks' unhappy second marriage and posits that "Temecula Sam" quit the business because he couldn't think of a way to end Captain Duckburg's version of the "square eggs" story. I recall that Blum's "World Wide Witch" (UNCLE $CROOGE #320, August 2003), with its audacious blend of Wicca and the Internet, received a great deal of comment -- some of it quite sharp -- from "old sourdoughs" of the "Would Barks ever have done THAT?" persuasion. If there's any justice -- not to mention enough room in the Boom! letter columns -- "The Saga of Captain Duckburg" will receive as much feedback, and rightly so. It's a most intriguing commentary on the whole "Barks industry" and at least some of its discontents.

Speaking of That "Old Duck Man" Himself, Barks gets the back of the book with the reprinting of "The Mystery of the Loch" (WDC&S #237, June 1960), a quiet little palate-cleanser of a story in which Donald commandeers HD&L's newly-won underwater camera and drags the boys along with him to Scotland to attempt to snap a pic of the legendary, never-before-photographed "Loch Less" Monster. The casualness of Barks' approach here is summed up by the fact that the totality of "local Scottish color" on display consists of one grocer wearing a tam who sells haggis. No heavy perusal of back issues of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC on this job, I deem. It's still a pretty good story, with an unusual ending in which dogged Don wins at least a partial victory -- make that "sustains a less painful loss than usual" -- when HD&L describe his ultimate defeat to the reader in words, as opposed to Donald's being smacked across the face with the loss. Don Rosa provides a good cover illo, as well. But I do think that HD&L whined about wishing that they'd gotten the "electric head-massager" at least one too many times...

Comics Review: DONALD DUCK AND FRIENDS #360 (November 2010, Boom! Kids)

A superb cover by the all-too-infrequently-glimpsed Pat and Shelly Block deserves better than serving as a "front" to the conclusion of the drab, desultory Oriental "dreamscapade" "Son of the Rising Sun." It's pretty much "more of the same" -- more bland art, more "smoochy-smoochy" between Donald's heroic warrior stand-in Tekka-Don and the amorous Dai-Chan (the real Donald should only wish that Daisy were this sexually aggressive!), more "red-hot bo action" (between Tekka-Don and the preternaturally lucky visiting Gander-Bei), more grumbling and grimacing from putative villain Shogun Scrooge-San (who seems to yield to Tekka-Don with embarrassing ease in the end), all culminating, of course, in the inevitable "wake-up call" for the snoozing Donald. No one's heart seems to have been in this exercise, a state of affairs which can best be observed in the clumsy way in which such an apparently simple matter as the nature of Gander-Bei's luck is handled. Tekka-Don's ultimate triumph over Gander-Bei is fueled by the fact that, as T-D gloatingly notes, "[Gander-Bei] used [his good fortune] to help a rat [Scrooge-San]!" and thereby "short-circuited" his luck's effectiveness. There seems to be a connection here to the notion, first seen in the DuckTales episode "Dime Enough for Luck," that Gladstone's luck turns sour when he "uses it for an evil purpose." Indeed, the circumstances in "Rising Sun" jibe more closely with that theory, since Gladstone didn't mean to help Magica De Spell steal the Old #1 Dime in "Dime Enough" (he was instead hypnotized into doing so), whereas Gander-Bei serves Scrooge-San as a willing hireling. But to make the theory work, shouldn't Gander-Bei's luck have turned bad during the first of his two fights with Tekka-Don? G-B wins Encounter #1 when Donald is foiled by a collapsing bridge, a natural thing to happen when a foe is "within the penumbra" of the gander's good fortune. Bout #2, however, finds Gander-Bei less willing to fight Tekka-Don, which, if anything, should have strengthened his protection against luck-leakage. Instead, everything goes wrong for G-B and T-D wins in a rout. The logic involved here is as tough to follow as the steps needed to solve one of those Chinese puzzles. Slack editing is also present in a visual sense; the editors forgot to remove the wooden "FINE" from the Italian original's final panel, perhaps because they didn't recognize what it was. The "Double Duck" stories had their share of soft spots, but "Rising Sun" under-performs even the least of them.

Happily, the ish's back-up story, "The Titan of Tae-Kwon-Duk", is much more like it. After the first page of the new story provides a clever segue from the events (such as they were) of "Rising Sun," we go off in a decidedly Barksian direction, with Donald, determined to show the scoffing HD&L that he can, too, be a martial-arts maven, bungling his way into unmerited status as a Tae-Kwon-Duck expert... and into a match with Goosetown's black-bearded black belt, Blutosaki. After benefiting from another slice of ludicrous luck that even Gladstone wouldn't sign for, Don finds that his dream of impressing the boys remains tantalizingly unfulfilled. With Donald having acquitted himself with honor in the role of Double Duck, it ought to be at least a bit dispiriting to see Donald cast back into the familiar role of a buffoonish blowhard, but, hey, it's certainly canonical -- and funny. Joe Torcivia festoons Gorm Transgaard's plot with references to Lost in Space, Star Trek, POPEYE (the aforementioned Blutosaki), and Osamu Tezuka, among many others, and Jose Maria Manrique's straightforward art is enlivened by the numerous background gags at Duckburg's "Tae-Kwon-Duk Dojo and Take-Out" studio. "Titan" is the best evidence yet that Boom! made the right decision when it chose to restore back-up stories to many of its titles. Before, if the main story happened to be a dog, then there was no escape from it until the next issue (if then, given Boom!'s early fetish for continuity). Thanks to "Titan," however, this issue manages to "socky-choppy" its way to a draw... or the Tae-Kwon-Duk equivalent of same.

Comics Review: WALT DISNEY'S CHRISTMAS PARADE #5 (Gemstone Publishing, December 2008)

After a one-year hiatus, XMAS PARADE returns with an excellent, though at times deuced peculiar, collection of holiday stories. The lead-off reprint of Carl Barks' "The Thrifty Spendthrift" (1963) is actually the most "normal" thing in the ish, and that's saying something, considering that Scrooge is under hypnosis most of the time and Donald and HD&L spend several pages dressed up in bird costumes. Having learned nothing from his disastrous experiment with a toy hypno-gun eleven years earlier, Donald attempts to use a "hypno-ray" bamboozle his tightwad uncle into buying him scads of Christmas gifts. Thanks to innocent interference by HD&L, however, Scrooge's intentions wind up being "fixed" on the Duchess of Duckshire's dog. Soon Scrooge is busily gathering up the components to bring the famed presents named in "The Twelve Days of Christmas" to life, while a frantic Donald, assuming that the gifts are for him -- and that he'll get stuck with the room-and-board bill for hosting all those dancing ladies, piping pipers, leaping lords, etc. -- is just as busily trying to sabotage him. Don drafts his Nephews as the "three French hens," and he, himself, suits up as the pear-tree-perching partridge just to cut down on the expenses he expects to have to shoulder. Compared to such Barks Christmas classics as "Letter to Santa" and "A Christmas for Shacktown," "Spendthrift" has the story content of the average fluffernutter, but this ultra-lightweight story still manages to entertain. A rather mournful note is struck in the first panel when Scrooge makes a reference to John F. Kennedy ("My money! It vigahrizes me to dive around in it like a porpoise!"). Barks completed the story in the summer of '63, but it was published the month after Kennedy was assassinated. I believe that several DC Comics stories featuring JFK as a supporting player also came out after the President's death.

The 1954 Italian story "Memoirs of an Invisible Santa" is so bizarre that it makes "Spendthrift" seem like poker-faced drama. Goofy's home-brewed perfume, meant as a gift for Minnie, winds up turning both him and Mickey invisible (apart from their feet, that is -- we have to have some way of tracking them, right?). While the perdu pals search for a way out of their dilemma (and spook a healthy portion of Mouseton in the process), Minnie, Daisy, Donald, HD&L, and Scrooge wait with increasing impatience for Mickey and Goofy to keep their promise of meeting them for a Christmas Eve party. The gang gets so steamed that they start hurling insults at the absent pair, even as the newly-solidified duo return to overhear. Soon, a full-blown pah-rump-a-pum-rumpus erupts, complete with snowball fight. Will tempers cool before the clock strikes Christmas? And why is the fact that said clock (another Goofy project) is running faster than normal a key to making the season bright once again? It's always a treat to see the Duck and Mouse characters interact in a full-length story, but we're about as far from "Mythos Island" territory here as can be imagined -- rather, think Home Alone without the "cuteness" of the Culkin-crooks conflict. The suddenness with which M&G's pals turn on them is rather jarring, even considering that the Italian comics do tend to make their relationships a little rockier than American readers are used to. It's well drawn by Romano Scarpa and expertly dialogued by David Gerstein, but it definitely falls in the "more weird than truly hilarious" category.

The zaniness continues as Pat and Shelly Block and Tino Santanach's "Cookery Countdown" somehow contrives to make Donald's purchase of a new set of crockery a mechanism for getting orbit-bound shuttle astronauts a real Christmas dinner. In Stefan Petrucha and Jose Ramon Bernardo's "Better to Give Than to Deceive," we appear to return to familiar "true meaning of Christmas" territory as Mickey teaches spendthrift Horace Horsecollar a lesson about buying presents for himself as opposed to others, but that's only setting us up for Kari Korhonen's "Mr. Clerkly's Christmas", one of the cleverest subversions of A CHRISTMAS CAROL I've ever read. Amazingly, Korhonen manages to do the deed without making any character look truly "bad." After a local TV crew catches a stressed Scrooge cursing out Christmas as "a lie... empty sentiment wrapped in tinsel!", the negative publicity imperils a business deal the tycoon's got cooking. A seemingly contrite Scrooge invites the newsies to his Money Bin to learn how "generous" he truly is to his employees, but Clerkly inadvertently curdles the eggnog, and Scrooge responds by ripping his faithful clerk a new... er, page out of the account book. Is Clerkly truly Scrooge's Bob Cratchit? A series of unlikely coincidences lead the increasingly guilt-ridden Scrooge to believe as much... but he's got a surprise coming to him. Some may regard Korhonen's ending as cynical; I prefer to think of it as realistic, given what little we know about Clerkly (not to mention Scrooge himself). In light of the current economic crisis, you might even find yourself thinking that Clerkly does, indeed, have a point. This story shows that you can do an effective CAROL parody without relying on mean-spirited or gross humor, and, for that alone, I'm grateful.