Comics Review: WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES #714 (December 2010, Boom! Kids)

We're sittin' on 714, with the 70th anniversary issue of WDC&S due next month. If we are fated not to have any new Casty material for a while, then at least the much-praised creator improved on the disappointing "Mickey Mouse and the Orbiting Nightmare" with the enjoyable, albeit somewhat frothy, "Mickey Mouse and the Menace from the Future." It turns out that I correctly called the true nature of Goofy and the Bubblebrains' "Purple Rain Punch," but Pete's role in the affair was not expected, nor did I foresee Special Agent Uma's complete lack of a direct connection to Mickey. Given Uma's physical looks and scrappiness, I was certain that she would be some sort of descendant of The Mouse. Then again, with our heroes having straightened out the Mouseton of 2049, we don't even know whether a Special Agent Uma will need to exist in the altered future, so perhaps she should count her blessings that she had a hand in creating a future where her presence would be required. (But why would she not be used to "positive reinforcement"? Wouldn't her superiors sending her on a mission that could alter the future of Mouseton signify a certain amount of basic trust in her abilities?)

Casty would have been well advised to have worked on this tale's backstory just a bit more. Why would the Mouseton conquered by "The Grim Gagagoofy" have experienced such a universal "great leap forward" in technology, even unto possessing the secret of time travel? I would think that "The Grim One" would have wanted to limit the development of bubble cities, "omnidisks," etc. so as to maintain the upper hand over the populace. It's not even clear how "The Grim One" managed to assemble the tech to create a robot army in the first place. I suspect that the tech may have been stolen from some other source (Gyro Gearloose? I certainly hope not, for his sake). David Gerstein does another fine job with the dialogue; there are fewer pop-culture gags but a couple of "wink-wink" references (such as the characters entering "The Ladder District") that help us to remember that the story is not meant to be taken all that seriously.

The three-page filler story "Pluto at the Beach" (WDC&S #177, June 1955) is an odd choice in view of the fact that it is completely "out of season" for a comic with a December cover date. In fact, apart from the inclusion of "Christmas Cheers" as a backup story in UNCLE $CROOGE #398, Boom!'s Disney books let the holiday season pass without comment. Between this and the lack of holiday movies this year, do we have reason to be worried? Hopefully, Boom! will top off its "classics"-heavy slate of 2011 releases the right way and bring back some sort of special Christmas release a year from now.

Merry Christmas from Chris, Nicky, Harry, and Shasta!

Just in Time for Christmas... A Few Welcome Presents from Boom!

We now have some additional information on the "Classics" collections heading our way from Boom! early in 2011. The WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES ARCHIVES series is particularly intriguing -- will Boom! go "whole hog" and reprint the ENTIRE issue, ephemeral non-comics-related features and all, or will it simply reproduce the plethora of newspaper strip reprints that dominated those early issues? Personally, I'd prefer a literal replication.

Comics Review: DONALD DUCK AND FRIENDS #361 (December 2010, Boom! Kids)

If only the sole feature of DD&F #361 were as lively as Sabrina Alberghetti's clever cover! Not even the heroic dialoguing efforts of David Gerstein can mask the undeniable fact that Francois Corteggiani and Comicup Studio's 1994 effort "Donald Duck Tsunami" is one lame excuse for a story. "Retconned" as representing the continuing adventures of the feudal ronin Tekka-Don introduced in DD&F #359-360's "Son of the Rising Sun," "Tsunami" mixes byplay between T-D and (in order) work-wearied villagers, the massive (and terminally stupid) "advance scout" of a horde of ruthless bandits, and the "full complement" of said bandits with the completely gratuitous on-pouring of a pair of tidal waves. I don't know which is harder to believe: the notion that a bandit-band worth its stolen salt would employ a "scout" who is so absurdly easy to recognize and to fool, or the idea that a tsunami happens to arrive just when the bungling T-D needs it to subdue his foes. T-D makes a comment that tries to pass off the improbable inundations as unexpected "high tides," but I think Gerstein may have meant it as a joke, if not a wry comment on how silly the original plot was. (Comicup inadvertently does the same thing when it shows one of the villagers fleeing the first tsunami with an inexplicable grin on his face.) Gerstein tries manfully to make this thing worth reading, and he succeeds to the extent that "Tsunami" actually ends up being fairly readable... but it's little more than that. This whole "Kung Fu Donald" sequence -- the back-up story "The Titan of Tae-Kwon-Duck" in #360 excepted -- is making the DOUBLE DUCK stories look better and better all the time.

Comics Review: DARKWING DUCK #7 (December 2010, Boom! Studios)

Part three of "Crisis on Infinite Darkwings", not unlike part two, rolls along in relatively straightforward fashion... but a surprise revelation at the end justifies some

S
P
O
I
L
E
R

S
P
A
C
E

As promised in #6, Gosmoduck (assisted by Honker) and the reformed "Crimebots" do indeed join Darkwing, Morgana, and, in a manner of speaking, Launchpad (who gets one grand two-page splash panel's worth of combat against some of the "infinite Darkwings" and virtually no other exposure) in their fight against Negaduck and Magica. Good guys and bad guys finally square off in the villains' subterranean lair, and the expected magical fireworks and exaggerated punch-ups ensue. I'm not normally a fan of overheated superhero battles, but here is a case where a few additional pages might actually have improved matters. Magica "neutralizes" Morgana with surprising ease -- in view of how many times Morgue has been battered, brainwashed, and the like in this story, can we infer that writer Ian Brill has something against DW's girlfriend? -- and thus, a magical showdown that Darkwing Duck and DuckTales fans had literally anticipated for years doesn't deliver on its promise. Likewise, the ruse that DW uses to counteract Negs' assault a la chainsaw, mace, etc. is almost childishly simple. Gosmoduck makes up for some of the letdown when she receives a near-deadly blow from a "Wolfman DW," but, after 20 years of waiting, I could have hoped for a little more of an epic "feel" to this battle. (DW's entrance line, "I am the TV crossover that doesn't live up to the hype!", turned out to be truer than Brill probably intended.) All current antagonisms will probably have to be shoved to the rear in part four, when everyone will be forced to deal with the "sinister force" behind St. Canard's misbehaving water... which turns out to be Paddywhack, the frankly unsettling force (the word "villain" seems a bit inappropriate for such a creepy being) who made such a memorable impression in the TV episode "The Haunting of Mr. Banana Brain".  Paddy was reportedly supposed to get a second TV appearance in the fourth DW season that never came to pass, so I'm happy to see Brill bring him back, but tossing Paddy into a narrative that already seems so overstuffed may not be the most effective use of the character. Paddy is a strong enough adversary to merit a story in which he is the principal antagonist from start to finish. 

In the course of his fight with DW, Negs reveals his ulterior motive in dumping the "infinite DWs" into St. Canard. After the unwelcome visitors "exterminate" the "Regularverse" DW -- and I'm hard-pressed to see why simply causing mass chaos in the streets and skies of St. Canard would help to accomplish that task, but whatever; perhaps Negs is simply letting them run riot on general principle before directing them to their main task -- Negs will turn around and destroy them, thus eliminating all DW simulacra apart from himself. This is definitely a believably grandiose (and ego-driven) scheme for Negs, next to which he must regard Magica's desire for the Old #1 Dime as the equivalent of Oliver Twist's request for an extra helping of gruel. It's hard to see how Paddywhack relates to Negs' game plan, though.

As things stand right now, unless Brill really outdoes himself in part four, "Crisis on Infinite Darkwings" is not quite measuring up to "The Duck Knight Returns." The plot is a little easier to follow, but the appearance of the "kitchen-sink DW" in DARKWING #6 reflects Brill's "throw-in-everything-you-possibly-can" approach to this storyline, and some of the parts are fitting together better than others. I can't quibble too much, though; this continues to be a first-rate read.

Belated RIP Billie Mae "Rudolph" Richards

I've had more than the usual amount of time to Web-surf this week while recovering from surgery. Thus it was that I learned, only a couple of days ago, of the death of Billie Mae Richards, the Canadian actress who voiced Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer on three extremely memorable occasions, this past September 10. She was 88 and had suffered several strokes. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) remains my favorite of all the perennial Christmas specials -- yes, even over A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) -- and Richards' winning, boyish portrayal of Rudolph, so similar in so many ways to Billie Lou Watt's portrayals of Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion, is a VERY big reason why. Rudolph's Shiny New Year (1976) was a popular (and still, to my mind, highly underappreciated) sort-of-sequel, with Richards in fine form after a decade away from the character, and even the maddeningly slow-tempo'ed feature film Rudolph and Frosty's Christmas in July (1979) had its good points (plus a solo song by Richards, "No Bed of Roses," which, quite honestly, wasn't one of them). Younger (in a comparative sense) folks probably best "know" Richards as the voice of Tender Heart Bear, one of the Care Bears.

In tribute to Richards, here's "No Bed of Roses."