DUCKTALES Fanfic Review: "The Sincere Fraud" by "Commander"

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in. -- Robert Frost

Of course, what happens AFTER they take you in is often the most interesting part...

I'm back with another DuckTales fanfic focus... and the angst is STRONG with this one!  Thankfully, DuckTales doesn't appear to have inspired nearly as many of these soul-sucking fics as, let's say, Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers (does anyone remember the concept of "Gadget-gouging"?  If not, then be thankful) or Darkwing Duck (the Gosalyn-Drake relationship was always rife with potential for emotional exploitation, and numerous writers have taken advantage).  The TV series simply didn't provide sufficient raw material for the introduction of soap-opera elements.  With THE LIFE AND TIMES OF $CROOGE McDUCK still well in the future, the show's explorations of Scrooge's past were comparatively straightforward, and they focused almost entirely on his individual exploits.  The Nephews and Webby were too young to enter "the dating zone" and similar locales where adolescent Weltschmerz might have a chance to get its hooks into them.  As for Launchpad, he was primarily concerned with where his next crash was coming from.

Of the main cast of DuckTales, Fenton Crackshell came the closest to experiencing some legitimate angst, thanks to his occasionally rocky relationship with Gandra Dee, the demands of his "M'Ma," and his struggles to reconcile his "normal" and superheroic identities.  However, these experiences  were generally played for laughs.  The mere fact that such stories were attempted with Fenton indicates just how promising a character he was... and what a shame it was that he was left abandoned on a metaphorical siding following the TV series' shutdown, with no further opportunities to build upon the ideas that had already been introduced.

The prolific fanfic writer "Commander" appears to have reasoned, logically enough, that, in order to introduce any heavy-duty emotional dynamics into the world of DuckTales as a whole, the characters would have to be pushed forward in time.  OK, I know what many of you must already be thinking...

... and, yes, HD&L are thrust into middle school in the epic under discussion here, but there's little indication that "Commander" was influenced in any meaningful way by Quack Pack.  During the traumatizing events of "The Sincere Fraud, " the boys are anything but ironically detached snark-dealers. 

"Commander" apparently planned to write a whole series of fics set in his personal version of the DT "universe" -- which turns out to be a mixture of the world of the TV series and his own take on Don Rosa's LATO$M timeline -- but "The Sincere Fraud" turned out to be the only major product that survived the vagaries of time and the demands of "real life."  He did, however, manage to set the table for the story in the reminiscence tale "Sepia Tone," which basically consists of the seven-year-old Louie finding an old family album and asking Scrooge to tell him about some of his and his brothers' "foreducks."  It's a pretty quick read, and I encourage you to give it a look if you get the chance, but here's a summary of the significant takeaways.  Some of them will be quite familiar, some not so much.

(1)  The McDuck siblings, in order of age: Scrooge, Matilda, Hortense (as per Rosa).

(2) Matilda married Ludwig Von Drake (as per the Rosa Family Tree) and died young.  Scratch "A Letter from Home" (preferably, while shedding a silent tear or two).

(3) Hortense married Quackmore, and they had Donald and Della two years apart.  That is, Donald and Della were not twins.  This fact actually turns out to be rather significant.

(4)  Quackmore joined the Navy during World War II and died in action when Donald was nine years old.  Since Donald was a "Mama's boy" and never really that close to his Dad, that was what really motivated him to join the Navy... AND, more than that, to make the service an actual career.

(5)  Della was the proverbial "bad seed," getting into repeated, and increasingly serious, trouble as a youngster and developing a knack for conning people into making them do what she wanted them to do.  In the process, she also developed a bad feud with her older brother Donald.  Don's original intention, to keep her from running completely off the "road of life," was actually a good one, but he ultimately got so angry at her that he came to believe that he had always hated her.  For her part, Della resented Donald trying to butt into her life, and he similarly assumed the role of a monster in her own troubled mind. Della ultimately got knocked up by someone or other -- I'm guessing that the picture of Della's anonymous mate on the Rosa Family Tree is meant to be a generic composite; if so, then it's probably an overly flattering one -- and had her triplets, Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

 Idealized portrayal of Duck relationship #1

(6) Incapable of supporting herself, yet desperate to provide for her kids, Della tried to rob a bank and was arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison.  The Nephews, who by that time were three years old, were subsequently transferred over to Donald's care.  The famous 1938 DONALD DUCK Sunday strip that introduced HD&L is therefore in error in at least one respect: The document that was sent to Donald to inform him of the transfer was probably a lot more formal than a simple handwritten note.

(7)  At the age of five -- yes, you read that right -- Donald joined the Navy, and HD&L came to live with their next closest relative, Scrooge.  Commence the events of DuckTales.  IF you can buy the idea of the Nephews being that young at the start of "Don't Give Up the Ship," then this actually explains a lot about why the characters act the way they do during the "dock scene."  As I noted in my review of that episode, it is quite clear that the Ducks of "Ship" do not know one another all that well, and it is therefore next to impossible to imagine them sharing any joint adventures between the time Donald assumed charge of the Nephews and the time he left to go to sea.  Heck, even if they had wanted to have an adventure, there was hardly enough time for them to do so!

Take a moment to consider the consequences of this setup.  "Commander"'s interpretation takes the events of "Don't Give Up the Ship," and subsequently of DuckTales, as being the TRUE Duck "canon," at least in an adventurous sense.  Any previous tales told by Barks (basically, the only Duck-bard who was relevant at the time of DT's debut) are hereby rendered null and void... EVEN THE ONES in which Donald and HD&L went on adventures all by themselves!  We're dealing with the cleanest of whiteboards here!

(8)  Webby was three years old when she and her "grammy" came to live with Scrooge and HD&L.  Despite Webby's occasionally "childish" behavior, that age also seems a little low.  Perhaps young Ducks mature at a quicker rate than humans of a similar age.  (If nothing else, then their memories improve quickly; HD&L do not have any clear memories of their mother, but, in the span of two years, their memories are suddenly working on roughly the same level as a typical adult's.)

Flash forward a decade or so.  Scrooge is older and creakier, and he now allows himself the luxury of a day off every week (gasp!), but he remains feisty and driven.  HD&L are now 14, are in eighth grade, and have developed very distinct personalities.  Webby is 12, is in sixth grade, is about to start dating, and may also harbor a secret crush on Dewey.  Mrs. Beakley, sad to say, is in a nursing home with Alzheimer's disease, and Scrooge has become Webby's legal guardian.  Donald is still in the Navy, albeit on leave, and Daisy is pushing him to finally "pop the question" (about time, don'tcha think?). 

** MAJOR SPOILERS **

THE STORY:  Having secured an early release from prison for good behavior -- or what would pass as such for a character with a temperament that's just as explosive as Donald's -- Della comes to McDuck Mansion in search of a fresh start... and, perhaps, some assistance from Scrooge to help her get her life back on track.  The Nephews have very different reactions to her.  "Troubled kid" Huey is suspicious of her motives, partially because he sees himself in her but doesn't want to end up like her. "Intellectual" Dewey tries to weigh the available evidence and maintain some objectivity.  "Optimistic, sensitive, and creative" Louie, meanwhile, embraces the idea that his Mom has returned and accepts her wholeheartedly.  When Donald proposes to Daisy and is turned down (for a presumed "lack of sincerity" -- sheesh, even Barks' Daisy never came close to being THAT fickle!), Donald has a mental breakdown that requires him to be cared for by Scrooge.  With Donald and Della now forced to be in close proximity, their long-standing feud flares up, in the manner of a particularly wince-inducing hemorrhoid.  When Ludwig von Drake calls from Europe to check in with Scrooge, the increasingly stressed tycoon jumps at the chance to invite Ludwig to his mansion, where the prof will be able to provide some much-needed therapy for Donald and Della.  Alas, Huey chooses this moment to explode in frustration at his role as the "put-upon," least favored Duck triplet, and he chooses his "cousin by adoption," the "perfect porcelain doll" Webby, as his primary target.  Events finally come to a head when Donald and Della get into an ugly fight at a restaurant at the same time that Scrooge, beset by familial dysfunction, finds himself at the mental -- and, more importantly, the physical -- breaking point.  Can this family be saved?...

PLOT:  The unraveling and subsequent reraveling of the Duck family.  That's pretty much all that happens.  (*** out of *****)

One of the problems with "angstfics" is that there is usually quite a lot going on -- of the emotional variety, anyway -- but nothing is actually happening.  To his credit, "Commander" doesn't completely succumb to this trap.  We only hear about Donald's post-turndown breakdown at second hand, from the policemen who come to tell Scrooge about the incident, but the restaurant ruckus is "on screen" and is appropriately nasty, complete with cursing and knives wielded with deadly intent.  Adding to the noxious atmosphere is the fact that Donald had been on a blind date and had been confronted and dressed down by an angry Daisy before Della even got there, making Don's reaction to Della's subsequent arrival all the more malicious.  (You may wonder why Daisy should even care that Donald has plunged back into the dating whirl, given that she had turned down Don's proposal.  Sorry, I got nothin'.)  Apart from this one ugly scene, "Commander" basically sticks to dialogue scenes (frequently involving arguments) and uses very little action. 

I know that there are those who love this sort of thing.  I typically don't count myself among their ranks.  At least "Commander"'s dialogue scenes are usually well-written and, given the characterizations that he has chosen to use here, generally believable.  They're just somewhat painful to read through at times.

CHARACTERIZATION:  "All over the map" doesn't begin to cover it.  (***1/2 out of *****)

There's no denying it... some of "Commander"'s decisions on characterization here are a little tough to stomach.  Take Huey, now... he's basically a complete asshole.  He "acts out" in school, breaks curfew, bullies the more passive Louie into spying on Scrooge and "his mysterious visitor" (Della), and pelts Webby with crudely sexist insults even before he verbally attacks her (and is apparently also ready to SLUG her!!) for being the cute little "favored child."  He's like the egocentric Huey of Quack Pack with the amp set at "11."  It's hard for me to believe, as "Commander" suggests (through the medium of Huey's thoughts), that Huey got to be this way because of some school pranks that just got out of hand.  There's a definite suggestion of something uglier having been there under the surface all along.  That thought kind of disturbs me.

Donald and Della, whose feud is sufficiently nasty to render them both as contemptible as Huey from the start, nonetheless wind up faring a bit better in the long run.  We all know about Donald's legendary (and supposedly "hilarious") temper, and Don did have a few minor blowups during his infrequent appearances on DT, but his outbursts here seem uncomfortably... realistic.  We are led to believe that the authorities may have had a point in examining Don at the psychiatric hospital before releasing him into the care of Scrooge.   To his credit, though, Donald rallies after Scrooge's cardiac event, pulls himself together, and even manages to make up with and become engaged to Daisy before the end.  (Daisy... fickle.  Just saying.  Actually, the reconciliation is handled very well, with both characters admitting that they will inevitably have arguments as husband and wife, yet deciding to get married anyway.  That's what makes a marriage work... the partners recognizing and accepting one another's flaws while, at the same time, cherishing the more meaningful feelings that drew them together in the first place.)

"Commander," of course, has more direct control over the characterization of Della, and he basically opts for the "female version of Donald" notion... the difference being that Della's temper has tended to have much more serious consequences in her life than Donald's has had in his.  This is why Della suffers through such despair after her fight with Donald at the restaurant gets them both tossed in jail.  She had been making some progress with Ludwig's help and now appears to have tossed it all away.  This was the first moment at which I legitimately felt bad for Della and hoped that she would, indeed, get control of herself and reform.  She subsequently earns additional points by deciding to leave Scrooge's mansion, move into a homeless shelter, and pick up the pieces of her life without being a burden on others.  (In response, Scrooge allows her to keep her job as a janitor at the Money Bin, despite all the problems she's caused.)  The change of heart comes very late in the game, and after Della had amassed a pretty sizable likability deficit, but at least she winds up making some progress, and I do appreciate that.

Idealized portrayal of Duck relationship #2

The rest of the gang is characterized fairly well.  Scrooge is Scrooge, albeit with a few thousand miles extra on him, and Webby is a reasonable advancement of the DT character to the lip of adolescence.  (Webby's "desperate" desire to be accepted at her new school does strike me as a little extreme, though.  Why haven't all of those adventures with Scrooge and the boys given her more self-confidence?)  Ludwig von Drake's bubbly enthusiasm provides a nice counterweight to all of the troubles swirling around him.  He can't completely escape the imperatives of an angstfic -- he is still clearly affected by Matilda's early death -- but he serves as a welcome voice of reason, and his psychiatric dissection of Donald and Della is far more adept than, say, his semi-comical analysis of Launchpad in the DT version of "The Golden Fleecing."  In a sidebar, "Commander" says that Ludwig is one of his favorite Duck characters, and his affection for the loquacious polymath is on clear display.

I also admit to being quite taken with the characterizations of Dewey and Louie.  Dewey is an intellectual with a heart; he wants to be supportive of others but prefers to get as many facts as he can about the case before committing himself.  Thus, he learns that Webby's "big first date" was a disappointment and immediately moves to comfort and counsel her, but he reserves passing final judgment on Della until he becomes more familiar with her.  Louie, meanwhile, is akin to the sensitive-souled kid of Quack Pack who wanted to protect "pugduddies" and such.  The difference is that he is even more trusting and optimistic.

HOMEWORK:   Only relevant when it comes to Duck Family Tree material. (N/A out of *****)

These are basically "Commander"'s own future versions of the characters, so it's not all that surprising that he does not refer to any of the TV episodes.

WRITING AND HUMOR:  The story is very well-written.  The humor is... well, quirky, for lack of a better word.  (***1/2 out of *****)

"Commander" has an odd way of slipping humor into unlikely places in the narrative.  When two policemen come to inform Scrooge of Donald's breakdown, one of them inexplicably starts acting like a character in a goofy cop comedy:

"Can I tell the story, officer?" asked the other policeman, younger and more hyper than his supervisor.

The older one sighed.  "Go ahead, Korwitz..."

Korwitz spread his arms out dramatically, as if about to begin an epic tale.  "Dateline, Duckburg, eight o'clock last night!  Location, the Dragon's Head restaurant, 825 L Street!  Incident, a broken-hearted Duck goes crazy, overturning tables and eating napkins!  Cloth napkins, not the paper kind!"

Considering that Scrooge, because of the return of Della, is already on edge as this scene begins, this strikes me as not exactly the most opportune time to shoehorn in some (rather forced) comedy relief.  Later, when HD&L and Webby visit Scrooge at the hospital, we get an awkward exchange that I think was supposed to pass for some manner of humor, in which Scrooge teases the youngsters' assuming responsibility for his hospital bill... or, barring that, his insurance premiums. Unnecessary cheapness gags during a family-wide crisis?  Not a smart editorial move.

QUESTIONABLE MATERIAL:  Occasional curse words, though none of the REALLY bad ones, and argument scenes that are sometimes difficult to endure.  Plus, one fairly nasty fight scene.

OVERALL:  ***1/2 out of *****.  RECOMMENDED, BUT WITH RESERVATIONS.

This one is definitely a matter of taste.  If you don't like watching the Ducks -- even slightly altered versions of same -- bickering like a hypercaffeinated version of The Fantastic Four, then I would suggest that you avoid.  If you're curious, or if you're indifferent to the notion of mutual Duck-breaking, then you're extremely unlikely to find a better version of the DuckTales angstfic anywhere in Googleworld captivity, so have a look.

NEXT FANFIC UP: Time for the Big Kahuna, the Top Boss, the Meat Grinder.  "DuckTales: 20 Years Later."  You'll definitely have to be patient with me on this one.  It's 125,000 words long, it features multiple crossovers, and a WHOLE honkin' load of stuff -- some of it quite untidy -- comes down in the process.  I may even have to break the review into several parts: one setting the stage by describing the world in which the story takes place, the other examining the story itself.  So as not to tease my reading public unnecessarily, I will not announce the review's impending arrival(s?) until I am just about finished with the project.

Comics Review: DISNEY'S FOUR COLOR ADVENTURES, VOLUME 1 (July 2011, Boom! Studios)

For all the optimistic good cheer evident in David Gerstein's introduction, I think that we're more likely to see the deployment of a FIFTH color than to see a follow-up to this collection of American Disney comics rarities. That's not to say that the reprintings of ONE SHOT COLOR COMICS #4 (February 1940) and ONE SHOT COLOR COMICS #13 (1941) -- to give these tomes their rather awkward "official" names -- aren't heartily appreciated. As, respectively, the first all-color English-language Disney comic and the first comic-book adaptation of a Disney (sort of) feature film, they deserved to be brought back into the light.

COLOR #4 is as meat-and-spuds as it gets -- a great, quivering, 64-page hunk of DONALD DUCK daily-strip reprints from early 1939. The strips are presented one after another, without even the slight attempt at gag-dividing that was seen in the first two issues of WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES. With the idea of American Disney comics being so new at the time, I wonder how many readers unfamiliar with the nature of the DONALD strip thought that the "narrative" was "mighty confusing." While the collection of work by Bob Karp and Al Taliaferro (..."with Carl Barks"? Why wasn't that explained?) suffers from the same "law of diminishing returns" that plagued "Gladstone II"'s relentless reprinting of old strips in its DONALD DUCK title, the gags are somewhat easier to take now that Donald has graduated from his previous stint as "The Compleat Asshole" and is now starting to faintly resemble the harried suburban Everyman and ineffective parental figure whom Barks would inherit and raise to a higher creative plane. The Nephews (whose earliest appearance in the SILLY SYMPHONIES DONALD Sunday strip are also reprinted here, complementing an informative article on Taliaferro by Thomas Andrae) have likewise been toned down from their earliest, most "hellionish" incarnation and are now just as likely to flummox Unca Donald, or innocently get him into trouble, as to actively torment him. Sometimes the point of a gag has curled up and died in the intervening seventy-plus years -- when was the last six-day bike race YOU saw? -- but most of them are pretty decent, even today.

COLOR #13 is a fairly thorough "panelization" of the various featured items in The Reluctant Dragon (1941), now perhaps best remembered as (1) the first appearance of a Goofy "how-to" short ("How to Ride a Horse"); (2) the first big-scale "How it's Made" tour of the Walt Disney Studio, as experienced by humorist Robert Benchley (who himself famously pioneered the "how-to" genre in a series of live shorts); (3) the film that came out during the bitter Disney strike of 1941 and thereby mocked its own "just one big happy family" pretensions. David Gerstein describes how artists Irving Tripp and Jack Hannah relied on storyboard materials to produce this pioneering effort, but Tripp almost takes it too far in his adaptation of "The Reluctant Dragon" itself, drawing "backgrounds" that are more like a rumor and using pose after pose that appear to have been cadged directly from the 'boards. This can also be seen in Tripp's adaptation of "Baby Weems," but that was presented in the movie in storyboard format to begin with. "Dragon" was more ambitious and deserved better, but instead, we get static poses and text, text everywhere. Several full pages include just one smallish character drawing afloat in a sea of explanatory verbiage. It's as if we've gone back to the dawn of the comic strip at times. At least the figure drawing is good. Jack Hannah's putative rendition of the Donald short "Old MacDonald Duck," which was also presented in rough format in the film, and "How to Ride a Horse" (artist unknown, according to inDucks) look a bit more like many of the original Disney comics that would be coming down the pipeline in the early FOUR COLOR days, though there is still lots of text. (I do hope that the letterer got paid more than anyone else for this issue.) There's an unexpected bonus in the form of a text adaptation of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" from Fantasia (1940), the first attempt of several to put this story into comics format, and a column about Fantasia (which was then in the process of bombing big-time at the b.o. in first release) by Leopold Stokowski. Since The Reluctant Dragon was seen as a "cheater" by many critics at the time, the inclusion of the Fantasia material here may have been an effort to give the Dragon adaptation "class by proxy," not to mention convince just a few more folks to go see Fantasia in the process.

Boom! has made many missteps in its handling of the Disney characters, but one can't really fault the company's archival efforts, nor the high quality of the CLASSICS hardbound line. Had Boom! refrained from reprinting everything it released in the early stages and reserved the collections for "special events," perhaps its bottom line would have been boosted and the traditionalist fans whom the company turned off with its radical "new directions" would have been sufficiently mollified to support the company. Sometimes, I think that Donald's Nephews should have been named Coulda, Woulda, and Shoulda when they appeared in Boom! releases... If this is, in fact, the last of the vintage wine, then it was a generally enjoyable potable on which to part ways.

Comics Review: WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES ARCHIVES, VOLUME 1 (April (sic) 2011, Boom! Studios)

I don't know how many of these we're going to get, but I'm sure going to try to enjoy them! Though this first volume only reprints WDC&S #1-2 (October and November 1940), the reprints are facsimiles, complete with original advertisements and promotional offers (which an introductory note helpfully informs us are no longer valid), plus such quirky text features as a dance lesson in the "Donald Duck Doodle," which was (1) actually referenced in a "TNT" story six decades later and (2) evidently NOT the only such feature in the early WDC&S, according to David Gerstein's informative introduction. Given the choice between more issues per collection and thoroughness of the reprints offered, I'd have to opt for the latter.

David describes the early issues of WDC&S (as it transitioned away from the text-heavier MICKEY MOUSE MAGAZINE) as "endearing, tentative, imaginative, clumsy, and full of genius all at once." For sure, #1 appears to have been a "shakedown cruise" of sorts as formatting bugs were worked out. The first feature in #1, ironically enough, is a text story based on the Disney short The Robber Kitten (1935). It's almost as if Western Publishing were attempting to reassure parents that stories would, too, be a key part of the revamped magazine, but starting with a story when "Comics" are the prominently featured item (in a bigger font on the cover, yet!) still seems strange to me. The reprints of Al Taliaferro's DONALD DUCK daily strips are printed three to a page without any clear dividers indicating that one strip was ending and another beginning. The first part of the reprint of Floyd Gottfredson's classic "Island in the Sky" simply begins with no particular fanfare, apart from a subtitle that wouldn't have been out of place in a Sunday gag page of the era. The final chapter of "Mickey Meets Robinson Crusoe", a serial carried over from MICKEY MOUSE MAGAZINE, gets somewhat better treatment with a "title bar" that would come to be standard formatting for many of the vintage Gottfredson reprints to come. Of course, that wouldn't have helped those who'd never purchased MMM but had decided to give WDC&S a try, so there's yet another self-inflicted formatting problem.

Issue #2 solves some of the aforementioned problems but unearths others. The new "secondary" MICKEY feature, "Oscar the Ostrich," has its title on the first page, but doesn't formally introduce the story otherwise. Part two of "Island in the Sky," meanwhile, which readers of #1 would presumably have anticipated more than any other feature in #2, is shunted to the back of the issue, behind "Oscar"! You might, if you were so inclined, regard this as a precursor of sorts of the MICKEY serials that would wind up issues of WDC&S for many years, but the placement here seems pretty arbitrary. Progress is seen, however, in the use of geometric dividers to split up DONALD strips (though the transitions are still sometimes difficult to recognize) and a "last month, as you recall..." text box in the first panel of "Island" part two.

Nattering over formatting issues aside, these first two "numbers" of WDC&S gave readers of 1940 considerably more than their money's worth. The generous samplings from Gottfredson's prime period are the obvious highlight at this point, but the Taliaferro strips are spotted effectively without wearing out their welcome (sideways glare at "Gladstone II"'s DONALD DUCK), and the text pieces are primarily adaptations of Silly Symphony cartoons, a prose accompaniment of sorts to the verse-versions run in GOOD HOUSEKEEPING. It's intriguing to note that Western saw nothing wrong with depicting button-eyed and pupil-eyed versions of Mickey in the same issue, when the transition was apparently regarded with much more trepidation at the animation studio. (One story I've heard is that an animator sarcastically suggested that the studio "pupil" Mickey's eyes one at a time to help the audience accept the idea.) It probably helped that Mickey and company were still very much a presence in movie theaters at this time and that the redesigns of the major characters had occurred fairly recently, so that many readers -- even some of the younger ones -- might have been familiar with both versions.

It's a shame that this fine collection is being released at a time of such uncertainty regarding Boom!'s "degree of stewardship" of Disney comics. Here is where soliciting support from the "general" comics community might help the company's cause. Anyone seriously interested in the history of American "Golden Age" comics is a potential customer for WDC&S ARCHIVES and should be approached as such. If Boom! gets enough broad-based support, Disney might even think twice about taking "classics reprint projects" away from the company. Given the high quality of most of Boom!'s efforts along those lines, that would be a very good thing.

Comics Review: WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES #719 (May 2011, kaboom!) ... with an Irritated Postscript

Pretty dull stuff in this issue, with the drab tone being set by William Van Horn's leadoff DONALD tale, "The Heat of the Moment." The Van Horn of 20 years ago would no doubt have taken the story premise of "volunteer emissions inspector" Donald searching for "hot spots" around Duckburg and turned it into a zany satire of the whole climate-change debate, complete with loonily obsessed oddball characters. Instead, this tale's climactic gag about City Hall producing the most "hot air" in town has been around since the days of Aristophanes and would certainly not have been considered nearly ridiculous enough to make Bill's "silliness cut" back in 1990. Donald's pale-pastels pseudo-feud with fellow volunteer Neighbor Jones and repeatedly frustrated attempts to uncover emissions are presented with an almost po-faced lack of real humor. The overall weariness is exemplified by Van Horn's spending 2 1/2 pages on Donald's laborious attempts to wring readings from a pair of smokestacks, as opposed to tattooing us with a series of short, sharp gags, which would seem to be the preferred approach here. You can't even get a real reading on the point Van Horn is trying to make about climate change. Does the climax suggest that Bill thinks that the issue is nothing but "hot air"? Then why does the TV newscaster who opens the story play his doom-saying perfectly straight?

The 1965 Jack Kinney-Al Hubbard DONALD AND FETHRY story "Water Sports" is what it is, as only the "Cool Kids" used to say before everyone got in on the act. Fethry ropes Donald into trying water-skiing and quickly gets his cousin in "hot cold" water. Strangely, though the two Ducks are clearly arguing in the last panel, Hubbard draws them in silhouette as if they are both smiling or laughing.

Thanks to a big assist from David Gerstein, the 1988 Dutch LI'L BAD WOLF story "Het Robotlinger" ("Pop's Army") is arguably the best thing in the issue. Buying an army of robot wolves (with what? Since when does he have a source of income? Or has he discovered the secret of getting credit from Acme?), Zeke tries to wear down the Three Pigs' defenses by sacrificing his metal minions one at a time. Geez, John D. Rockerduck isn't as profligate. Li'l Bad (charmingly drawn by Dick Matena) uses some impromptu pseudo-tech of his own to save the Pigs' bacon. Not exactly a complicated story, but David's clever references to the likes of Lost in Space, Hamlet, and Styx (!) make it fun.

kaboom! advertises the issue's last feature as "a classic Al Taliaferro DONALD story not seen in the U.S. in over 60 years!", but all this wonder-work amounts to is a one-page Sunday strip in which Donald literally must "cover his tracks" in order to ogle a bathing beauty without Daisy finding out. At least the gag ties in with the announced theme of "a slew of classic stories perfect for the beginning of Summer." The real question is: once next month's WDC&S #720 comes and goes, will we ever enjoy another Summer in the company of new issues of WDC&S?

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One of the other kaboom! books released this week was UNCLE $CROOGE #404. This is certainly not strange. What is strange is the ad on the back cover of U$ #404, extolling the new ongoing DUCKTALES series "drawn by modern Duck master Miquel Pujol (sic)." Uh, guys, the statute of limitations has expired on that particular claim. Time to put this ad to bed!

Comics Review: DONALD DUCK #365 (April 2011, kaboom!)

I must admit to being far more impressed with Federico Pedrocchi's 1938 adventure "Donald Duck: Special Correspondent," the second half of which appears in this issue, than I would have guessed I would be, even given the promise of "The Secret of Mars." The artwork is a little on the pedestrian side, but the storytelling remains first-rate to the end. Donald even gets to use his brains in a scheme to trick Sargassian General Sour into thinking that the sailor-suited fowl is the reclusive General Sweet. At a time when the movie Donald was still locked into predictable displays of "hilarious" temper and the Donald of the Al Taliaferro comic strip spent most of his time being frustrated by foes both animate and in-, treating Donald as being fully capable of carrying a serious adventure was a legitimate departure. Were it not for the somewhat stiff artwork and a comparative lack of humor (though David Gerstein does a great job of papering over the latter fault), "Correspondent" would rank with some of the better Gottfredson adventures.

In his review of "Correspondent," GeoX discusses the sociopolitical ramifications of the story (hard to ignore, given that Pedrocchi was publishing in Mussolini's Italy during the omen-filled late 1930s) in some detail. One interesting point Geo makes is that the choice of "good guys" and "bad guys" in this story is completely arbitrary; Donald and Peter Pig wind up helping Sylvania, but primarily because that happens to be the country that houses the reclusive General, and even the Sylvanians (more specifically, their justice system) give the boys a hard time at first. While Gerstein does a beautiful job with the dialogue at virtually all points, I think that his choices of the names "General Sweet" and "General Sour" for the opposing commanders somewhat obscure this point. Those names lead us to support the former (despite his unwillingness to reveal himself) and suspect the latter, when, in fact, there's no real difference between them and the "non-causes" their armies espouse. Something more neutral like "General Frick" and "General Frack" would have been better; unfortunately, that particular pairing has already been taken, but I'm sure that a similar pairing could have been doped out.

The rear of the book features a true curio: a retelling/rehashing/carbon copy of "Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold" in the decidedly disposable form of a 1947 one-tier giveaway comic that was placed in Cheerios boxes. Jack Hannah, Carl Barks' artistic partner on the original "Pirate Gold," returns to do the honors for the imaginatively titled "Donald Duck and the Pirates" and performs reasonably well, to the extent that the artist/animator remembers which leg the grizzled old parrot Yellow Beak carries his peg on more consistently than he did in the original story. The script, attributed to Chase Craig, holds absolutely no surprises, being a radical simplification of the treasure-hunt scenario of "Pirate Gold." Even the villainous Black Pete's more slovenly grammar reflects a simpler mind at work. It's being overly complimentary of "DD and the Pirates" to describe it as a sequel to "Pirate Gold," as David Gerstein notes in an afterword; the real thing, a 1962 Italian story, will be appearing in DD #366 next month. Consider "DD and the Pirates" an appetite-whetter -- say, for a non-discriminating kid eating cereal.

Gott Rights?

This project has been "teased" for a long time, but it appears to be about to come to pass. It will certainly be an "acid test" for the acceptability of politically incorrect material; Fantagraphics' PEANUTS, KRAZY KAT, and THIMBLE THEATER collections contain no material quite so dicey as that seen in, say, "The Great Orphanage Robbery" or "An Education for Thursday." FG's well-regarded ongoing collections, however, have bought the company quite a lot of good will, which no doubt helped during the negotiating process.

Will this collection extend to the end of Gottfredson's working career, in 1975? I rather doubt it. Previous efforts to collect the Mouse master's work stopped when the format switched permanently to "gag-a-day" mode in the mid-50s. Even before that time, in the 1940s, when the gag format was occasionally used for brief periods of time, the quality of the gags was not exactly top-notch. (In particular, the gags tended to put Mickey in a surprisingly bad light more often than not, though he never came off as badly as Donald consistently did in Al Taliaferro's strip.) I'll definitely call it quits once the adventures trail off, but how nice it will be to have such a luxury to begin with!

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In his comments on the Gottfredson Library news, GeoX wonders whether Disney is sending a signal to Boom! by assigning the publication rights to Fantagraphics. If I were Boom!, I'd be a bit more concerned about this news. The TRON graphic novel -- which, with its "departures" from the movie cast and storyline, certainly sounds like a setup for a continuing series to me -- is different from the Library in that it's an honest-to-goodness original comics creation. Are we now simply counting down the days until Disney flips all of its remaining comics over to Marvel?