Book Review: WALT DISNEY'S UNCLE $CROOGE AND DONALD DUCK: THE DON ROSA LIBRARY, VOL. 1 by Don Rosa (Fantagraphics, 2014)

Quick turnaround time, indeed: Volume 2 of this collection just landed at my comics dealer's this past week.  (Volume 3, by contrast, isn't slated to be released until next June.)  Since a good deal of the matter in these initial tomes has been reprinted several times in the past -- by Gladstone and Boom!, to be more specific -- and can easily be found to pristine-or-close-to-it condition, I'm not all that surprised that Fantagraphics got this new reprint project off to a fast start.

I was an anomaly among the many unsuspecting readers who bought Gladstone's UNCLE $CROOGE #219 (July 1987) and were hit square in the face with a brand-new $CROOGE adventure story, crafted by an American, no less.  Thanks to an article in COMICS INTERVIEW magazine, I knew who Don Rosa was, how much he admired Carl Barks, and even something about THE PERTWILLABY PAPERS, the fan project that provided the template for the plot of "Son of the Sun."  I even recognized Rosa's nascent art style -- which one of the very few negative letter-writers to the U$ lettercol criticized as "nervous and scuzzy-looking" -- as an extension of sorts of the style he had previously used for his personal comics.  (I was not aware of the fact that Rosa basically cribbed virtually all of the Duck-poses in "Sun" from Barks drawings... though, now that Rosa has made me aware of the fact, said fact seems pretty obvious in retrospect.)

You'll pardon me if I classify the appearance of Rosa in general and "Sun" in particular as one of TWO great "booster shots" that Scrooge's career received in '87, the other, of course, being DuckTales.  At the time, I was unaware that DT was on its way -- the good thing AND the bad thing about today's instant-gratification world is that very few such pop-culture bombshells still catch us by surprise -- but the arrival of a new and promising American Duck creator clearly presaged a future for American Disney comics that went above and beyond "simply" reprinting Barks classics and serving up treats from abroad.  And so it proved to be.

In the COMICS INTERVIEW piece, Rosa said that Barks' anonymity during his working career could be considered an advantage of sorts, because it gave Barks the freedom "to just try and please himself."  And that is precisely what the Rosa adventures, short stories, and gag pages of 1987-88 reflect: an inexperienced, but talented and enthusiastic, creator, who was simply trying to craft the best Duck tales he possibly could.  Yes, a lot of the artwork is crude and clunky by Rosa's standards of the 90s and the aughts, but it's not REALLY that terrible -- William Van Horn's early gag pages for Gladstone got more catcalls -- and the writing is good from the off.  Rosa's bold willingness to put his pen to the service of eye-popping, oversized individual panels (the explosion that hurled the Temple of Manco Capac into the empyrean in "Son of the Sun" was the first and, arguably, the most famous example) indicates a creator who is willing to punch above what would seem to be his artistic weight, at least at this time, and such risk-taking would serve Rosa well as his sense of finesse improved.  Most importantly, the pretension and "weight-of-the-worldishness" that beleadened numerous Rosa projects during and after THE LIFE AND TIMES OF $CROOGE McDUCK is almost entirely absent.  In "Last Sled to Dawson" (UNCLE $CROOGE ADVENTURES #5, June 1988), Rosa's first stab at Glittering Goldie, the sentiment underlying the entire story is only revealed at the very end and is kept quite low-key, Rosa's spangled and flashy "staring into my memories" final panel notwithstanding.

Most indicative of the fact that Rosa was still taking these early jobs with the lightheartedness that they reflect is the observation that he was perfectly willing to do "ten-pager"-style domestic stories during this period.  In his "Behind the Scenes" story notes, Rosa has some fun with the idea that he doesn't have much to say about the content of these stories, but, then again, there wasn't a lot of content in most of Barks' "ten-pagers," either.  (There were exceptions, of course, but a lot of fans tend to remember those "sports" and then make mistaken generalizations as to the quality of the lot.)  A couple of these efforts -- "Mythological Menagerie" (WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES #523, October 1987), in which Rosa wears his considerable research into obscure mythological creatures rather lightly, and "Metaphorically Spanking" (WDC&S #531, August 1988), in which Rosa delightfully subverts his soon-to-be-ironclad rule that Donald, and NOT HD&L, should always be the member of the Duck clan to take the major abuse -- stand out as legitimately superb.  Even in these tales, though, I get the sense that Rosa was straining at the leash, unsatisfied with painting on such a relatively small canvas.  By the time he got to the "operatic" part of his career, such "minor" creations would, for the most part, be set aside.  When you're comparing Rosa to someone like Barks in terms of being a "complete" creator, that does have to count as a debit.

 

"The Rosa Archives," presented at the back of the volume, appears to be Rosa's version of a biography of sorts.  If so, then he's booking through it at double time, since part one takes us from his birth up until "The Son of the Sun."  Oh, please tell me that I'm wrong... does this mean that part two is going to be one gigantic rant about how that evil Disney corporation (does any "artistic type" believe in a GOOD corporation anymore?) refused to give him back his original artwork to help him make a living?  I haven't opened Volume 2 yet -- a few other items on my current "pile" are on top of it -- but I'm hoping that Rosa exercises good judgment on that score.  (BTW, there's a funny photo in this section of a teenaged Rosa smiling like a split cantaloupe over a pile of comics that he's just recently acquired.  He looks for all the world like a maniacal teenaged Bobby Fischer with glasses.  I kid you not.)

Book Review: ENDGAME: BOBBY FISCHER'S RISE AND FALL by Frank Brady (Crown, 2011)

Frank Brady, author of PROFILE OF A PRODIGY, one of the best books on the rise of Bobby Fischer to the World Chess Championship in 1972, is "back at the board" with a full-length general-reader biography that completes Fischer's bizarre odyssey to (and beyond?) "the edge of madness" and the man's pathetic end as a stateless, anti-Semitic quasi-hermit in Iceland, the site of his great victory. Brady certainly knows as much about this strange genius as anyone, and he does deliver a readable book, but the end product is not what it could have been, thanks in large part to Brady's patchy (to put it mildly) and occasionally cynical (to put it harshly) use of material from PRODIGY. A "newbie" unfamiliar with chess literature will no doubt have a more positive opinion of the work.

To give him his due, Brady does expand upon some events that were only touched upon in the earlier book. He gives a good description of Bobby's childhood and fleshes out such incidents as young Bobby's appearance on the TV game show I've Got a Secret in the late 1950s, but skims over some others that would appear to be particularly germane to the theme of Fischer the tortured genius. Why not more on Ralph Ginzburg's ATLANTIC MONTHLY interview with Fischer from 1961, a piece which did considerable damage to Fischer's reputation very early in his career? Brady describes the Fischer who appeared in that portrait as "homophobic" and "misogynistic" but doesn't give us any particulars. When the subject turns to Fischer's amazing run through the qualifying rounds prior to his 1972 duel with Boris Spassky, Brady suddenly "becomes a camera," reproducing entire passages from PROFILE verbatim. Other writers have been able to dig up much more information on the Fischer-Spassky match (especially now that the old Soviet archives have been opened) and produce highly enjoyable works. The fact that Brady did not avail himself of these new data was highly disappointing.

Fischer's post-1972 life makes profoundly depressing reading, and Brady's book is at its most interesting (in a perverse sort of way) here. While he had a certain ability to charm people, Fischer's devouring need to control all aspects of his environment ultimately drove all but the most loyal of his compatriots away. His late-in-life anti-Americanism (e.g. his notorious cheering for "death to America" after 9/11) is attributed in part to a late detonation of warnings about "FBI snooping" passed on by Fischer's leftist mother, but the cynic in me is more inclined to blame his legal quarrels over money and unwillingness to pay taxes. (This is, after all, a man who wanted to be paid more for a chess championship defense than Muhammad Ali and George Foreman got for their "Rumble in the Jungle.") There is something touching in Fischer's desire to find romantic love as he aged, but in all other respects he is a particularly noxious example of how genius can destroy itself from within. I certainly think that there will be better Fischer biographies in the future, but this is a good "first draft" of Fischer's twisted history.

Book Review: WHITE KING AND RED QUEEN by Daniel Johnson (Houghton Mifflin, 2008)

This was a most refreshing read! Subtitled "How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chessboard," this book describes how the Soviet Union made a conscious effort to promote chess as a propaganda weapon during the Cold War... and how the resulting "chess machine" was challenged by three very different threats that each portended the crack-up, not only of the USSR's dominance over world chess, but of the USSR itself. What makes the narrative -- which could have been quite dry and pedantic -- so powerful is the author's pronounced anti-Communist stance. No punches are pulled and no "moral equivalence" is tolerated. In his preface to the American edition, Johnson, a British reporter, notes that this uncompromising stance earned him some criticism when the book was published in the U.K. From my point of view, we should all have such detractors.

The three aforementioned "threats" to post-WWII Soviet chess hegemony were Bobby Fischer, the troubled American genius who defeated champion Boris Spassky in a 1972 match that put chess on the front pages of the world's newspapers; Viktor Korchnoi, a Soviet defector who barely lost to Anatoly Karpov in a pair of contentious, occasionally bizarre matches in the late 1970s and early 1980s; and Garry Kasparov, who wrested the title from Karpov in 1985 -- though not without a fair share of controversy -- and gradually drifted from a supporter of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms to outright opposition to the Communist regime, a position he has since maintained vis-a-vis Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation. The Fischer story will be familiar to most American readers who are interested in chess and has been told in greater detail elsewhere, and Johnson plows relatively little new ground when discussing Fischer's career, his relationships with the world and the Soviet chess establishments, and the Fischer-Spassky match. Korchnoi and Kasparov, however, have never truly gotten their due in this country, and this book serves as a useful corrective. Korchnoi, in particular, may have been an even graver threat to the Soviets than Fischer, since he had been a well-established grandmaster in the USSR before falling afoul of the authorities and choosing to abandon the Soviet system in favor of the West. Paranoid and superstitious Korchnoi may have been, but the saying "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you" never contained more truth than it did in his case. Kasparov -- who's best known in this country for losing to the computer "Deep Blue" back in the 1990s -- was younger, much more of a "world citizen," and, once he made his break with the Communists, a much clearer indication that the regime that had nurtured his talents had lost the ability to control them for its own purposes.

In between the sections dealing with Fischer, Korchnoi, and Kasparov, Johnson discusses such topics as the history of chess, the fates of post-Revolutionary emigrants from Russia, the fact that the vast majority of great chess players have been Jewish, the uses of chess in various literary contexts related to the Revolution and its aftermath, and the Jewish dissident Natan Sharansky, a chess player of promise who used tactics adopted from the chessboard to maintain his intellectual independence from the Soviet state. This renders the narrative somewhat choppy at times, but Johnson does manage to "thread the needle through the popcorn" in ingenious ways, e.g., discussing the development of chess-playing computer programs in the context of the failure of Soviet technology to keep up with that of the West. Those who know nothing about chess need not worry about diagrams and game summaries; this is strictly an historical narrative that can be read by anyone with an interest in the Cold War -- and, thankfully, never loses sight of who was "black" and who was "white" in the overall struggle.