Book Review: FUNNYBOOKS by Michael Barrier (University of California Press, 2014)

What Michael Barrier did for the history of classic Hollywood studio animation in HOLLYWOOD CARTOONS, he does here for the golden years of Dell Comics and its most accomplished and historically significant creators -- Walt Kelly, John Stanley, and, above all, Carl Barks.  While devoting most of his critical attention to this trio of greats and the ways in which they helped shape the development of the American comic book into an art form with its own distinct verbal and visual language, Barrier also unearths facts and highlights overlooked personalities in a manner that is sure to surprise and delight even the most knowledgeable Dell/Western Publishing fan.

As was the case with HOLLYWOOD CARTOONS, FUNNYBOOKS had an extremely long gestation period, with Barrier using interview material from as far back as the 1960s to help craft his narrative.  Barrier also draws upon material used in his 1981 book-length study of Carl Barks, but he expands greatly upon that earlier work.  Perhaps his most important critical achievement here is his in-depth illumination of exactly how Barks, who famously worked in isolation and with minimal (at first) editorial interference, became one of the very first comics creators to "crack the code" and essentially discover how to tell effective stories in comic-book form.  Barks fans have always known of the Old Duck Man's mastery of narrative, but they will come away from this discussion with a newfound appreciation of the wider importance of his work.

Barrier pretty clearly considers Barks to be primus inter pares even among the "really good ones," but Kelly and Stanley get their due and then some.  Kelly's creation and development of the POGO characters is covered in detail, as is Stanley's work on LITTLE LULU, but Barrier brings their other notable comic-book works (e.g., Kelly's stories for OUR GANG and his fairy-tale and Christmas comics, Stanley's honing of his craft in NEW FUNNIES) under similar critical scrutiny.  As was made quite clear in HOLLYWOOD CARTOONS, Barrier is a very astringent analyst, and it takes quite a lot for a story to wring praise out of him.  Everyone who knows these creators will probably disagree with Barrier's assessments at some point -- for example, I think that he is much too harsh on Barks' more loosely-wound, but still immensely entertaining, UNCLE $CROOGE stories from the 1960s -- but he always has a well-considered reason for his opinions.

The "extra material" here is what really lifts FUNNYBOOKS to "instant classic" status.  Anyone who has ever wondered about the precise relationships between the various corporate subsidiaries and allies grouped under the spreadeagled "Western Publishing" umbrella -- Whitman, K.K. Publications, Dell, Gold Key -- will have any and all questions answered to their satisfaction here.  Interested in the early history of LOONEY TUNES AND MERRIE MELODIES, the Warner Bros. "answer" to WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES, or in how Dell handled such significant "non-funny-animal" licensed properties as TARZAN and various movie cowboy heroes?  You'll learn about some of these comics' most accomplished writers and artists here.  Perhaps the biggest surprise is a brief discussion of "the Jim Davis shop," an association of artists who produced "funny-animal" challenges, of a sort, to Dell's humorous hegemony for the notorious comics entrepreneur Benjamin Sangor.  It's nice to see the exquisitely obscure characters that came out of this outfit get some recognition, even if Barrier's primary purpose for bringing them up is to demonstrate how their comics failed while the best of Dell's succeeded.

If I have a small nitpick here, it is with Barrier's comparatively brusque brushing-aside of the Gold Key era.  Yes, that era did see ill-considered format and price changes and increasing editorial restrictions, but there was a whole lot of high-quality material being produced at that time, as well.  (See Joe Torcivia's 50th Anniversary tribute for numerous examples.)  I fully realize that Barrier's intention was always to focus on the years before the Dell/Western split, but a few extra pages discussing some of the GK highlights couldn't have hurt.  Anyone want to pick up the bracketed torch (as opposed to fallen; it's not as if Barrier failed, after all) and try writing a sequel?

So, what are you waiting for?  If you care at all about the Dell Comics that truly WERE "Good Comics," or simply about the history of quality comics in general, FUNNYBOOKS virtually defines the term "MUST-GET."

Book Review: WALT DISNEY'S MICKEY MOUSE, VOLUME 6: LOST IN LANDS OF LONG AGO by Floyd Gottfredson (Fantagraphics, 2014)

We've finally hit the mother lode of the early-modern (read: "post-pie-eyed" and "pre-all-gags-all-the-time") MICKEY MOUSE strip.  If I had to choose a single era of Floyd Gottfredson's prime creative years in which I felt the strip was at its very best, it would be 1940-42, the years covered in this volume.  No single story jumps up and presents itself as a "smack-you-across-the-face" classic on the order of "Mickey Mouse Outwits the Phantom Blot," but all of them are, at the very least, good.  Merrill de Maris' imaginative verbal interpretations of Gottfredson's plotting is at its best, while Bill Wright's inking is slick and confident.  The locations of the stories spreadeagle the map; to take the most head-spinning example, Mickey jumps from a bloody, near-deadly encounter with the primitive inhabitants of the "Lost World" of Cave-Man Island ("Land of Long Ago") right into the catty "drawing-room comedy of manners" (so saith yours truly, in an introductory essay) that is "Mickey Mouse in Love Trouble."

A fan's appetite for revisiting (or, in such rarely-reprinted cases as "Mystery at Hidden River" and "Mickey Mouse, Super Salesman," making initial acquaintance with) these tales is made all the keener by the knowledge that major changes in the strip were just over the horizon.  De Maris departed the scene in 1942, Dick Moores assumed the inking chores soon after, and we would have to negotiate several long stretches of gag strips before Bill Walsh took firm control of the plottery... and promptly steered the stories into very different, though still highly entertaining, channels.  Thad Komorowski has a good point when he fingers "Hidden River" as the last adventure that could be said to fit the "prewar Gottfredson adventure model." (This is quite literally true: Pearl Harbor was attacked just as Mickey was riding down a log flume, heading for the end of the North Woods encounter with a newly pegless Peg-Leg Pete.)  The happiest thought that one can take away from these tales is that the "prewar model" rolled out of the shops in first-class condition, rather than gasping to the finish line.

** SPOILERS **

The best story herein?  Well, I'm kinda prejudiced in favor of "Love Trouble," but even I would admit that an actual adventure needs to take pride of place, and I'm perfectly fine with Byron Erickson's praise of "The Bar-None Ranch" as an ideal story to show a "Gottfredson newbie" so as to pique his or her interest in seeking out more of the strip.  The story has very few plotting problems and a good mix of humor, action, and "forward thinking" (Peg-Leg Pete's use of a scientist's "dinguses" to create the illusion that he is an unstoppable master crook).  In addition to being a bit more sedate -- not to mention a bit dated in its portrayal of feminine "wiles" and overall bitchery -- "Love Trouble" also contains an annoying flaw, one that I did not mention in my essay but have always found irritating, nonetheless.  In order to get back at Minnie's stepping out with the caddish, superficially debonair Montmorency "Rodawn," Mickey calls on his cousin Madeline to play the role of visiting debutante Millicent Van Gilt-Mouse, who becomes smitten with him.  At one point, though, when we see Madeline call Mickey on a house phone, Mickey answers and refers to her as "Millicent."  What, does he think Minnie has the phone tapped?  They're conversing in private, so why just call Madeline by her real name?  And it would have been so easy to have fixed the problem, too, by having the two meet at a cafe or something.  OK, it's not as obvious a flaw as the sudden change of the mysterious ghosts in "Bellhop Detective" from three-dimensional spooks to 2-D projections on a wall... it's just that this story came SO close to stone perfection.  I can't help but be just a LITTLE resentful.

Insert "beach/bitch" gag here.

We begin to get inklings (and even a few overt mentions) of the war era in "Hidden River" and "The Gleam."  One possible essay feature that I would like to see in the next volume -- which will take us deep into the war years -- is how depictions of the conflict in the MICKEY strip changed over time.  I've only had extensive exposure to the Walsh-scripted continuities from 1944 and 1945, and some of those stories could certainly be considered more or less escapist.  I seem to recall that there was far more actual war-related material (including war-themed gags) in the strip during the first few full years of the conflict.  At least we won't have long to wait to test my theory.

Feature material in this volume includes a cartoon tribute by Stephen DeStefano (of Disney Comics peak-years fame), reprintings of several panels' worth of examples of the Gottfredson "redraws" that appeared in WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES in the late 40s and 50s, and an "Heirs of Gottfredson" piece on Carl Barks that includes a color reprinting of Carl's one MICKEY adventure, 1945's "The Riddle of the Red Hat" (FOUR COLOR #79).  For something that Barks claimed to not be his "cup of tea," this story is surprisingly good.  Barks certainly didn't mail it in; he does a particularly good job of writing Goofy. 

One comment of Gottfredson's concerning this era that probably should have been mentioned somewhere in here was his claim that the revenue from the MICKEY strip and the other ongoing Disney strips was literally keeping the straitened Walt Disney Studios above water in the early 40s.  (Recall that Pinocchio [1940] had been a box-office disappointment, the first release of Fantasia [1940] was an out-and-out bomb, and the war had cost Disney the overseas market.)  How about a statistical report at some point on how successful the MICKEY strip actually was?  Do those data even exist any more?  It's worth a dig through the appropriate archives, if you ask me.

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.)

A POST-"DUCKTALES RETROSPECTIVE" PERSPECTIVE: "A Dime in Time"

Let's get right into the spirit of things and (mentally) travel 20 years back in time, to that fateful moment in 1994 when Joe Torcivia introduced himself to the "small but mighty" audience of the late, great Disney Afternoon-themed APA WTFB with the first installment of his now-legendary THE ISSUE AT HAND.  The comic that Joe reviewed in that first effort was Disney Comics' UNCLE $CROOGE #259 (October 1991).

U$ #259 was the third installment of an ingenious "Duck comics crossover event" dreamed up by Disney Comics Managing Editor Bob Foster.  "The Time Tetrad" linked together four unrelated Duck stories, all of which featured a spheroidal time machine created by Gyro Gearloose.

"Book One": "The Secret of Atlantis" by Byron Erickson (English dialogue) and Vicar, in DONALD DUCK ADVENTURES #17.  Any relationship to a story by Carl Barks, or, for that matter, a certain DuckTales adventure of more recent vintage, is hereby discounted with extreme prejudice. 

"Book Two": "Dirk the Dinosaur," the featured story in WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES #564, again by Erickson and Vicar.  Interestingly, this story was the first installment -- officially, it was labeled "Chapter 0" -- in an actual series of much lengthier time-traveling adventures which Inducks flags as the "Time Machine graphic novels." 

"Book Three": "The Only Way to Go/Travel," in the aforementioned U$ #259, yet another Erickson/Vicar joint.  Disney Comics' BETWEEN THE LINES list of the month's releases uses "...Travel," while the story itself uses "...Go."  Both versions of the title appear in Inducks.  And now my head hurts.

"Book Four" is our main concern for the nonce: DUCKTALES #17's "A Dime in Time", written by Bob Langhans and drawn by the usual assortment of "credited-by-name-but-in reality-all-but-anonymous" Argentinians who toiled for the Jaime Diaz Studios.

Unlike the other stories in the "Tetrad" series, "A Dime in Time" takes up the entire issue.  What's more, it ends with a scene the setting of which would have seemed quite familiar to those who had been following the DUCKTALES title.

That's right, we're going into overtime.  It's yet another Bob Langhans cliffhanger, of the exact same sort which so enlivened "The Gold Odyssey" (DT #9-15).  My opinion of the latter story has been on record for quite some time, and I see no reason to alter it in the wake of the short-lived Boom! revival of the DUCKTALES title.  When it comes to DT comic-book stories that appeared in America and captured the authentic spirit of the series... well, this is as good as it gets, folks.

Thankfully, "A Dime in Time, Part Two" turned out to be the actual conclusion of the story, as DT #18 (November 1991) ran smack into the onrushing shock wave that was "The Disney Implosion."  Dan Cunningham's coverage of the "Implosion" era (the link shown above) as part of his survey of the history of Disney Comics is as thorough an exposition as we are likely to get of the affair.  If the details are unfamiliar to you -- or even if you think they are familiar -- then I highly recommend that you read the whole thing.

Well, at least another Langhans multi-part story got into print before the heavens fell, right?  And this one is bound to rival "Odyssey," if not in scope, then in terms of overall quality.  Right?

When I reread "A Dime in Time," I found that I could remember no details about it whatsoever.  Evidently, my "memory bone" was unconsciously doing me a favor.  "Time" doesn't measure up to "Odyssey" in any way, shape, or form.  It doesn't come close.  From the evidence provided in the story, I'm not even sure that anyone who directly worked on this story -- writer, artists, editors -- was paying it more than the most cursory attention.

Even the much-admired Bob Foster can't escape some criticism here.  He had to vet the tale on the American end, and I can only excuse his signing off on some of the egregious continuity errors and sloppy storytelling that fatally compromise Part One as the result of a desperate desire to find SOME way to give DUCKTALES its place in the "Tetrad."  Part Two flows more smoothly, but is also somewhat duller, due to all of the action basically taking place in a single venue, and it doesn't end so much as stop, with an abruptness that is violent enough to give one literary whiplash.

We begin Part One with a typical DuckTales Beagle Boy raid on the Money Bin that proceeds in the expected fashion, "expected" being in the second-season sense.  (By contrast, "The Gold Odyssey" started with Scrooge already in the throes of high adventure, stubbornly snow-catting his way through an Alaskan blizzard.  Steee-rike One.)  Magica De Spell has been crystal-eye-balling the Beagle siege and has a better (but aren't they always?) plan to snag her eternal heart's desire, Scrooge's Old #1 Dime.  She's going to use a time machine to literally go "back to the Klondike" and snag the coin from young miner Scrooge.

Magica later describes the pictured gizmo as, and I quote, "a time-warper from the 23rd century."  And Magica acquired it how, exactly?  Sure, she's a sorceress, but she's not capable of something like THIS, is she?  Or perhaps she is.  As Langhans writes her throughout the story, Magica's powers appear to be "whatever is necessary to perform a particular task," including those tasks the achievability of which would seem to be above her pay grade.  Apparently, Langhans never stopped to consider that, if Magica had the inherent magical ability to nip ahead in time and steal a time-travel device, then she wouldn't have NEEDED a time-travel device in the first place.

I also have a problem with the whole notion of Magica snookering Scrooge in his virile, full-of-beans Klondike phase.  I had certain issues with Don Rosa's "Of Ducks, Dimes, and Destinies" (UNCLE $CROOGE #297, April 1996) when it first appeared, mostly related to the whole idea of mucking around with the charmingly simple (and, lest we forget, non-Barksian) idea of Scrooge obtaining Old #1 after shining a Glaswegian ditchdigger's boots, but Magica going back to 19th-century Scotland to take advantage of a 10-year-old Scrooge makes much more logical sense. 

Magica decides to put the device to a test (she should really have done that in the 23rd century, I'm thinking) by making the Beagle Boys younger.  In the process, she leaves the rest of Duckburg in the present.  I have NO earthly idea how that works. Nor can I savvy how the Ducks (well, Scrooge and Louie, at least) are literally able to sense that "something weird is going on here" in the space of a single panel:

Scrooge had last been seen chasing the Beagles with murder in mind two pages back, but mentioning that fact seems a bit like piling on at this point.  Seriously, HOW did Scrooge and Louie figure that out?!  I suspect that even "ol' Al Einstein" (how colloquial of you, Magica) would be unable to come up with a good explanation for this.  At this point, the story is falling faster than my old pants did when I tried to put them on after my post-surgery weight loss.

Magica takes off for the past in the Ducks' very faces, conveniently explaining her plan in the process. She even tells Scrooge her exact destination; she's headed for "Uppa Creek" in the Klondike, where she'll presumably find a general store selling "Ahilla brand beans" and "Aloafa brand bread".  Evidently, Magica has done enough research on Scrooge that she knows exactly where he hung out during his mining days, at least in this somewhat dubious version of his past.  Scrooge corrals Launchpad (whose participation, along with a couple of early-Barks-style HD&L rescues, arguably comprise the sum total of high points in this entire effort) for assistance, and the Ducks ask Gyro to get his Time Coupe out of mothballs.  It appears that the events of "A Dime in Time" are taking place a good deal of time after the events of the other three stories in "The Time Tetrad."  Well, Gyro did once say, "Toy with time and you're asking for trouble."  Perhaps he finally admitted to himself that he had been right all along.

See Gyro there, in the lower right hand corner, hiding the Time Coupe in the bushes?  Take a good, long look... because you won't be seeing him again.  That's right; the story still has 40-odd pages to go, and Gyro is nowhere to be found on any of them, even after the Ducks have moved on to another point in time.

Seriously... there are no words.  After this scene, Langhans evidently forgot that Gyro had been a member of the cast, and no one editing or reviewing the story caught the error!

Are there sharks in the Klondike, and is there a location where one can jump them?

Leaving Gyro in limbo for the duration, the Ducks head to town, where Magica successfully gets them in Dutch with the local authorities by framing them as wanted bank robbers.  In so doing, she proves able to materialize and manipulate whatever she requires in order to make the ruse seem at least reasonably convincing to the rubes.  I can kinda-sorta accept the magical puppeteering, but creating material objects out of thin air with her own bare hands?  Has Magica ever displayed that sort of ability before?

If the bottom panel of that page looks a bit more like the Old West than the Klondike... well, that's because the town of Uppa Creek gradually does morph into a Western town as the story goes on, with the snow cover being the only material difference between the two venues.  I guess that either Langhans didn't know about the true nature of the Klondike, or he simply didn't care and went with what he did know.

The captured Ducks are soon in jail, faced with a grim fate, which Langhans describes sans veils of any sort.

"We'll string up them no-good polecat varmints, eh?"

A wee echo, there, of some of the grimmer moments of "The Gold Odyssey," such as the magus being buried alive or Flintheart Glomgold being marooned on the planet Sarros.  Granted, HD&L are ultimately let off with life in prison -- perhaps their jail cell will be renamed the "uninvited guest room"? -- but this is pretty stern stuff for a DuckTales romp.  Or limp, "as the bee may case."

Meanwhile, Scrooge confronts young(er) Scrooge and demands Old #1, though she goes about doing so in a fairly slipshod manner:

Er, Magica, "that shiny dime" may not BE Old #1.  How can you be certain from that distance?  And how do you know that Scrooge's entire fortune is lying on his bed?  (Actually, we are led to believe that it is, but Magica couldn't have been expected to have known that.) 

The believably feisty young Scrooge doesn't take kindly to Magica labeling him a "jerkymonger" (isn't that someone who works for the Slim Jim company?) and knocks her down a hill, turning her into a giant snowball in the process.  She must get knocked unconscious, or something, because we quickly move back to Scrooge and Launchpad's meet-up with impending doom.

HD&L subsequently escape and, taking advantage of the fact that all of the spectators at the hanging are conveniently standing on one side of the gallows, pile up sacks below the trap door to break S&L's fall.  Before the supposedly-fatal-but-now-not-so-much drop, Scrooge commits what he really ought to know is a big boo-boo, especially in this venue.

Earlier, when faced with denying his ID as the notorious outlaw, Scrooge had tried to pass himself off as the fictitious "Jim Smith," which makes logical sense.  This... does not.  The potential effects of the goof are subsequently exacerbated when the newly-free Scrooge and Launchpad join with HD&L in helping Klondike Scrooge try to keep the dime away from Magica.  To be fair, Scrooge doesn't fall into the same trap again, saying more or less cryptic things like "we have a lot in common" and "[we are] kindred spirit[s]."  But I'm afraid that the empty bag is already lying on the ground, and the cat is nowhere to be found.

Now... when you consider that I had a major problem with the ghosts of departed members of the McDuck Clan helping to shape Scrooge's destiny in Rosa's "The New Laird of Castle McDuck" (UNCLE $CROOGE #289, December 1994), how easily do you think I bought THIS little scenario?  Putting aside the issue of the "lucky" dime for the moment, given the immense symbolic relationship that Scrooge will come to have with Old #1, it is tough to imagine him completely forgetting this series of incidents, which were most likely the first such to distinguish Old #1 from the rest of Scrooge's stash.  The possible impact of "remembering a meeting with his future self" on Scrooge's subsequent progress is, well, monumental.  For example, modern-day Scrooge makes the offhand comment that young Scrooge should "hold tight to that dime" because "it's going to carry you far in life."  Can you imagine a memory of that comment helping to buck up young Scrooge's spirits at difficult points in his future life... and consequently helping to dictate some of his actions?  I certainly can.  The fact that young Scrooge sees the Ducks and Magica taking off in their time machines, and that Old #1 suddenly returns to him, as if by magic, at the end of Part Two, would most definitely set him to thinking about the true nature of the mysterious visitors whom he'd previously called "daft."  He'd need something on which to cogitate during those long winter nights on Uppa... er, White Agony Creek.

When it comes to Scrooge's origins, I prefer keeping things as straightforward as possible.  No time-traveling interventions, ghostly buttinskys, or dumb-lucky oil strikes, please.  Rosa's LIFE AND TIMES OF SCROOGE McDUCK was a monumental and, generally speaking, worthwhile endeavor, but I tend to lean a bit towards the sentiment of longtime fan-friend Dana Gabbard, who opined (re Rosa's epic in WTFB) that Scrooge's background, as presented by Barks, was part fact and part fiction, thus rendering Scrooge a classic example of a mythical or legendary figure, like Paul Bunyan. Pinning such a character down with too many specifics tends to reduce him to "just another adventure hero with a well-detailed past."  When you start throwing fantastic elements into the mix... well, just as Gyro said happens when you "toy with time," you're asking for bad vibes to rear up and bite you.

Part One ends on that cliffhanger panel of Magica (who had just stolen Old #1 back from the Ducks) and our gang flying through... the intertemporal medium, I guess.  Launchpad's attempt to hitch a ride on the surface of Magica's time device proves unsuccessful but has the side effect of knocking her progress askew, sending her to the Old West (not to be confused with the Klondike, unless you're reading this story).  Not that the Ducks themselves know quite "when" they're going, of course... though, when the dime slips into a time vortex, Launchpad seems mighty confident in his ability to track it, no matter "when" it goes.  Nice of Gyro to have given the Ducks all the information they needed to artfully manipulate the Time Coupe before he... he... heeeeeeee...

Hopefully, someone will reseal the "Universal Plug" in time.

For the vast majority of the story's 19 remaining pages, we'll be spending our time in ancient Rome, shuffling through our dog-eared index cards listing all the "ancient Roman" cliches that have accreted over the millenia.  Greedy, self-centered, bloodthirsty emperor... check.  Arrogant Roman soldiers and gladiators... check.  Ducks (well, Scrooge and Launchpad) being thrown to the lions... check.  Vaguely appropriate "period insults" like "rabble," "cur," "carbuncle," "toad," "harpy," "plebian [sic] dog," and "wretch"... check.  (Scrooge is also called an "infidel," which belongs to another period entirely.)  Sticking "-us" at the ends of words... check.

What saves the sequence, at least for me, is Launchpad's performance.  By doing nothing more than just being himself -- with all the good and bad that that implies -- he inadvertently creates crisis after crisis for the other Ducks, who ultimately become so spooked by his presence that they literally run away from him when it seems like he's about to step in it once again.

In classic LP style, Launchpad uses his own improvisational skills to best the most persistent of his tormentors, an overbearing, Bluto-like "greatest gladiator" named Detractus Finalus.  Say what you will about Langhans' performance here, but he definitely knows how to write Launchpad.

HD&L once again do their part as well, neutralizing the lions slated to gobble up Scrooge and Launchpad in a manner strikingly similar to (that's a politically correct way of saying "exactly the same as") a gambit they used in a well-aged Barks adventure.

At least Scrooge and Launchpad weren't summarily thrown out of Rome for being such "disgraces to the Empire" that even tigers wouldn't touch them.

Somewhere in the midst of all this, Magica has arrived, using her crystal ball as a sort of temporal GPS (there's that "rubber-sheet flexibility" of her powers turning up again...) and subsequently disguising herself as the Emperor's bitchy wife in a failed attempt to trick Scrooge out of Old #1.  Thereafter, she resorts to good, old-fashioned zappery.  The gang nonetheless manage to take off in the Time Coupe, leaving Magica behind, and fly back to Duckburg, where, in Scrooge's absence, the ever-persistent Beagles have broken into the Money Bin with the aid of what Bouncer calls "this super acid we swiped from the lab."  You know, you know... THAT lab.  The Time Coupe arrives just in time to decisively squash their hopes...

Bozhe Moy!  Baggy is Russian?!

... and, if you can believe it, that's a story.  No return of Magica, no explanation as to what became of Gyro.  That's it.

So, was Bob Langhans just the Duck comics writers' equivalent of a one-hit wonder?  Hard to say.  He wrote a number of other DUCKTALES stories, some of which were published in the UK, but most of the images I've been able to find of them on Inducks are from Dutch publications.  Most of the other stories appear to be of the fairly modest variety, ranging from 6 to 16 pages.  For sure, "A Dime in Time" and "The Gold Odyssey" were, by a considerable margin, the most ambitious DT tales he ever wrote.  If one of these epics had to be second-rate, I'm glad it wasn't "The BIG One."

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Next, I'm going to turn my attention to DuckTales fanfic that can be found on the Internet.  As I mentioned before, while there isn't all that much of it to be found, I have found a couple of works worth commenting upon.  Any illustrations will have to be of the generic variety, of course, but that's what comes of working with text stories.

My first review along these lines will be of a rather modest, lighter-veined story, but more ambitious efforts are on the docket.  Here's one preview that may intrigue you:

Imagine that someone took Don Rosa's famous image of Scrooge's 1967 gravesite seriously... very seriously... and used it as a jumping-off point for the Nephews' future lives.  In the world of DuckTales.  And Darkwing Duck.  And TaleSpin (circa 1970 or so).  And even Goof Troop.  Now imagine that the story rated somewhere between PG-13 and a "hard" R.

Yes, really.

Disney Comics: NEXT PUBLISHER UP!

While he was attending the New York Comic Con, Joe Torcivia passed word along to me that "classic" American Disney comics are finally on their way back.  So, did Disney finally grow a brain and realize that, hey, it now owns one of the world's biggest comics outfits (Marvel), so Disney should oblige it to get cracking?  Well, um, no.  The publisher is actually going to be IDW.  Surprise, surprise!

Let's look at IDW's official announcement of what it terms "a monumental collaboration" and see what we can glean from it:

This monumental collaboration kicks off with multiple monthly series featuring some of the most iconic characters of all time: Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto, Minnie Mouse, Goofy, and many more! Re-presenting acclaimed comics from the past and today, these series will highlight the best and brightest of Disney’s impressive comic catalogue.

Looks as if the old standby titles -- MICKEY MOUSE, DONALD DUCK, UNCLE $CROOGE, and WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES -- have some life left in them yet.  Hopefully, IDW will know who to consult regarding identification of the "best and brightest," starting with those people who made the final few months of Boom!'s Disney comics line so enjoyable.  Given IDW's interest in publishing adaptations of animated series (MY LITTLE PONY, ROCKY AND BULLWINKLE, and various CARTOON NETWORK series, just to name a few), could some Disney Afternoon-related titles also be in our future? 

The award-winning Artist’s Edition line, pioneered by IDW, that showcases original artwork, will feature collections from the immense talents who have contributed to many beloved Disney comics over the years. Artist’s Editions featuring the legendary Carl Barks and Don Rosa will receive the spotlight in these gorgeous over-sized collections of original art reproduced at full size.

Sounds good, too.  Given the collector-focused nature of the Artist's Edition line, it is likely that the regular comics will be pitched at both collectors and new readers.  American Disney comics MUST do something to increase the pool of potential patrons, or we all are simply going to die out! 

Launched in 2014, Micro Comic Fun Packs have enjoyed immense success with highly recognizable franchises, and will expand its line with multiple Disney properties. Packed with a mini-comic, stickers, posters, and more, the Micro-Comic Fun Pack has been captivating new comic audiences on a mass-market scale.

OK, as long as IDW doesn't try to stuff comics material into boxes of ice-cream treats.  (A few of you will know what I am referring to there.) 

Celebrating the rich history of the many facets of comics, the Library of American Comics offers detailed and insightful looks at specific comics and creators. Beginning in 2015, the LOAC will begin collecting the various newspaper strips that have featured iconic Disney characters.

Given that Fantagraphics is releasing the Barks and Gottfredson collections even as we read, what could IDW have planned here?  Collections of the SILLY SYMPHONIES strips, perhaps?  I can't see them simply taking over from Fantagraphics.

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Back to personal musings... If IDW's handling of the MY LITTLE PONY franchise is any indication of how the Disney characters will fare in the company's hands, then there is every reason to believe that IDW will be good stewards.  Management of American Disney comics has been so erratic, whimsical, and downright perverse over the decades that I, for one, could stand for a spell of honest, reliable craftsmanship.  One open question at the moment is how "hands-on" Disney will be with IDW.  Actually, I'm inclined to believe at this point that Disney couldn't care less.  If Disney found it easy enough to ignore its alliance with Marvel, then Disney clearly saying that it's perfectly willing to let IDW take the comics off its hands (or somewhere near there), just as long as they don't have to deal with the issue any longer.  "Ignorance is bliss," Disney style?  It might actually be a blessing.

Book Review: WALT DISNEY'S MICKEY MOUSE, VOLUME 5: OUTWITS THE PHANTOM BLOT by Floyd Gottfredson (Fantagraphics Press, 2014)

By the time we run out of space in this latest Gottfredson collection, we're bumping up against what I consider to be THE ABSOLUTE prime period of the strip -- roughly, from 1940 to 1942.  Every single story during this period is a winner in every way, and, as fate would have it, we're going to get just about the whole schlemozzle in Volume 6.  Before that, however, we're obliged to crawl over a fair amount of the panelological equivalent of "broken glass."  Despite the presence of the single most famous MICKEY story of them all, "Mickey Mouse Outwits the Phantom Blot," the 1938-1940 dailies reproduced here vary dramatically in quality and force the reader to choke down a carload of racial stereotypes, mostly of the black persuasion.  (Even the appearance of the Blot himself was partially inspired by the looks of two Negro children called "The Blots" in the old comic strip JERRY ON THE JOB.)  Some of the early reviews of Volume 5 have made quite a bit of this unfortunate coincidence.  It doesn't really spoil a context-conscious reader's enjoyment of this collection, of course, but those who are made overly squeamish by "unacceptable" pop-culture conventions past are advised to proceed with some caution.

One of the problems here is that some of the worst examples of stereotyping are married to stories that are unusually weak by Gottfredson's standards.  "Mickey Mouse Meets Robinson Crusoe" marks a significant turning point in Mickey's history, as the strip of December 22, 1938 suddenly finds The Mouse sporting pupiled eyes for the first time.  The context, confusingly, is the start of filming of a new MICKEY cartoon, an adaptation of the Daniel Defoe classic.  Not that Gottfredson hadn't tried framing gambits like this before -- see this volume for two such efforts -- but, given that the daily strip, unlike the Sunday page, had long since been dedicated to lengthy, real-world adventure narratives, using it here seems awkward.  Gottfredson's use of the "make-believe" cordon sanitaire becomes more understandable once we bite into the heart of the story: a messy slumgullion featuring an irritatingly nebbishy, "pink-tea" version of Crusoe and "island natives" who talk like Stepin Fetchit.  It's every bit as embarrassing as it sounds.  Remarkably enough, Gottfredson did a sequel of sorts to "Crusoe" in "An Education for Thursday," wherein friendly (and lazy, and hungry) native Friday sends his "almost twin brother" Thursday to Mickey to acquire some "edumcation."  IMHO, "Thursday" wears a bit better than "Crusoe" only because Thursday is a primitive savage, as opposed to a deep-Southern knockoff, and it's not hard to mentally replace Thursday with DuckTales' Bubba Duck and interpret Gottfredson's three months' worth of "fish out of water" gags as a sort of "early director's cut" version of "Bubba Trubba."

"The Miracle Master" and "The Plumber's Helper", while far more satisfying than "Crusoe" and "Thursday," suffer from another problem that seems to have been bothering Gottfredson during this period: an inability to wrap up his stories in a reasonable amount of time.  "Master" takes a reasonably short time to make its basic cynical point about the futility of well-meaning reforms (even magical ones) in a fallen world, but taking the show to "Genieland" to make exactly the same point seems like overkill.  The inadvisability of the double-dip becomes apparent when Mickey's visit to "Genieland" quickly devolves into a series of gags.  Granted, many of the gags are pretty amusing, but you're ready for the story to be over long before it actually is, a rare experience for a Gottfredson reader.  "Helper" is a cleverly written mystery featuring one of Gottfredson's more intriguing visiting characters, but, given that it lasts almost 40 strips longer than "Phantom Blot" and has almost no action, it's not hard to imagine that Gottfredson could have sped up the story a little and sharpened its impact.

Aside from "Phantom Blot," the quality of which goes without saying, the best story in the book is "Mickey Mouse, Mighty Whale Hunter," the last great "true adventure" of the "pie-eyed Mickey" era.  It's got all the classic whaling tropes -- including, of course, a couple of ethnic stereotypes among the crew -- but Gottfredson doesn't fall into the trap of concluding the tale with the capture or destruction of the legendary whale "Ol' Barney."  His solution to the problem is far more subtle and gives Mickey one of his more memorable "compassionate moments."

Ancillaries include reproduced pages from the "softened" 1955 reprinting of "Phantom Blot" in WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES, in which the Blot's notorious deathtraps are redrawn by Paul Murry as considerably less perilous perils; a first-rate essay by Joe Torcivia on the history of the Blot; and a fascinating "Heirs of Gottfredson" piece detailing just how heavily the early works of Osamu Tezuka were influenced by "Phantom Blot."  It ain't subtle, gaijin.

DUCKTALES RETROSPECTIVE: Episode 90, "The Unbreakable Bin"

For obvious reasons, I'm not sure when I'll be able to do the next one of these. Take some solace from the fact that this final pre-surgery post is a honkin' huge one.

The last DuckTales adaptation of a Carl Barks story ("The Unsafe Safe," UNCLE $CROOGE #38, June 1962)... and I don't care whether you're an "old sourdough" who has every Barks re-re-re-reprint in your collection or a relative young'un who came to the comics through DT, but you REALLY have to be impressed with the job that Alan Burnett turns in here.  No sludginess as was seen in some of the earliest adaptations, no unwanted and unnecessary injections of "morals" as in "Down and Out in Duckburg," not even the introduction of made-for-TV characters into roles more or less unobtrusive, as in "Scrooge's Pet" and "The Land of Trala La."  Yes, yes, I know that Fenton/Gizmoduck appeared in this episode.  The point is that Burnett simply includes the trials and tribulations of Gizmo -- chucked into abrupt unemployment as the result of Scrooge's adaptation of Protectoglass as a new, and presumably the ultimate, bin-defense -- as an additional subplot.  At the same time, Barks' narrative -- leavened with what I believe to be judicious borrowings from a couple of other Barks stories -- is presented with only minor alterations.  That's a lot of material to pack into 22 minutes, and yet, Burnett's script never seems rushed or incoherent.

After reading through "The Unsafe Safe" and observing the story's relatively modest quotient of action, Burnett evidently felt that something needed to be added.  The Beagle Boys, in their brief appearance in Act One, do get the chance to directly imitate their Barksian counterparts, assaulting Scrooge's glass safe with sledgehammers and high explosives.  (Since the DT Beagles only try the explosive approach once, while the Barks Beagles repeatedly fail to use "the right amount" of TNT to blow up the safe, this sequence might be counted as one of the few times when the former could legitimately be said to have outperformed the latter.)

For Magica's mission, however, Burnett hauls out the big guns -- or celestial cannons, if you will -- and borrows from Magica's attack on the Bin in Barks' "For Old Dime's Sake" (UNCLE $CROOGE #43, July 1963).  Seeing as how the Magica of "The Unsafe Safe" tries to crack the vault with the dulcet tones of a series of musical instruments -- a gambit that one would expect a character like Pinkie Pie to be more apt to use -- one can understand Burnett wanting to permit Magica, in her only appearance of the Fenton-Bubba era, to display the full extent of her magical powers.

Magica only gets to hit the "Unbreakable Bin" with one comet, as opposed to the series of celestial objects that Barks' Magica uses, but the balance is redressed by the fact that we're getting to see the attack "live."  The visuals of the comet approaching the bin and the immediate aftermath of the impact are impressive, and I'm glad that the animators eschewed the cliched "dollar sign cloud" effect that we got at the end of "Money to Burn" in favor of what one might term a cleaner and more "classical" approach.  There's something just slightly comical about the manner in which Barks' comet and meteor strike the bin -- the pronounced sound effects may have something to do with it -- and letting the visuals and natural sounds speak for themselves was probably the correct choice for the TV version of the assault.

In case you're wondering... I don't regard this lifting of an aspect of another Barks story for use in an unrelated episode in quite the same manner that I did the use of material from, say, "Only a Poor Old Man" in "Liquid Assets."  "For Old Dime's Sake," created at a time when Barks wasn't doing Magica stories so much as gushing them out, is itself little more than a "string of incidents," so picking one incident to use somewhere else doesn't seem like such a big deal.  Like the added subplot involving Gizmoduck, I regard the "Dime's Sake" detour as an enhancement of the original story, as opposed to the plugging of important matter from another source into a completely different narrative.

Apart from "The Unsafe Safe," Barks' other significant tale of "material Money Bin encasement" is the ten-pager "Too Safe Safe"/"The Money Preserver"/"Imperviwax-ing the Money Bin" (WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES #171, December 1954), and I think that's there's a case to be made that Burnett consulted this story as well.  Not so much because DT, like Barks, portrayed its protected Bin as having no easily definable means of reentry into the structure...

... as because Scrooge takes advantage of the situation in both cases to divest himself of what he now regards as superfluous help (Donald in Barks' case, Gizmoduck in DT's).  It's not difficult to imagine Burnett drawing inspiration from Donald's post-Impervi-wax fate and reasoning that Gizmoduck was a logical candidate for a layoff.  In both cases, of course, Scrooge lives to know better... though Donald, unlike Gizmoduck, doesn't get a chance for satisfying redemption.

While Burnett may have gathered the material for his adaptation from several sources, the opening of "The Unbreakable Bin" is wholly original, a dazzling departure from the series' past visual practice.  In what looks for all the world like a dry run for the Frank Miller-inflected visual stylings of "The Masked Mallard" -- but one with even more of an abstract flair -- Scrooge's nightmare is a charcoal-tinted farrago of weird angles, exaggerated dimensions, curving corridors, and menacingly omnipresent Beagle Boys (who, significantly, are drawn in Barks "clone" mode, the better to emphasize Scrooge's subconscious paranoia).  Even the normally chipper DT background music becomes tense and ominous.  The looser drawing style of the later episodes helps here, as the various distortions don't seem quite as "detached from reality" as they would have been had this been a first-season effort.  Even so, the potency of the "nightmare fuel" is readily apparent.

GeoX draws a parallel between this opening and that of Marco Rota's Italian classic "The Money Ocean" (ALMANACCO TOPOLINO #215, November 1, 1974), and it's easy to see why.  In both cases, a sleeping Scrooge is unconsciously undermined by hordes of invading Beagle Boys.  The Scrooge of "The Money Ocean," however, keeps his fortune in a series of numbered Bins, so, even though the Beagles' imaginary raid climaxes with the "main" (#1) Bin, their string of sieges doesn't really have the impact of a single attack on the "One True Bin."  To his credit, Rota does slightly modify his normally elegant art style here in favor of a somewhat sketchier approach, especially when drawing background details such as a crumbled Money Bin, but the results simply don't compare to "The Unbreakable Bin" insofar as visceral imaginative impact is concerned.  There's nothing in "The Money Ocean," for example, as creepy as the scene in which Scrooge, having retreated to the "safety" of his vault, finds Beagles popping out of his money and, even worse, grabbing him by the webs and trying to drag him under.  Not even the Rota Beagles reenacting the famed attack of the Zulus as they lay siege to Bin #1 can match this.

Once the resistant properties of Protectoglass are displayed to Scrooge -- with Gyro Gearloose and Gizmoduck using tests very similar to the ones Scrooge employed at the start of "The Unsafe Safe" in the process -- the old miser is immediately eager to put the substance to the ultimate test, even going so far as to challenge the Beagle Boys to see if they can crack it.  In this respect, he is quicker off the mark than Barks' Scrooge, who didn't see the light shining through the glass, so to speak, until yet another Beagle assault on his Bin.  The glass of "The Unsafe Safe" is attributed to unnamed "scientists" in Scrooge's employ, since, thanks to an obscure postal regulation that was then applied to periodicals with second-class mailing privileges, Gyro, who starred in the backup story in UNCLE $CROOGE at the time, wasn't permitted to appear in both "his" story and the main story.  "The Unbreakable Bin" gives Gyro back some of his inventive dignity by letting him be the one who creates Protectoglass spectacles for Scrooge in the first place, just as he created Impervi-wax in WDC&S #171.

After trying and failing to best Protectoglass, the Beagles, as they did in "The Unsafe Safe," quietly retreat from center stage, allowing Magica to assume the role of antagonist.  Scrooge, meanwhile, takes HD&L on a celebratory trip around the world, on which he "splurges" -- but only up to a point.  To me, at least, this behavior makes far more sense than the equivalent jaunt in Barks' story, in which the cost of the trip is never mentioned.  Scrooge's line, "Now that I've stopped worrying about my money, I don't mind spending it!" may not sound right, but his actions here speak far louder than his words.  It's reasonable to think that it would take a while for Scrooge to really loosen the old purse strings -- if he ever will.

"The Unbreakable Bin" also takes the logical step of asking what might happen to the rest of Duckburg if it were to find out about the wonders of Protectoglass.  (It'd be hard not to notice how well the Bin withstood that Beagle assault; even "the little old lady across the street" who repeatedly complained about the noisy attacks in Barks' story might have stopped kvetching long enough to take notice.)  Since there is no indication that Gyro invented Protectoglass for Scrooge's exclusive use -- he does have many other customers, as even DuckTales recognized in "Sir Gyro de Gearloose" -- this is one instance in which all of society reasonably stands to benefit from one of Gyro's McDuck-inspired creations.  The consequence, of course, is that Gizmoduck isn't the only security guard thrown out of work.

So the cops from "The Good Muddahs" washed out ALREADY?  You might say I'm not surprised.

Having learned of Scrooge's absence (as she will later learn of Protectoglass' fatal flaw) thanks to her crystal ball -- if Scrooge ever gets wind of this method of omnipresent surveillance, then he'll REALLY have a reason to be paranoid! -- Magica blows into Duckburg, there to have a funny exchange with Gizmoduck the reluctant traffic cop.  The fact that Magica flies in on a broom is noteworthy in and of itself; she rarely did that in the comics, preferring instead to travel in comparative comfort on Vesuvius Airlines.  The use of the broom also complicates matters a bit later in that Magica, just as she did in "The Unsafe Safe," reaches Tanganyika/Quackanyeeka via canoe, leading one to wonder why she didn't just hop on the ol' stick and cut down on travel time.

Back in Tanganyika/Quackanyeeka, Burnett lightens the mood a bit by inserting the bad-comedy guide (did Chuck McCann suggest some of those jokes?) before returning to Barks "book" as Scrooge and HD&L encounter the Yeeker bird and learn of the damage it can do to Protectoglass.  The fateful moment of "initial breakage" is pretty much identical in both cases, right down to the close-up shot of Scrooge's specs being blasted to smithereens.

Scrooge's subsequent drafting of the natives to help him round up "all the Yeekers" (which, as in Barks, turns out to be surprisingly easy) is similarly kept intact, though Scrooge only agrees to pay $1 per Yeeker, as opposed to the $10 and $20 he offered in "The Unsafe Safe."  Nice consistency there from Burnett regarding Scrooge's maintenance of a thrifty attitude.  The DT Quackanyeekans, unlike their Tanganyikan brethren, don't speak, or, in fact, possess much of anything in the way of personality.  Not that Barks' natives said anything particular dicey, but, judging by DT's last attempt to depict an indigenous culture, perhaps it's all for the best that Burnett chose not to go there.

After "blowing into town" in perhaps the silliest and most pointless moment of the episode -- really, what did Magica channeling Launchpad's ability to crash accomplish that a simple fidelity to Barks' original would have? -- Magica uses her "stun ray" to immobilize Scrooge and the boys (not exactly a "foof bomb," but I'll take what I can get) and takes off for Duckburg with her Yeekers in tow, or, rather, towing her.  Again, Burnett sticks firmly to the Barks template here, auditory rip-off of a scene in "Frozen Assets" aside.

As the opposing forces make their way back to Duckburg, Gizmoduck is enduring the final indignity, serving as lunch wagon to a crew of hardhats with decidedly plebeian tastes.  (I suppose that Gizmo must simply have quit the traffic job; he certainly didn't do anything to justify being fired from that gig, at least not that we could see.)  As they have throughout the episode, Gizmo's travails provide a healthy number of laughs, but they also provide an additional comment on the utility of a hero, sort of a comedic counterpoint to Fenton's dilemma in "A Case of Mistaken Secret Identity," or even the fate of Mr. Incredible and the other "supers" in The Incredibles (2004).  When a superhero is laid low by the vagaries, hassles, and petty annoyances of everyday life, how does he or she cope?  The solution to Fenton's problem would seem to be to cut loose from conventional duty and set himself up as, well, a "Hero for Hire."  But Fenton's imagination doesn't, or can't, stretch that far; he sticks with more mundane employment opportunities.  At least Mr. Incredible tried to keep his heroic hand in, even as he was forced to hide his deeds from the public eye.

The two main narratives, which have been tracking one another like hounds on a scent up until now, finally diverge just a bit when Magica brings the Yeekers to the Money Bin and tries to break in.  (Technically, in Barks' story, she gets into the Bin easily enough but is balked by the safe, whereas she can't even get through the door in "The Unbreakable Bin.")  For my money, the windup of "The Unbreakable Bin" is far superior.  In both cases, a sleepy Yeeker puts a crimp in Magica's plans...

... but Barks' Magica then succeeds in breaking through and stealing the Old #1 Dime, only to be foiled when the other Ducks arrive and she literally runs out of juice to fight them.  (As with her use of air travel, Magica's use of a mechanical aid here is part and parcel of her original portrayal as what might be called a "practical" sorceress.)  This makes for an ending that is frankly underwhelming, as the Ducks grab Old #1 and the foiled Magica is reduced to a spasm of ineffective rage.  Burnett's approach is a little more cliched, using as it does the classic tropes of "the last-minute rescue" (the rehired Gizmoduck flying in at the last minute to spirit Magica away before the Yeeker can sing) and "the evil attack that backfires" (Magica's Wind Powder "turning against her" after the Yeeker busts the beaker), but I'm not complaining.  Gizmoduck needed to save the day in order to fully justify his renewed employment, and there is something satisfying about seeing Magica being "hoisted by her own pet bird," as it were.

Barks' story simply stops after the end of Magica's final attack, leaving behind one big, whomping plot hole -- what's to become of Protectoglass after this?  It's easy to imagine the security-obsessed Scrooge swearing off the stuff, reasoning that, even if all the Yeekers can be captured and caged, there's always the chance that they might be freed.  The baby Yeeker's inadvertent destruction of all of the Protectoglass in Duckburg, however, would seem to provide a more visceral motivation for Scrooge to abandon the idea.  It's not made clear who will be responsible for paying for all the damage, but it's easy to imagine Scrooge feeling a certain obligation to help Gyro out of any legal difficulties that might ensue.  The resulting payout would probably be sufficiently stiff to scare Scrooge away from using Protectoglass permanently.

Greg disliked the ending because it made Scrooge and the boys look "dumb."  This strikes me as unfairly harsh.  The boys' plea that they be allowed to keep the Yeeker "for a little while" reflects (1) their understanding that they won't be able to keep it when it's able to sing in all its "gory" and (2) their perfectly reasonable belief that a baby Yeeker may not be as dangerous as an adult.  Far from asking "what harm could it do?" -- Dewey gets that line -- Scrooge simply stops and briefly weighs his options before the degringolade strikes.  Nothing wrong here that I can see.

Burnett's feat here is probably a bit less impressive than the one Doug Hutchinson pulled off in "The Land of Trala La." The story being adapted there was a much more challenging one, and a new, more visually appealing "adventurous ending" had to be created.  "The Unsafe Safe," by contrast, is a relatively simple story and could be absorbed pretty much "as is."  It's safe (heh) to say, however, that "The Unbreakable Bin" ranks with "Scrooge's Pet," "The Status Seekers," and "Robot Robbers" on the link just below "Trala La"'s on the "Great Chain of Barks Stories Brought into Animated Being."  It might even be granted some extra points on the grounds that it appeared so late in the series' run, with the show's metaphorical shirt collar having long since been loosened and any lingering sense of reverence towards the characters and the concept having been shunted to the side.  In any event, it's a pleasant note on which to conclude this subgenre of DT offerings.

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"DuckBlurbs"

(GeoX) The idea -- as if you didn't know -- is that Gyro invents new, unbreakable glass for Scrooge's new glasses[;]he uses this to sheathe the bin (actually, he appears to not just sheathe it, but actually replace the metal with glass, given that you can see through it to the money -- cool effect; not necessarily that practical)...

In "The Unsafe Safe," Scrooge sheaths the bin in glass AND replaces the original safe with a glass one; the former action seems a bit extravagant, in view of the fact that the front door to the Bin is left unlocked anyway.  The "cover-up job" in "The Unbreakable Bin" handles things in a similar manner but does not make it clear how one would get into the Bin after it has been glassed-in.  There must be a way to do so, since Scrooge can let the Beagle Boys in after the fact, but we never see it demonstrated.

(Greg)  Anyhow; we hear noises and here come the "real" Beagle Boys. It's the usual idiots: Big Time, Baggy and Burger with digging objects. Here's the obvious problem with this: Dig underneath the domed glass and you get in easily. The only way this works is if the bottom has the Protecto glass. So I already see a scratch in the armor in this plan guys.

I'd like to think that Scrooge planned for that contingency, based on his unpleasant experience in "A Drain on the Economy."  The fact that he went to the trouble to plate the entire bin suggests that he did the same to the bin's bottom.

(Greg) Scrooge runs to the vault as he wants to take the vacation he has been planning for 40 years or so and the nephews will get to see the world as the nephews are happy. Okay; there is one problem with that: Whomever wrote this episode has NEVER watched Ducktales because the nephews have been around the world in almost 80% of these episodes anyway.

"Vacation" vs. "business" (read: treasure-finding) trip.  There IS a difference, no? 

(Greg) After the commercial break; we head into the jungle with Scrooge and the nephews wearing safari hats. The guide is a dogperson in complete safari gear with the Mickey Mouse gloves. The guide makes the worst jungle jokes ever in a cartoon and it's clearly intentional because Scrooge blows him off for it.

Funny thing about this "safari": The Ducks and the guide haven't brought any gear with them!  It's as if they are going on a tour of a zoo.  Scrooge's cheapness is all over this one like white on rice (because rice is cheap).

(Greg) So we see Magica fly to the Money Bin and apparently; we break logic again since the whole bin is now plated with glass. Okay; then how does Scrooge and everyone else get in?

There must be a way.  See "Scrooge/Beagles."

(Greg) Magica scratches the glass and proclaims that she'll find a way to break the glass if it's the last thing she ever does and she uses her elbow to pound on the glass; but then sells an injury by grabbing her foot. Huh? Explain THAT one kids! If that was BS&P again; that is one of the dumbest spots ever. 

It does look as if her elbow makes contact with the glass, but the main action here is unquestionably the foot-fault.  Note how Magica's shoe is "squished" in the image below.

(Greg) So we see Scrooge and the nephews in the streets with Gyro driving a NASA rocket car. Seriously. I'm sorry; but the VANILLA MANILLA UFO OF DEATH from Micro Ducks From Outer Space was much cooler (Gyro: Really Mr. Weagle? I thought you were breaking from the script there for a second.). 

It's somewhat difficult to get a detailed image of the hovercar here, but it does appear as though the Wang animators were at least TRYING to duplicate the look of the vehicle in "Micro Ducks."  TRYING, I said.  In its flexibility, the "new version" of the hovercar looks and acts more like a rubber raft than a rigid flying object.  The "racing stripe" and two front lights (or whatever they are) look the same, though the color of the interior has been changed from red to white.

Next: Episode 91, "Attack of the Fifty-Foot Webby."