“Magical Mix-Up” - What's This From?

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Hello! May I present this?



This funny illustration-thingy, which, you'll notice, may have been one of the first stories to intentionally use Phooey Duck, surfaced on Tumblr at some point. I have reason to believe it's from some issue of DuckTales Magazine, but it's not indexed on INDUCKS. Do you have any further information?

[Zantaf]

Yep, it's from the Spring '89 issue.

[Orora]

Inside illustrations don't get indexed much, do they? Especially when they're fully original/exclusive?

[Zantaf]

I meant to type Spring '89, fixed it now

[Matilda]

Shame on the colorist: the cat walking in front of Gladstone should clearly be black!

[Mesterius]

Dec 8, 2018 15:58:36 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

This funny illustration-thingy, which, you'll notice, may have been one of the first stories to intentionally use Phooey Duck, surfaced on Tumblr at some point. I have reason to believe it's from some issue of DuckTales Magazine, but it's not indexed on INDUCKS. Do you have any further information?

Uhhh... you do realize that page is not a story, right? It's a puzzle page; you're supposed to find the errors in the picture. It's not the opening page of a comics story.

By the way: hi everyone, new user here! I actually registered a while back, but haven't commented on anything before now. (I used to be a member of the old DCF forum, but that's already getting to be a few years ago now.)

[Mesterius]

Dec 9, 2018 23:46:36 GMT drleevezan said:

Dec 9, 2018 23:16:38 GMT Mesterius said:

Uhhh... you do realize that page is not a story, right? It's a puzzle page; you're supposed to find the errors in the picture. It's not the opening page of a comics story.

By the way: hi everyone, new user here! I actually registered a while back, but haven't commented on anything before now. (I used to be a member of the old DCF forum, but that's already getting to be a few years ago now.)

Welcome, Mesterius! And yes, we realize that it's not the first page of a story, "story" was used here to mean "something which tells a story", which this illustration does. 

Thanks for the welcome! But I'm not 100% sure if that was the intended meaning... Scrooge MacDuck mentions that this page is not on Inducks, but the way I see it, this is exactly the reason why it isn't: it's not a comics story. As far as I know, Inducks focuses on stories (plus cover art/articles related to the stories), not puzzle pages. So this doesn't really count as a story featuring Phooey Duck.

[Mesterius]

Adding to that, I don't think there is any way to confirm that this was an "intentional" use of the fourth nephew Phooey Duck. The whole point of the nephews as depicted in this page is that there is NOT supposed to be four nephews; and that error is supplemented by numerous others, like Launchpad's hat, Scrooge giving away money to a Beagle Boy who doesn't want it, etc. How to know if the people doing the page were even aware of the character Phooey Duck as a fourth nephew who had mistakenly been included in the panels of some Disney comics? Especially if Wikipedia is correct and this mistakenly-created extra nephew wasn't given a name until after 1989 (after Bob Foster took over as the editor of the Disney Comics line)?

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Dec 10, 2018 0:21:55 GMT Mesterius said:

Thanks for the welcome! But I'm not 100% sure if that was the intended meaning... Scrooge MacDuck mentions that this page is not on Inducks, but the way I see it, this is exactly the reason why it isn't: it's not a comics story. As far as I know, Inducks focuses on stories (plus cover art/articles related to the stories), not puzzle pages. So this doesn't really count as a story featuring Phooey Duck.

I was using the Wiki definition of story rather than the INDUCKS definition of story. But I do think this belongs on INDUCKS — whether it's a narrative or not, it's definitely an illustration with the comic characters, and INDUCKS usually indexes those. Just for example…

Dec 10, 2018 0:32:10 GMT Mesterius said:

Adding to that, I don't think there is any way to confirm that this was an "intentional" use of the fourth nephew Phooey Duck. The whole point of the nephews as depicted in this page is that there is NOT supposed to be four nephews; and that error is supplemented by numerous others, like Launchpad's hat, Scrooge giving away money to a Beagle Boy who doesn't want it, etc. How to know if the people doing the page were even aware of the character Phooey Duck as a fourth nephew who had mistakenly been included in the panels of some Disney comics? Especially if Wikipedia is correct and this mistakenly-created extra nephew wasn't given a name until after 1989 (after Bob Foster took over as the editor of the Disney Comics line)?

Well, yes, the whole idea is that the world of Duckburg is being turned upside-down; but that's precisely my point: among the weird things created by Magica's spell is a fourth, yellow-clothed nephew. Within the world of the story, that nephew really is supposed to be there, if only as a result of Magica's sorcerous mischief. This in contrast to previous appearances by the fourth, yellow nephew, which were mere mistakes by the artists. 

…and perhaps this predates the creation of the name, Phooey; perhaps. But I think it'd be one heck of a coincidence if the artist here had independently thought up "a fourth nephew who wears yellow" as his anomaly for HDL, with no knowledge of the fact that other artists before him had sometimes drawn 4 nephews by accident. Certainly, whether or not Foster had created the name "Phooey", some Duck fans would have noticed. 

[Baar Baar Jinx]

"Something's gone wrong in Duckburg"? Is this a British page?

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Dec 10, 2018 16:40:14 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

"Something's gone wrong in Duckburg"? Is this a British page?

…no, why? I feel like there's a reference I'm not getting. 

[Baar Baar Jinx]

Dec 10, 2018 16:53:08 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

Dec 10, 2018 16:40:14 GMT Baar Baar Jinx said:

"Something's gone wrong in Duckburg"? Is this a British page?

…no, why? I feel like there's a reference I'm not getting. 

No reference, really, just one of those phrases that gives off a British vibe.  Americans would probably just say, "Something's wrong in Duckburg".

[Matilda]

Dec 9, 2018 19:41:27 GMT Matilda said:

Shame on the colorist: the cat walking in front of Gladstone should clearly be black!

OK, now that I think about it, it's impossible to tell whether the non-black cat was intentional or not. Perhaps they meant it to be one of the things wrong with the picture: the cat should be black, but it's not. Though that's a pretty meta joke, isn't it? As in, "if the cat were black, it would be an unlucky thing for Gladstone and fit in the picture of wrongnesses, but it's not black, so that's wrong." The two wrong elements here cancel each other out, though, since it's not unlucky to have a non-black cat cross your path. It would certainly be more straightforward if the cat crossing Gladstone's path were black, and thus it's "wrong" because it's one of the several instances of bad luck befalling him in the picture. And now I have officially put *way* too much thought into this.

I have a picture page showing the Junior Woodchucks' summer camp island which I love--I got it as a detached page from French eBay (ordered it along with some comics) and don't know where it's from. Haven't been able to find it on Inducks by searching for any of the obvious words, though. If things ever calm down a little I will scan it and post it.

Anyway, my sense is that there are gazillion illustrations of Disney characters from interior pages of comic books which are not indexed on Inducks.

[Baar Baar Jinx]

Dec 11, 2018 0:12:53 GMT Matilda said:

OK, now that I think about it, it's impossible to tell whether the non-black cat was intentional or not. Perhaps they meant it to be one of the things wrong with the picture: the cat should be black, but it's not. Though that's a pretty meta joke, isn't it? As in, "if the cat were black, it would be an unlucky thing for Gladstone and fit in the picture of wrongnesses, but it's not black, so that's wrong." The two wrong elements here cancel each other out, though, since it's not unlucky to have a non-black cat cross your path. It would certainly be more straightforward if the cat crossing Gladstone's path were black, and thus it's "wrong" because it's one of the several instances of bad luck befalling him in the picture. And now I have officially put *way* too much thought into this.

I guess there's one way to answer this; is there a page with the official solution (i.e., things that are wrong with the picture)? If the cat not being black is listed, then it was intentional.

BTW, the decision to make the cat black or not would have been the inker's, not the colorist's. I guess the colorist could have noted the apparent error and colored the cat a dark gray to approximate black, but if the cat was truly supposed to be black, the inker should have made it so.