Looking for Donald and Scrooge's relatives created by Strobl

[TheMidgetMoose]

Jan 5, 2020 8:48:17 GMT LP said:

If Silas Elias was named McDuck instead, everything would be so much simpler.

I'm not a native English speaker, but how distant does a person have to be in order to be defined as an ancestor in relation to somebody? I'm only asking since I know that Spock referred to having a human ancestor once in Star Trek. The context of that scene made it seem like he was referring to the closest human relative he had, and in a later episode, it was revealed that his mother is human. Now, one could argue that this was an error due to the fact that the production crew hadn't yet decided how closely Spock was related to humans yet, but...

Enough about Star Trek, the question is this: Would a person's mother count as an ancestor?

I think things, at least from a "let's include as many stories into one canon as possible" perspective, would make the most sense if Silas Elias was an O'Drake or, maybe, a Mallard. We already have a whole lot of McDuck male ancestors. While Silas Elias could just be an alias of an already-known figure (e.g., Titus McDuck), I feel the simplest solution would have been for him to Downy's father, born about 1820 (assuming Downy was born in 1840 as per A Letter From Home) and died about 1925. Unfortunately, he is a Duck, not an O'Drake. I guess he could still be from Downy's side, but he must be a Duck from Downy's side, unless, once again, "Silas Elias Duck" is just an alias.

Yes, a parent is technically one's ancestor. Parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents, and so on and so forth are all considered ancestors. That said, at least in normal conversations in the U.S.A., one doesn't use the word ancestor unless they're referring to someone distant enough that they haven't met and whose technical relation to them would contain more than one "great" ahead of "grandfather/grandmother", at least in my experience. This may not apply to everyone. Some people just might refer to their grandparents as their ancestors even in normal conversation, but I've never seen that.

[Matilda]

Yup, I concur with TheMidgetMoose on American English usage. In spoken English, "ancestor" would generally be used for those antecedent to great-grandparents. I would say, though, that I might say "our ancestor" as a catch-all term for someone who is, say, my grandparent and X's great-grandparent. Not, though, for someone who is my parent and X's grandparent.

[TheMidgetMoose]

I thought about opening a separate thread for this, but I did a search on the forum and found that we already discussed Zak McWak some here. For reference sake, Zak McWak is an uncle of Huey, Dewey, and Louie's mentioned in the 1968 Strobl-drawn story, Voyage to Azaltan, a story which also features Captain Hook and Smee attempting to steal ancient Aztec gold that Moby and Donald Duck are on the hunt for. Zak McWak is implied to still be living. He's very wealthy and famous. Why? Zak was sitting under a tree one day when an a bad apple fell and hit him on the head. Resourceful Zak was given an idea. He soon invented a spray that kills apple-decaying worms!

Zak McWak's exact relation to the Duck family is not stated. Huey, Dewey, and Louie do state that he is an uncle of theirs. Donald also calls him "Uncle Zak" and "Uncle Zak McWak." Again, Zak seems to be still living in the present day, but, according to Donald, he "seldom see" Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Anyhow, Zak McWak was brought to my attention again when I was reading another 1968 Strobl-drawn story, The Money Tree. I was not reading this story with Zak McWak in mind but had sought it out to do some research on another character, Mac Waddle. In The Money Tree, Mac Waddle is an employee of Scrooge McDuck's, apparently the head inspector of Scrooge's South American gold mines. I was interested in knowing if Mac could also be a member of the Duck family since he shares a surname with Donald's uncle Willie Waddle from this Bob Karp and Al Taliaferro strip. In a hypothetical universe comprised of Taliaferro-drawn stories and Strobl-drawn stories, maybe Mac is another nephew of Willie's hired by Scrooge in part because of the family connection.

I was surprised to find that Mac Waddle is actually not the character introduced in The Money Tree who is most likely to have a genealogical connection to Donald. No, that would instead be another character from the story, Weaver McWak. Weaver worked at the museum of natural history when he was duped by the Beagle Boys into helping them set a trap for Scrooge. Note that his surname is McWak, a surname that, just a few months later, would be used for "Uncle Zak McWak." Like Zak, Weaver is an inventor. He discovers how to weave (hence the name) plant fiber into the fiber of a dollar bill. There's no indication that he is related to Donald. He kind of just shows up out of nowhere and starts talking to Donald and Scrooge. Scrooge is explicitly not familiar with him and has never met him, asking for his name. What if Donald knew him already? What if the reason that he just so happened to be near Donald and Scrooge was because he was going to see his relative Donald about some issue. Huey, Dewey, and Louie do not appear in this story. Maybe they were with their Uncle Weaver for the day, and he had dropped them off at the Money Bin and was stopping by to tell Donald about it. Some relevant panels below.

Now, even more amazing, in the same issue of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories that The Money Tree is in, there is yet another Strobl-drawn story that uses the surname "McWak." In The Battle of Bent Bow, Huey, Dewey, and Louie marvel at a General McWak who fought Chief Bent Bow in a famous battle in Duckburg (or whatever town this story takes place in) exactly one hundred years ago. The battle is also stated to have occurred in 1867.

Firstly, does the reuse of the name "McWak" perhaps indicate that all three stories are from the same author? INDUCKS says that Vic Lockman wrote Voyage to Azatlan. Can The Money Tree and The Battle of Bent Bow be attributed to him as well? Has "McWak" been used by other authors? Does the name appear in any other Strobl-drawn stories? Also, was "Zak McWak" perhaps just a misremembering of Weaver McWak? The two characters do have the same surname and both seem to be somewhat goofy inventors. The only major difference is that Zak is explicitly a relative of Huey, Dewey, and Louie's while Weaver is not stated to be related to the Ducks and is, in fact, totally unknown to Scrooge. I don't think it wouldn't have been to much of a continuity error to just have it be Weaver himself who is the famous uncle in Voyage to Azatlan. The Money Tree is written in such a way that Donald and Weaver could hypothetically be relatives; Weaver just probably does not come from the same side of the family as Scrooge does.

From an in-universe perspective, I believe that Zak and Weaver must be brothers. I personally like to think of them as the brothers of Huey, Dewey, and Louie's paternal grandmother. This means that they would be uncles by marriage to Huey, Dewey, and Louie's mother (Della is the name I prefer to use, as I think most fans do) and are thus sort of uncles to Donald without being biologically related to him. I also think that General McWak (first name never stated) should be the grandfather of great-grandfather of Zak, Weaver, and HDL's grandmother. As yet another musing, could we somehow connect the Battle of Bent Bow to the battle that brought peace to Duckburg in Carl Barks's The Village Blacksmith? Perhaps General McWak and General Stonewall Duck led their armies together in some sort of campaign that, as per The Village Blacksmith, brought peace to Duckburg. Of course, the battle in The Village Blacksmith was fought on Battlement Hill, while the battle in The Battle of Bent Bow was fought where...

SPOILER: Click to show

{Spoiler}Daisy's house now stands

[RobbK1]

Jan 5, 2020 20:27:07 GMT Matilda said:

Yup, I concur with TheMidgetMoose on American English usage. In spoken English, "ancestor" would generally be used for those antecedent to great-grandparents. I would say, though, that I might say "our ancestor" as a catch-all term for someone who is, say, my grandparent and X's great-grandparent. Not, though, for someone who is my parent and X's grandparent.

But, usually, only if they are both deceased.  In English, and all Germanic languages (of which I am aware), although one's parents and grandparents are, technically, one's ancestors, they are not spoken of that way, IF they are still alive. I believe "forebears" is an exact synonym, and would be treated the same.  I think that my parents or grandparents would have been a bit peeved and insulted if they were within earshot of my referring to them as my "ancestors".