Ignorant question: On a scale of A to F, what the heck is "S"?
I've combined the American grading system with a tier list, where S (and sometimes even SS) are even higher grades than 'great'. On a ten-point scale, I think it works something like this...
S = 9.5 - 10 A = 8 - 9.5 B = 6.5 - 8 C = 5 - 6.5 D = 3.5 - 5 F = don't bother
The observation about Scrooge's new and expanded role being the death of varied Barks-adventure-setups is a very keen one!
But it's not entirely true! To Barks' credit, he did continue to invent new reasons for traveling: compare Back to the Klondike, Tralla La, and The Secret of Atlantis. What's arguably more impressive is how he managed to ground Scrooge as a character, despite these incidental personality quirks.
I agree that "No Such Varmint" doesn't get the attention it deserves. I suppose that in contrast to some of the others you review in this post, it could be seen as having the plot of a ten-pager--but the comic material drawn out of Donald's charming the sea serpent is great. I particularly love the expressions on the sea serpent's face.
This set includes stories that I would grade quite differently on two different scales, the scale of comic book excellence and the scale of personal affection. Dangerous Disguise and In Old California are both great but neither one feels very real to me, because they don't feel like Duck stories. The Ducks have fallen into other genres. I enjoy the twist/double-twist in Disguise and the romance of Old California, but the other stories in this batch are all much more prominent in my mental Duckworld.
"A Christmas for Shacktown" is, as you say, evergreen. As an adult who knows that a blowout party is not a good solution to economic injustice and poverty, I like to imagine that the Club put aside a tidy sum to invest for a fund to provide college educations for all the children of Shacktown. But plotting, humor, character-driven conflict, soul-satisfying denouement: check!
Most people would rate "Golden Helmet" at the very top also, but though the artwork is terrific, I myself find the "king of the mountain" plot a bit boring. So I'd probably give it a B, too. But it does serve as a fine introduction for the child-reader to the idea that power corrupts! So much so, that the golden helmet has become for me the symbolic shorthand for this dynamic.
I like "The Gilded Man" a lot, a treasure hunt that leads to the discovery of an entirely different mystery. I agree that the Gilded Man is a bit underdeveloped, but he's still cool. And Philo T. Elllic, as you say, is a delightful and (heh-heh) memorable character. I don't have any problem with anyone accepting his money, as it's clear that he has way more than anyone needs and that he enjoys rewarding people with it. Ellic is in the select company of one-shot characters who have become permanent residents of my mental Duckworld.
Can you expand on what you mean by "don't feel like Duck stories"? I'd very much put these in the top league of Duck stories -- everyone else better step up their game!
Shacktown was written in 1951, right during that post-war consensus/solidarity period. I'd like to think that the Duckburg city council addressed its poverty problem in the following years. We certainly don't hear much about the Shacktowners in the follow-up story, Gyro's First Invention! (TBH, this is a clear oversight on Rosa's part.)
The Golden Helmet is certainly an iconic story, combining elements of Luck of the North with The Magic Hourglass. It's fine on its own. Maybe I'm a bit too familiar with it at this point.
This set includes stories that I would grade quite differently on two different scales, the scale of comic book excellence and the scale of personal affection. Dangerous Disguise and In Old California are both great but neither one feels very real to me, because they don't feel like Duck stories. The Ducks have fallen into other genres. I enjoy the twist/double-twist in Disguise and the romance of Old California, but the other stories in this batch are all much more prominent in my mental Duckworld.
Can you expand on what you mean by "don't feel like Duck stories"? I'd very much put these in the top league of Duck stories -- everyone else better step up their game!
Just that I have a more circumscribed idea of "what sort of adventures the Ducks get into" than you do, I guess. Dangerous Disguise feels to me as though the Ducks have been transported into a sort of book/movie genre in which they don't belong. I'm aware that part of the humor of the story is based on this fact, but the "not belonging" is so blatant to me that I can't feel that this is "really" happening to the Ducks I know. I'm not arguing that this is a superior attitude in any sense, it's just the way I react.
Old California is a bit different. Partly it is a matter of genre; the Ducks are in a historical romance, not only out of their time but also out of their sort of story. Partly it's that (as others have noted) the Ducks truly are, in-universe, witnesses to someone else's story here--you could argue that they're not the protagonists. That's fine and it's a great story and I'm glad it was written that way, and at the same time, I don't think of it as one of the stories that "really" happened in my mental Duckworld.
Post by Scrooge MacDuck on Mar 9, 2020 0:31:57 GMT
I totally see what you mean — less so for Dangerous Disguise perhaps (silly spy-fi is one of the genres available to the Ducks in my mind, DoubleDuck and M.I.A. and all that), but Old California has indeed always felt to me to be Else. Good—but not of a kind with usual Duck stories.
Of course, unlike Matilda, this doesn't mean they're not part of my understanding of the wider Duckverse, since my understanding fo the wider Duckverse also casually includes things like Peter Pan.
Yeah, the other spy-fi Duck comics such as DoubleDuck are also unreal to me. Also the superhero ones, apart from Super Snooper, Barks and Rosa. Not that I don't like some superhero comics in their own right, but it's a genre that doesn't fit the Ducks for me. Both spy agencies and superheroes belong in Darkwing stories, not Donald/Scrooge stories. Or even Daisy stories--though I did enjoy Andreas Pihl's Agent Daisy! But it's not "real" to me. Science fiction can be "real"--the Barks stories where they go to other planets or get visited by tiny aliens are all "real" in my headcanon, and many other similar stories by other authors. Not the futuristic PK stories, though.
OK, now, back to old Barks stories! Don't want to drag us too far off-topic!
I've given it some more thought and decided The Golden Helmet should be A tier. The symbolism of the helmet, and how it affects its various owners, is a little more three-dimensional than Scrooge's comeuppance in The Magic Hourglass. Absolute power corrupts, absolutely -- and The Golden Helmet is probably the best example of that.
Final batch of this volume. It's a collection of odds and sods that found its way to Donald Duck magazine between 1952 and 1971.
Trick or Treat This ain't it, but it's hard to blame Barks for the contents. He was asked to adapt a Donald Duck cartoon, and they didn't amount to all that much at this point. Much of what he added to the plot was cut by his editors, and had obtained a kind of cult status by the time this book was published. As someone who grew up with the full comic, it's visually interesting but not all that in terms of plot and character. In fact, that kinda sums up the story as a whole. Barks could have had fun with this in 1945, but by 1952 this was clearly below his usual game. All the cool gothic elements he added (the first page, Smorgie the bad) were removed. You've got to wonder what direction Duck cartoons would have gone to, had Barks and others of his calibre stayed on in the writing team. I adore Disney's output from the '30s, but the cartoons got dumber and flatter with time. I guess all the good animators were siphoned off to do the features or something. Verdict: C-
Hobblin' Goblins Occasionally, when you dig into the history of a long-running series, you come across something and think: "So that's where they got this from!". That's basically this story in relation to Don Rosa's "Metaphorically Spanking". Stories like these are carried by the visuals, and Barks' drawing manages to pull the dynamism. The sequence where Gyro invents the goblin foiler is pretty cool too, and the mix of the supernatural with Gyro's atom-age inventions is the sort of crossover only Barks could dream up. The typical Barksian sense of cosmic justice allows the nephews' increasingly desperate attempts at hiding to be followed up with increasingly unlikely discoveries, like a Gladstone story in reverse. (Donald Ault provides an examination of Gladstone in this volume, which is an interesting read if nothing else.) The story also features one of Barks' few satisfying endings in this batch: "We're going to see an inventor about an invention!". Honestly, the ideas are too good to be wasting as a nine-page back-up. Verdict: A
Dogcatcher Duck And now for something completely different: a brittle mastery story. Its main invention is inverting the story structure: the story opens with Donald and the kids fleeing the city, setting us up for a foregone conclusion. The mystery is not if Donald will screw up, but how. The how, however, is less than spectacular: Donald is particularly dim, going after TV show dogs, racehorse dogs, and fox hunt dogs. It doesn't feel all that destructive compared to other screw-ups, nor is it very inventive. Verdict: D+
Secret of Hondorica What's interesting to note is that this is the only adventure story around this time where Scrooge isn't leading the pack -- arguably the only one between The Gilded Man in 1952 and "Forbidden Valley" in 1957. And there's a reason for that. On the surface it seems like a fairly standard adventure: some valuables, a secretive American Indian tribe, and a confidence trick. But the adventure takes a backseat here: as revealed in the second act, the real secret is Gladstone's luck. On the one hand, that's an interesting move. I have by this point grown tired of hostile Indians as a plot device. Donald Ault tries to explain what Barks is trying to do here, and there's definitely a meta element at play that's trying to get out. I only disagree with him in that I don't think it works. In order to do something interesting with Gladstone, you have to suspend his god-like powers of luck -- and that never feels satisfying to me. Barks also suggests they'll all only "get even" in the end, which I don't buy. This story is Barks versus Gladstone, and Barks losing.
[I think you could do something in this direction, but you'd have to really lean into the metatexuality in a way a 1950s kids' comic was never going to do. You'd have to take Barks' sarcastic narrator ("Ha! That's what you think, Donald!") and have him actively trying to subvert the storytelling. Gladstone, more like any other character, feels like he belongs in a superhero title -- or at least the kind of superhero explored in the "Super Snooper" stories. Battling the higher forces that shape Duckburg. There's a story in that, a really big one, but I'm not sure if you could pull it off within the constraints of Disney comics.] Verdict: C+
The Lost Peg Leg Mine A fairly simple ten-pager about pack rats trading gold nuggets in the desert. Barks always had an eye for small creatures. He also returns to the theme of superstition/legend versus reality. But unlike previous stories, Barks preserves some element of the legend by returning the treasure to the desert at the end of the story. I like this, these are some of my favorite Barks tropes. [Interesting little detail is the mention of the Dutchman's gold, which Rosa would later write about. The two writers have such different atittudes to treasure quests. For Rosa, the quest is the story; for Barks, the quest is the means to a story. Rosa revels in the uncovering of the puzzle, Barks uses the possession of the treasure to play out a game of poetic justice. Sometimes, the Ducks don't win. The Ducks don't win in "The Dutchman's Secret either", but that's not poetic justice: it's a metafictional contemplation of how the game itself (the treasure hunt) is a reflection of unjust systems (theft from natives).] Verdict: B
Forbidden Valley At least it's got a novel reason for going into the jungle. It's very socially-conscious for a Duck adventure, even if the 1950s ideas of protecting the environment seem rather quaint today. Just pour on the pesticides, why won't you? Of course, in 1957 hunger was still a common childhood memory in a way it simply isn't today. A failed harvest was more of an existential threat than an economic one. Our main foil is P. J. McBrine, a Barks pig villain who tries to compensate for his lack of character in sheer ruthlessness. Apparently, this is his first story. Much like Magica DeSpell, he's a late invention that Barks used as a crutch when he was tired of coming up with novel villains. The ruthlessness is his one asset, something I touched on previously in my "Golden Helmet" write-up. A lot of Duck villains get cozier as time goes on (the Beagle Boys being a great example), so a villain who can place our heroes in mortal danger does a lot to up the tension. Unfortunately, that's about all he's really good for: being a spoiler. Barks' final twist, that he starts to help the ducks, feels hollow. Also, his annoying laugh sounds like he's looking for a job tying people to train tracks. We get it, Barks. But hey, dinosaurs. That's cool. Verdict: C-
The Titanic Ants A bizarre story in which Barks plays around with size. I preferred the ten-pager where he took on relative size on other planets. Barks doesn't have the best understanding of physics, which is fine for a comic book, but it leaves the reader with very weird status quo: "Hey kids! If we could size up ants, they'd be super workers!". Yeah, you have to suspend your understanding of animal domestication as well as world consequences. It's a bit like the price of gold at the end of "The Prize of Pizarro": when you've altered the world in this way, it's hard to believe things just go back to normal in time for the next story. I prefer "Billions in the Hole". Verdict: D
Water Ski Race When Donald finally learns to waterski, Daisy gaslights him out of jealousy. Yikes. Verdict: F
The Master Glasser Doing its job better than "Dogcatcher Duck", but I've never been a big fan of brittle mastery stories anyway. Glass master Donald uses a new tuning fork on TV and destroys everyone's glassware. That's a thing, I guess. Verdict: D-
Pawns of the Loup Garou Barks took a single idea as the basis for his story, the existence of the loup garou. Which is some kind of Cajun werewolf. And he just can't fill the pages with it. I'm pretty sure it's not just Tony Strobl's cross-eyed ducks that make this story a flop, it's that this is one of Barks' thinnest mystery threads ever. Scrooge is just sort of there for most of it, Miss Minemore isn't even a real witch or anything, and the monster itself is nothing more than a jumbo-sized Looney Tunes ghoul. It's boring. Verdict: F
Officer for a Day This story is many things, but boring is not one of them! Old cynical Barks is always an adventure to behold: it may not be good in the traditional sense of the word, but he throws just about all at the kitchen sink in the process! In this case, Barks takes on biker gangs, street crime, illegal aliens, and epidemics -- the plagues of 1968. (Of course, a liberal might consider other plagues, but I'm not here to judge.) Take aside the politics, and you're left with a pretty crazy story: Donald is an impotent policeman on what has got to be one of the crazier days in Duckburg's history. It's kind of fascinating if you're in that mood: seeing the Beagle Boys use insane troll logic to bypass Donald is pretty amazing, and the comments of the aliens are funny in any context. (A gag Don Rosa pays homage to, years later, in "Attack of the Hideous Space Varmints"!) Also, the final gag is one of the best: after the police and their substitutes are in bed with the Asian and Hong Kong flue respectively (which really happened), Donald and the bad guys are in bed with the Venusian flu, a excellent reversal of Wells' classic The War of the Worlds. Chaotic, but fun. Verdict: B-
A Day in a Duck's Life ...remember drag racing? No, before RuPaul I mean. Yeah. In this one, Donald spends all his money on a phallic-looking hot rod. Was it just that all the old cartoonists were hitting a certain age around 1970? This is no better than the last of the theatrical cartoons shown at this time, and about as phoned-in. For all its bluster, this story feels tired and tiring. Barks was old and cranky, and probably a more than a little fed up with enthusiasts. I get it. The one nice thing about this story is the bookends with the neighbor. Even old and cranky, Barks could whip up a rhetorical flourish. Kay Wright's art style might not have been suited for this story, but the Jippes version actually makes me physically sick looking at it. Duck stories are better... than this. Verdict: F
Last Edit: Mar 15, 2020 22:13:09 GMT by That Duckfan
Final batch of this volume. It's a collection of odds and sods that found its way to Donald Duck magazine between 1952 and 1971.
Trick or Treat This ain't it, but it's hard to blame Barks for the contents. He was asked to adapt a Donald Duck cartoon, and they didn't amount to all that much at this point. Much of what he added to the plot was cut by his editors, and had obtained a kind of cult status by the time this book was published. As someone who grew up with the full comic, it's visually interesting but not all that in terms of plot and character. In fact, that kinda sums up the story as a whole. Barks could have had fun with this in 1945, but by 1952 this was clearly below his usual game. All the cool gothic elements he added (the first page, Smorgie the bad) were removed. You've got to wonder what direction Duck cartoons would have gone to, had Barks and others of his calibre stayed on in the writing team. I adore Disney's output from the '30s, but the cartoons got dumber and flatter with time. I guess all the good animators were siphoned off to do the features or something. Verdict: C-
Aw. You're a bit unkind to this one. I think it works best for the audience to which it was intended: people who saw Trick or Treat-the-cartoon once, loved it, and wanted to recapture the feeling but couldn't just pop in a DVD or enter the title in YouTube's searchbar because home media didn't exist yet. It's of akind with the Little Golden Books adaptations of Disney classics, Doctor Who novelisations, or that endless stream of movie comic-book adaptation with which Four Color Comics filled so many issues. It's an artform which works only if you can still hum the songs in your mind, and hear the voices of the character, as you're reading it. And for what it is, it's a stellar example of the form, successfully reintroducing Witch Hazel and allowing her the durability she needed to become a recurring character, which I think we can all be thankful for.
(Of course, the unexpected inoculation of Madam Mim into the Duckverse ten years down the line gave Duckburg an even better "chaotic fun-loving witch" character than Hazel, knocking a lot of wind out of Witch Hazel's potential as a true member of the main cast. But Barks can't be blamed for that, and anyway, the Italians never really took to Mim and continued churning out fantastic Hazel material, so there's that.)
Also, this is just me being pedantic, but I wouldn't characterize Smorgasbord as gothic, exactly. He's of a much more modern breed of spookiness: the Weird and Lovecraftian, with his many arms (hints of non-Euclidean geometry in the way his hands keep entering the house at seemingly-impossible angles?) and oddly-placed eyes. Which is perhaps to some extent why the editor objected to this vaguely cthulhuesque monster being mashed in with a classic Shakespearean witch; Barks threw in other monsters, of course, but they're more humanoid, more in the Bosche tradition of demonic imagery.
I think the decline of the cartoons has more to do with Disney cultivating a more and more kid-friendly image, to go along with their increased presence on television, than with the talent behind the scenes as such; the animation certainly isn't what's at fault, anyway, but rather the writing.
Pawns of the Loup Garou Barks took a single idea as the basis for his story, the existence of the loup garou. Which is some kind of Cajun werewolf. And he just can't fill the pages with it. I'm pretty sure it's not just Tony Strobl's cross-eyed ducks that make this story a flop, it's that this is one of Barks' thinnest mystery threads ever. Scrooge is just sort of there for most of it, Miss Minemore isn't even a real witch or anything, and the monster itself is nothing more than a jumbo-sized Looney Tunes ghoul. It's boring. Verdict: F
Yes, it's not very good, is it? This story is incidentally somewhat hilarious to read as a native French-speaker, since for us "loup-garou" is just the word for "werewolf" (the loup garou or rougarou as understood in the English-speaking world as a Cajun monster is just the Cajun concept of a werewolf, with the Cajun word for werewolf, e.g. the French word, remaining untranslated for exoticism).
Another fault you mentioned is the inexplicable throwing in of "Count Drakula" as a main antagonist only for him not to show up at all on-panel, let alone have some sort of confrontation with Scrooge. This reeks of the later, most slapdash of Universal Monsters monster-mash movies, which would be billed as Dracula Meets the Wolfman and then have a bare excuse for a plot where a single mad scientist revives both Dracula and the Wolfman but they never meet.
Officer for a Day This story is many things, but boring is not one of them! Old cynical Barks is always an adventure to behold: it may not be good in the traditional sense of the word, but he throws just about all at the kitchen sink in the process! In this case, Barks takes on biker gangs, street crime, illegal aliens, and epidemics -- the plagues of 1968. (Of course, a liberal might consider other plagues, but I'm not here to judge.) Take aside the politics, and you're left with a pretty crazy story: Donald is an impotent policeman on what has got to be one of the crazier days in Duckburg's history. It's kind of fascinating if you're in that mood: seeing the Beagle Boys use insane troll logic to bypass Donald is pretty amazing, and the comments of the aliens are funny in any context. (A gag Don Rosa pays homage to, years later, in "Attack of the Hideous Space Varmints"!) Also, the final gag is one of the best: after the police and their substitutes are in bed with the Asian and Hong Kong flue respectively (which really happened), Donald and the bad guys are in bed with the Venusian flu, a excellent reversal of Wells' classic The War of the Worlds. Chaotic, but fun. Verdict: B-
For my money, chaotic and therefore fun; chaotic is squarely a good thing for a Duck comic to be in my book. This story, especially if read in light of its title, really seems to cement a vision of Duckburg as just an extremely wacky place. Which is a metafictional twist in itself — after a good number of years of the Ducks constantly getting into incredible scrapes, Barks asks the reader to take a step back and consider how odd it is that they are apparently having incredible adventures every month, before positing that Duckburg is in fact always like that whether Donald is present or not.
(DuckTales 2017 gets a lot of its worse impulses from taking this same idea as read, and then taking it much too far. Scrooge is redefined as The World's Greatest Adventurer because, well, we've been reading stories about his having adventures and always coming out on top for 70 years. Etc.)
I'm with MacDuck on Trick or Treat--it did well what it was meant to do back in the day.
Is there a typo in your grades for Master Glasser and Dogcatcher Duck? You say of Master Glasser "doing its job better than Dogcatcher Duck", but your grade for Master Glasser is D- and your grade for Dogcatcher Duck is D+. Or am I misunderstanding the "doing its job better" comment?
As someone who has always loved the Ducks but has always been looking for more female characters to round out their world, I have to say that I like Miss Minemore. She's a sympathetic character, and a nice change from all the Random People we run into in classic Duck stories who just happen to be default-male. It's the Strobl version of her I like, though; the Jippes version with its exaggerated expressions makes her look like a nervous wreck.
Aw. You're a bit unkind to this one. I think it works best for the audience to which it was intended: people who saw Trick or Treat-the-cartoon once, loved it, and wanted to recapture the feeling but couldn't just pop in a DVD or enter the title in YouTube's searchbar because home media didn't exist yet. It's of akind with the Little Golden Books adaptations of Disney classics, Doctor Who novelisations, or that endless stream of movie comic-book adaptation with which Four Color Comics filled so many issues. It's an artform which works only if you can still hum the songs in your mind, and hear the voices of the character, as you're reading it. And for what it is, it's a stellar example of the form, successfully reintroducing Witch Hazel and allowing her the durability she needed to become a recurring character, which I think we can all be thankful for.
I sympathize. Like I said, it's not very good despite Barks' best efforts. I'm treating this story in the context I'm reading it, which is right off the back of The Golden Helmet and the like. Upthread we talked about No Such Varmint having the plot of a ten-pager, and that stuck with me as I was reading this story. Like I said, it would work great as a ten-pager, or a 1946 adventure, but not so much a 1952 adventure.
Also, this is just me being pedantic, but I wouldn't characterize Smorgasbord as gothic, exactly. He's of a much more modern breed of spookiness: the Weird and Lovecraftian, with his many arms (hints of non-Euclidean geometry in the way his hands keep entering the house at seemingly-impossible angles?) and oddly-placed eyes. Which is perhaps to some extent why the editor objected to this vaguely cthulhuesque monster being mashed in with a classic Shakespearean witch; Barks threw in other monsters, of course, but they're more humanoid, more in the Bosche tradition of demonic imagery.
Blame Donald Ault for getting the word gothic in my head. Smorgie looks like came from the covers of Weird Comics and the like, I'm not sure I'd taxonomize him as Lovecraftian per se. And is Hazel Shakespearean? She gives me more Puritan vibes.
Also, and this is me being more pedantic, but Bosche is a derogatory word for Germans used in the First World War. You may be thinking of Bosch.
Yes, it's not very good, is it? This story is incidentally somewhat hilarious to read as a native French-speaker, since for us "loup-garou" is just the word for "werewolf" (the loup garou or rougarou as understood in the English-speaking world as a Cajun monster is just the Cajun concept of a werewolf, with the Cajun word for werewolf, e.g. the French word, remaining untranslated for exoticism).
It's arguably the worst of the bunch. A Day in the Life has much better pacing than this, and Water Ski Race is actually pretty good until Daisy gets jealous and throws a wrench in the works. (I also thought its ending was unsatisfactory. Nobody had a toolbox nearby?)
Another fault you mentioned is the inexplicable throwing in of "Count Drakula" as a main antagonist only for him not to show up at all on-panel, let alone have some sort of confrontation with Scrooge. This reeks of the later, most slapdash of Universal Monsters monster-mash movies, which would be billed as Dracula Meets the Wolfman and then have a bare excuse for a plot where a single mad scientist revives both Dracula and the Wolfman but they never meet.
I didn't mention it, but it is weird. Did Barks just run out of funny names? If he'd wanted to use Dracula-with-a-C, he could have -- it had been out of copyright since 1962.
For my money, chaotic and therefore fun; chaotic is squarely a good thing for a Duck comic to be in my book. This story, especially if read in light of its title, really seems to cement a vision of Duckburg as just an extremely wacky place. Which is a metafictional twist in itself — after a good number of years of the Ducks constantly getting into incredible scrapes, Barks asks the reader to take a step back and consider how odd it is that they are apparently having incredible adventures every month, before positing that Duckburg is in fact always like that whether Donald is present or not.
I was a little cautious while writing, because the CBL makes rather a lot of Barks' message. Chase Craig's reponse to Barks was pretty forced, along the lines of "Gee whiz! Guess you got me voting for Mr. [Max] Rafferty and Mr. [George] Wallace now, Carl!" The story does take a certain position in a 1968 context.
I like the idea that Donald and company aren't the weirdest things in Duckburg. In fact, I've given a good deal of thought to a protagonist who is perpetually on the periphery of the weirdness of life/fiction. A regular citizen in Metropolis, if you will.
I mean, how does the Duck world function, anyway? Duckburg is home to several multi-explicate-illionairs -- even a Billionaire's Club, if certain continuities are to be believed. In such a heightened reality, who knows what happens on a daily basis.
(DuckTales 2017 gets a lot of its worse impulses from taking this same idea as read, and then taking it much too far. Scrooge is redefined as The World's Greatest Adventurer because, well, we've been reading stories about his having adventures and always coming out on top for 70 years. Etc.)
I've done well at avoiding it, then. Reminds me of Doctor Who of the last decade: the Doctor being this amazing in-universe legend because of 50 years of lore hanging around them.
Is there a typo in your grades for Master Glasser and Dogcatcher Duck? You say of Master Glasser "doing its job better than Dogcatcher Duck", but your grade for Master Glasser is D- and your grade for Dogcatcher Duck is D+. Or am I misunderstanding the "doing its job better" comment?
Good catch! I fiddled around a little with the grading, and switched around "Trick or Treat"'s D+ with "Dogcatcher Duck"'s C-. That still doesn't really explain anything though.
You know, I can't make my mind up whether I want Donald's screw-ups to be small and relatable, or big and unlikely. I'm going to leave it the way it is now. I do like "Dogcatcher Duck"'s framing device, while "Master Glasser"'s reversal of fortune feels bizarre and unearned. I think "Dogcatcher Duck" could have done with a little more ingenuity, while "Master Glasser" is reaching too far. (Note how people's TV sets and vases break before the camera lens does. That makes so little sense.)
Last Edit: Mar 16, 2020 10:53:56 GMT by That Duckfan
I didn't mention it, but it is weird. Did Barks just run out of funny names? If he'd wanted to use Dracula-with-a-C, he could have -- it had been out of copyright since 1962.
It's not the best example of the form but Count Drakula is a bird-name pun. You're supposed to read Drakula as "Drake-ula". This would, I assume, be more apparent if the Count had appeared in person and therefore been shown to be an anthropomorphic duck.
I didn't mention it, but it is weird. Did Barks just run out of funny names? If he'd wanted to use Dracula-with-a-C, he could have -- it had been out of copyright since 1962.
It's not the best example of the form but Count Drakula is a bird-name pun. You're supposed to read Drakula as "Drake-ula". This would, I assume, be more apparent if the Count had appeared in person and therefore been shown to be an anthropomorphic duck.
Ah. As a non-native English speaker, 'drake' is one of those words that never manages to stick in my vocabulary.
Yes, “Officer for a Day” (the Jippes-drawn version of the story) is surprisingly good for a post-retirement Barks story. “Loup Garou” was so-so, but who can blame Barks for being burnt out after 25 years of writing. Jippes’ art makes up for a lot of its faults. I wonder if Fantagraphics will reprint the stories that Barks wrote/plotted but didn’t illustrate, and whether they’ll use Jippes’ versions (probably not). There’s still a fairly large number of unused/unfinished Barks plots out there, just begging to receive the Jippes treatment (including a never-published Gyro story Barks wrote for Egmont in the 70s!). I hope Jippes will do at least a few more before he retires.
Also, I just remembered, Trick or Treat wasn’t Barks first story adapted from an earlier cartoon: he also did a loose adaptation of the short “Truant officer Donald” in the late 40s.