little peoples

[Matilda]

Since my 1960[s childhood, I have been fond of stories with little races of people (including Ducks or human-like animals or aliens). Here's a list of stories I've read...in the hope that y'all might have other stories to suggest. (This is something I can't find via an Inducks search.)

Barks: Gneezles, Peeweegahs, the mini-Arabs of Casbah Crater (Pipeline to Danger), Micro-Ducks, Menehunes
Fallberg: Menehunes (Pineapple Poachers)

Shaws' Shrink to Fit (though this one isn't "real" in my headcanon, since it uses the "lucky dime" motif)
Katz & Cosser's A Real Hero, where Pluto has a space adventure and saves little aliens
Renard & Rota's The Molepeople, a sort of underground version of Barks' "Island in the Sky"--I love Rota's drawing of the Molepeople's underground city!
Bergstrom & Anderson's Return to Bear Mountain, where Grandma Duck is in contact with the local elves
Hedman's The Bin Pixies, where Donald encounters the "house elves" of the money bin. The English title should actually be "The Bin Brownies," since brownies are household elves in English folk mythology (and pixies are not). It's interesting to see from the titles of this story in various languages which countries have a folk tradition of household elves. Norway (nisse) and Sweden (tomte) do--both those have been roped into Christmas mythology as gift-bringers, incidentally. Denmark apparently doesn't. Germany has Heinzelmannchen, though it's not clear to me whether they have any cultural cachet beyond a single folktale.

Two with sentient penguins living in their own underground community:
Pihl's Arctic Antics aka Antarctic Antics
Korhonen's The Coldest Warm Place

I'm sure I'll think of a few more later....

[RobbK1]

There was a Vicar Uncle Scrooge story published in The Dutch Weekly during the late 1970s or early 1980s maybe somewhere in the 4000s to 7000s of D numbers, that contained an underground deep cave people (Terry-Fermy-like conditions under The Earth).

[sirredknee]

Yep, that one came to my mind, too, but are they little enough?

inducks.org/s.php?c=D++4500

[Scrooge MacDuck]

There's an Italian story in an old issue of the French Mickey Parade that had a people of rather smurf-like underground people living beneath Duckburg; I remember thinking on the similarity of Rota's Molepeople to them when I first read the Rota story a long while later. Thing is, for the love of me I can't think of the title, nor the issue… could anyone help me out? 

[Zantaf]

Barks: the pygmy asteroid aliens from Island in the Sky 

Emanuela Negrin & Lucio Leoni's Paperino e l'invasione sottozero, where diminutive blue aliens from a frozen parallel dimension plan to conquer the whole universe by invading through people's freezers. (Actually a pretty cool story, with a sequel that I never got to read, as it was never published outside Italy)

Also, here's another story to add to the "sentient penguins living in their own underground community" list, Scarpa's Topolino e l'ultraghiaccio.

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Nov 26, 2017 19:30:24 GMT Zantaf said:

Also, here's another story to add to the "sentient penguins living in their own underground community" list, Scarpa's Topolino e l'ultraghiaccio.

Why is this ridiculously specific thing even a trope. 


Also, any help on identifying the story I mentioned above? 

[Matilda]

Nov 26, 2017 19:30:24 GMT Zantaf said:

Barks: the pygmy asteroid aliens from Island in the Sky 

Emanuela Negrin & Lucio Leoni's Paperino e l'invasione sottozero, where diminutive blue aliens from a frozen parallel dimension plan to conquer the whole universe by invading through people's freezers. (Actually a pretty cool story, with a sequel that I never got to read, as it was never published outside Italy)

Also, here's another story to add to the "sentient penguins living in their own underground community" list, Scarpa's Topolino e l'ultraghiaccio.

Ha, I *knew* I was forgetting one of Barks' little races. Will follow up on the blue aliens!

[Matilda]

Nov 26, 2017 20:40:12 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

Nov 26, 2017 19:30:24 GMT Zantaf said:

Also, here's another story to add to the "sentient penguins living in their own underground community" list, Scarpa's Topolino e l'ultraghiaccio.

Why is this ridiculously specific thing even a trope. 

Yup, I was pretty surprised to find *two* stories like this...but there's a Scarpa one, too? Yikes!

It looks from one of the pics on Inducks that the penguin people in that story might be more Duck-sized, though.

[Matilda]

Another one I forgot: the Halas & Claxton/Vicar The Little People (in English, The Little Gronins), which I at first thought was the one Rob and sirredknee were talking about. I didn't like it enough to keep a copy, so I don't remember it in detail.

[Orora]

Nov 26, 2017 23:40:42 GMT Matilda said:

Another one I forgot: the Halas & Claxton/Vicar The Little People (in English, The Little Gronins), which I at first thought was the one Rob and sirredknee were talking about. I didn't like it enough to keep a copy, so I don't remember it in detail.

I liked this one!

Interestingly enough, Don Rosa seems to have liked this story enough to draw a cover for it.


Oddly, in the French version of the story, the Gronins are called "Gens" which literally means "People". This is how they introduce themselves. "Nous sommes simplement LES GENS" ("we are simply THE PEOPLE"). I am guessing they didn't feel the need to give a specific name for their species considering they live in their own self-contained society.



Also, they look like beardless clones of Grumpy.

[Spectrus]

Nov 26, 2017 19:30:24 GMT Zantaf said:

Emanuela Negrin & Lucio Leoni's Paperino e l'invasione sottozero, where diminutive blue aliens from a frozen parallel dimension plan to conquer the whole universe by invading through people's freezers. (Actually a pretty cool story, with a sequel that I never got to read, as it was never published outside Italy)

It would be a cool story even if it wasn't any good, but it is really very amazing IMO! (Man, I'm already starting to write like joetorcivia...  ) Those aliens are hilarious!

And like you, I've never read the sequel. The Inducks comment sounds promising though: "Art lively, detailed, effervescent, humorous and sparkling, really a joy to be observed and impossible to enjoy completely at a single reading.The story is part of the classic line of fantastic adventures in hidden dimensions: in this case, the cold dimension of the "Blue Beings", which has a hot counterpart in which the Great Tyrant took refuge, creating the Electric Toy Soldiers turned against. It is a completely new mythology, which does not smell like a besotted, and is built with great care and attention to detail that makes it immediately credible (with the appropriate proportions Disney).Subject and screenplay are rich and "dense" as art, and the first is articulated in a complete manner, eviscerating every aspect of the story, while the second row like a train despite the complex dialogues (or perhaps thanks to them) where the Bright and self-conscious humor makes her continuously master." (courtesy of Google Translate )

On topic: Do the strange little creatures from Sottopolinia count?

[Scrooge MacDuck]

Dec 6, 2017 12:18:44 GMT Spectrus said:

On topic: Do the strange little creatures from Sottopolinia count?

I say they do. 

[Zantaf]

Dec 6, 2017 17:05:51 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

Dec 6, 2017 12:18:44 GMT Spectrus said:

On topic: Do the strange little creatures from Sottopolinia count?

I say they do. 

It's a bit difficult to classify them really, but I guess they count in the sense that they appear to be "little". To be more precise, they present themselves as little bipedal animals of some sort in order to hide their true nature: that of being sentient shapeshifters that secretly have a society and a civilization of their own. But then again in their true form they don't seem to be little. I suppose it's a matter of establishing parameters.