For what it's worth, she doesn't look like either Michelle or Beth, the two female Woodchucks who were introduced into Italian stories in 2020 and have appeared in half a dozen stories since.
Matilda I thought you might like to know that the latest issue of Le Journal de Mickey includes a story by Frauke Schmickl and Sebastián Puñales, titled "More than Medals," that is germane to your interests. :-) (I won't explain why, I don't want to spoil it all for you.)
Matilda I thought you might like to know that the latest issue of Le Journal de Mickey includes a story by Frauke Schmickl and Sebastián Puñales, titled "More than Medals," that is germane to your interests. :-) (I won't explain why, I don't want to spoil it all for you.)
Thanks for the heads-up! I just ordered the issue from eBay.fr. (I should go through my whole list of the French comics I'm interested in and try to order them, now that the dollar=euro! Price plus shipping for a single issue of JM, without even combining shipping for a larger order, now comes to almost exactly the cost of a new comic book in the US.)
I just got a copy of Journal de Mickey 3631, and I note that in the 2021 story A Very Big Snowman by Snejbjerg, April, May and June are shown as Junior Woodchucks. They're wearing Woodchuck hats, and the Grand Mogul calls them Junior Woodchucks in the second panel. So I take this as confirmation that Egmont has definitely decided that there are girls in the JWs. There is no hint in the story of there being anything surprising or new about the membership of AMJ; they're just Woodchucks, and that's that. This along with More than Medals, mentioned above, where the organization is represented as having been co-ed already two generations ago!!!
This means that all the European publishers have decided that there are girls in the JW organization. Italy and Egmont have girls and boys mixed in together, while the Netherlands (I hear) is more likely to show them in separate troops, but all wearing the JW hat. Thanks for all your help in researching this question, all of you who posted here!
By the way, the Inducks character list for A Very Big Snowman includes Chickadees, which is a mistake. The girls are clearly Junior Woodchucks. Should I put this on the Inducks thread?
I just ran across the INDUCKS listing of this story by Korhonen, which apparently involves the young Elvira Coot/Grandma Duck as some kind of scout, Chickadee or JW. Has anyone here read it yet? Could you please post a summary? It'll probably be a while before I can get it in a language I can read, though I will start haunting the German eBay for a copy of that issue of Micky Maus. I wonder whether it accords at all with "More than Medals"? And I wonder whether it will turn up in a future issue of Picsou or SPG ....
I just ran across the INDUCKS listing of this story by Korhonen, which apparently involves the young Elvira Coot/Grandma Duck as some kind of scout, Chickadee or JW. Has anyone here read it yet? Could you please post a summary? It'll probably be a while before I can get it in a language I can read, though I will start haunting the German eBay for a copy of that issue of Micky Maus. I wonder whether it accords at all with "More than Medals"? And I wonder whether it will turn up in a future issue of Picsou or SPG ....
I have read the story in the Norwegian DD 2023-07. Summary: HDL have found Gertrude Gadwall's diary, and the whole story (except the first page) is about what they read there. Which is this: Clinton Coot is never at home, always out with the Junior Woodchucks. This annoys Gertrude. Their two daughters want to join the Woodchucks, but Clinton tells them that it's only for boys. Gertrude is further annoyed by this, and ends up founding the Chickadees. In the end (after seeing the girls do several impressive things), Clinton accepts that girls can join the Woodchucks, but at that point the girls choose to remain Chickadees instead.
Last Edit: Mar 21, 2023 9:01:19 GMT by oysteini: fix typo
I just ran across the INDUCKS listing of this story by Korhonen, which apparently involves the young Elvira Coot/Grandma Duck as some kind of scout, Chickadee or JW. Has anyone here read it yet? Could you please post a summary? It'll probably be a while before I can get it in a language I can read, though I will start haunting the German eBay for a copy of that issue of Micky Maus. I wonder whether it accords at all with "More than Medals"? And I wonder whether it will turn up in a future issue of Picsou or SPG ....
I have read the story in the Norwegian DD 2023-07. Summary: HDD have found Gertrude Gadwall's diary, and the whole story (except the first page) is about what they read there. Which is this: Clinton Coot is never at home, always out with the Junior Woodchucks. This annoys Gertrude. Their two daughters want to join the Woodchucks, but Clinton tells them that it's only for boys. Gertrude is further annoyed by this, and ends up founding the Chickadees. In the end (after seeing the girls do several impressive things), Clinton accepts that girls can join the Woodchucks, but at that point the girls choose to remain Chickadees instead.
Thanks much, oysteini! From the title in the Scandinavian versions, I knew Gertrude must be central to the story. Glad to know the outline. So it doesn't quite accord with "More than Medals"--it sticks with the Barks & Rosa version of scout history, keeping the girls as Chickadees and separate from the Woodchucks at least until the "present day." Hope I get to read it someday soon!
Based on that summary (haven't read the story myself) it sounds like a story that was made to consolidate the fact that a lot of modern stories show female woodchucks with the fact that there's a LOT of older stories were Chickadees are a thing getting reprinted all the time.
From the title in the Scandinavian versions, I knew Gertrude must be central to the story.
As you probably noticed on Inducks, this is the second story in an ongoing series by Korhonen where each story is about one relatively unknown person from the Duck family tree by Don Rosa.
So it doesn't quite accord with "More than Medals"--it sticks with the Barks & Rosa version of scout history, keeping the girls as Chickadees and separate from the Woodchucks at least until the "present day."
It seems to me that Korhonen's story doesn't stick with one or the other of the existing versions of Woodchuck/Chickadee history, but rather attempts to be compatible with all of them.
In the story, we only learn about what Gertrude wrote in her diary, and the story ends while her daughters are still small children. At the very least, the story makes it clear that the Junior Woodchucks would allow girls as members already at this time, while the organization still consisted of only Clinton Coot and a few boys. But everything that happened afterwards is left open for speculation. So it is possible that, for instance:
There continued to be only boys in the Woodchucks, even though girls were always allowed to join. After a while, when there was an established tradition with boy Woodchucks and girl Chickadees, it would just seem obvious to everyone that boys were supposed to be in the Woodchucks and girls were supposed to be in the Chickadees, and nobody would even think about checking whether the organizations had any rules regarding this.
The Woodchucks got no girl members immediately after Clinton had decided that girls were allowed. Some time later, when the organization had grown to include lots of boys, someone formalized rules for membership and decided that only boys were allowed.
A short while after the end of D 2022-070, Elvira and some of the other Chickadees decided to join the Woodhcucks after all. (Maybe they were members in both the Woodchucks and the Chickadees at the same time.) From then, the Woodchucks always had both girls and boys as members.
Based on that summary (haven't read the story myself) it sounds like a story that was made to consolidate the fact that a lot of modern stories show female woodchucks with the fact that there's a LOT of older stories were Chickadees are a thing getting reprinted all the time.
I agree. In fact, I think the story serves several purposes:
To tell the story of Gertrude Gadwall.
To explain the origin of the Chickadees.
To bridge the gap between different existing versions of the history of the Woodchucks.
There is, however, one thing that confuses me. This story shows Gertrude and Clinton as having two daughters, while in Rosa's Duck family tree (which the story is supposedly based on), they have one daughter (Elvira/Grandma Duck) and one son (Casey Coot). I'm not sure whether Casey is so much younger than Elvira that it would be possible that he was not born yet in this story. But do anyone know any other story where Grandma Duck has a sister? The two girls in this story seem to be identical in size (in fact, they are completely identical except that they have different hair), so I guess that they are twins.
True, the Korhonen story leaves all options open for what happens after the events related in Gertrude’s diary. Since there are so many stories where there are many boys and only boys in the JWs, though, it seems to me that the first two options you list are much more reasonable than the third (that there have been girls and boys in the JWs from nearly the beginning).
I note that there are both American and Italian stories (1960’s-1980’s) which make it very clear that the JWs are all male, by having a single girl sneak in or come along. Not to mention Rosa! As far as I know, only More than Medals projects the actual gender integration of the JWs back in time to Elvira’s childhood.
As for Elvira having a sister (and no brother yet!), you’ll have to ask alquackskey! Why do you think Korhonen inserted the sister? Would the story have worked just as well if the second girl had been a friend?
Why do you think Korhonen inserted the sister? Would the story have worked just as well if the second girl had been a friend?
It does not seem to be necessary for the story that there are two Coot girls. I think it would have worked equally well (with some small modifications) if there had been either just one girl or a girl and a boy.
In the panels with Chickadees, we see both of the Coot girls together with a few other girls, so the sister could have been replaced by one more "other girl".
The motivation for Gertrude to start the Chickadees is that Clinton is always out with the Woodchucks, leaving her and the children alone -- and that Clinton refuses to let the children come with him since they are girls. If the story had included Elvira and Casey as the children, then this part would have been different: Clinton would have let Casey come with him, but not Elvira. I think this would also work in the story, but maybe Korhonen didn't want to show Clinton discriminating between his children like this? It might seem a bit more cruel if he says "you can come, but not you" than simply saying "you can't come" to both kids.
Yes, part of the motivation for the story does seem to be keeping Clinton looking good to contemporary readers. So it makes sense that he comes around to saying that the JWs should accept girls (even if they functionally don't for some decades), and it also makes sense, as you say, that Korhonen wouldn't want Clinton to be obviously treating his children unequally.
In the real world USA, the Boy Scouts (renamed Scouts BSA) have accepted girls since I think 2018, while the Girl Scouts still exist and continue to be girls-only. So analogously, one could imagine that the JWs have started accepting girls but that the Chickadees still exist as a girls' organization. Meanwhile, another USA scouting group, the Camp Fire Girls, renamed Camp Fire, started accepting boys in 1975.
For people who use a floating timeline for the comics, it's going to be more and more difficult to make sense of an all-male JW organization, not to mention Grandma Duck's lifestyle and clothing!