"Bubbleweight Champ"

You have heard it said that Barks became dispirited in the sixties, but I say unto you, nay, he did some very good stories at that time.

However, then you present "Bubbleweight Champ" as a counterargument, and I am forced to concede defeat. Alas! I slink away in humiliated silence. I think Barks' ten-pagers at the time suffered rather more than his longer Scrooge adventures. A LOT of his shorts at the time are quite sour, but of all those that I've read, none tops "Bubbleweight Champ" in this regard--it reads like something written by a very, very depressed man.

So as we open, the Duckburg Junior Woodchucks are competing with the Goosetown Junior Woodchucks in some sort of physical fitness competition, and at the end, they find themselves deadlocked. You'd think someone would have had the foresight to not include an even number of events. In any case, it is decided that the troops' respective instructors will have to fight to break the tie, and the Duckburg coach is out sick and you can see where THIS is going. A pretty standard premise, you'd think--HDL have to get Donald into shape to take on a superior opponent. Simple fun, right? Well, uh...



Whee! It's Carl Barks' L'Assommoir! If you've ever wanted to see what Donald would be like as an alcoholic, then what the hell am I saying? No one has EVER wanted to see that. But brother, you will get it here--start to finish. I'm actually sort of surprised the censors let such not-so-subtext get through--and in this case, I would actually kinda have been on the censors' side, because this is just...awful. Throughout the entire story, Donald is never, ever portrayed as anything other than a complete, barely-functional lush.



"Years on a soda fountain stool." So we're implying, even, that he's always been like this. Why, Carl, why?

Barks' second wife was an alcoholic, you know--a violent alcoholic, apparently, who would try to destroy his work. I don't know if that informs this or not, but it certainly could at least partially account for the grimness of tone.

So who does Donald have to compete against?



"Boldan True" is this fellow's name, and if you imagined that, perhaps, he would present some sort of positive contrast to Donald's drunkenness…well, as you can see, not so much: he may be tough, but he's also unpleasantly full of himself and his vaguely suspicious, hyper-organic lifestyle.

Well, you can maybe even guess what happens:



Yup, the Gurgleurp and Yaks' milk got mixed up. No glory; no nothing. A totally empty prize. Donald goes back to drinking, delusionally full of himself, and the kids just feel hollow.



Christ, Carl, were you trying to drive kids to drink, or what? Maybe retirement wasn't such a bad idea.

"The Fabulous Tycoon"

When Barks was doing Uncle Scrooge comics, he would generally draw one long story (though they trended shorter as his career progressed), and then often he would dash out a shorter story--as long as required--to fill things out. That's why, unlike the Donald stories which appeared in WDC&S and were almost all ten pages, the Scrooge shorts vary so much in length. And now you know (actually, you probably knew already, being a clued-in kind of individual. But we have to cater to the unwashed masses here, so have patience).

You have to admit, being able to dash off shorts on command is pretty impressive, especially given that they're generally pretty okay.

That's what we have here: a totally throwaway, five-page story that is nonetheless highly entertaining. The plot is nonexistent, the denouement doesn't make a huge amount of sense, but who cares? It's still good clean fun. It was a favorite of mine when I was small, and it continues to edify.



So to jump right in, let's jump right in. I am not sure I buy the notion that there could be any question of Scrooge being flatfooted by some random dude, but I will simply accept it. Note that Longhorn Tallgrass here would reappear in "The Twenty-Four Carat Moon." Continuity! Sort of. So anyway, let's go and meet this Tallgrass fellow, shall we?



And now we see the raison d'être of this comic, which is to tell Texas-y tall tales while showing jumbo-sized crops.



It's all very entertaining, I think. Barks was good at coming up with these and relating them in a fun way (unless he found them in a book somewhere, in which case LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU).



Donald has a rather defeatist attitude to all this--you'd think he'd know his uncle better than that, especially after having accompanied him on so many treasure hunts. You can pretty much tell where the story is going from this.



Donald's perspective does contrast nicely with Scrooge's attitude of wry, understated amusement. WHICH LEADS US TO THE DENOUEMENT!



PWNZ0RED! As I said, this doesn't seem to be very sensical--just because Scrooge provided Tallgrass with some startup capital doesn't mean that he couldn't, in theory, have outdone Scrooge since then. Or are we meant to assume that Scrooge loaned him billions of dollars to just buy the whole damn ranch, ready-made? I'm pretty sure business does not work like that.

Never mind, though--it's still a good story that I like to return to from time to time.

"Pecking Order"

It's man--er, bird--versus bird--er, non-anthropomorphized bird--in a classic story from 1945! Let's look in, shall we?

There's BIG PRIZE MONEY for anyone who can take a photograph of a rare woodpecker.


Topical--an obvious allusion to the ivory-billed woodpecker, the last known specimen of which died in 1944. Don't even get me started on how much humans suck.


Ten men! Gone crazy! Seems hyperbolic, but this is kind of how these things work--it's ALWAYS a serious situation. I'm not going to go into more detail about how this represents a modernist cultural milieu. I think I've beaten that dead horse sufficiently. But keep it in mind. IT IS TRUE. Insofar as there IS "truth" hereabouts. I would say that there is, more or less. That may change later on in Barks' run, but for now, we're okay. I'm done now.



As you can see, the dialogue here is a little stilted--it actually reminds me a bit of Mark Trail, and I apologize for making such an unfair comparison. I read somewhere that Barks, who lacked much formal education, studied grammar books as an adult because he knew this would be necessary for a cartooning career. The difference between his writing at this point and that from his late-forties-mid-fifties prime is really incredible.

In spite of that, this is a fast, fun little story, filled with manic action. Instead of a detailed play-by-play, let's just give the people what they really want: a montage of pictures of Donald being injured.


















Not bad for ten pages!

"Days at the Lazy K"

So I did the "choose a random comic book" thing, and I came up with…"Days at the Lazy K," a sour little story from 1945 that could easily be viewed, in this day and age at least, as right-wing propaganda. Whether there's actually anything to this, I'm really not sure. But let's look, shall we?

So Donald and HDL are hanging around at the Lazy K. Before the establishment of Duckburg, you could often find them here and there for no obvious reason. They decide to go to town to see a movie:



This does not sit well with Donald, however.



I actually like this part--I think it's hilarious that Donald takes it as a personal insult that the kid in the movie was able to carry out this feat. Look how enraged he seems. Damn kid thinks he's so great! But that's Our Donald--he will always have his neuroses, but in these early stories he often has little else.

As you've probably guessed, he decides that HE needs to tame a wild colt. That'll learn that upstart kid to…be in movies…and…do things…that Donald can't…do. Or something.

So they get a rancher to get them a wild colt, and godDAMN is the creature they end up with an evil hellspawn.



The bulk of the story consists of stuff like this. Not that it doesn't have a right to be angry over having been captured, I suppose, but geez.



See? See? Like the terrorists who will break out of our maximum security prisons with their super strength and bomb you to death in your bed, this creature has super powers.

Anyway, after Donald gives up, HDL ultimately decide that they're going to take the law into their own hands.



Ar! No mercy!




Aw! See what tough love can do? But then its mother calls for it, so they decide to let it go. AND:



SEE? SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU TRY TO BARGAIN WITH TERRORISTS? Reminds me of that one Redwall book that painstakingly makes the point that some races are just intrinsically evil and it's better to just slaughter them right away rather than trying to talk to them. Well, maybe not quite thatNazi-esque, but it's hard to say how we're meant to read this. It's a bit too easy to say "oh, it's just a kids' comic--there's no subtext." This was published in August, so World War II would still have been going on as Barks was writing it. But it also seems like it might be kind of pushing it to read this as some sort of veiled anti-Japan allegory. Then again, the hypnosis bit would fit in well with an Orientalist reading. So maybe!

What it boils down to, however, is: I don't know. I'm honestly sort of at a loss here. Feel free to chime in with any brilliant insights.

"Oddball Odyssey"

Why am I doing a Magica story? Because I decided, okay, I'm gonna flip through my big box o' disney comics and write about the first Barks or Rosa story that comes up. That story, to my mild dismay, was "Oddball Odyssey" (1963) in Uncle Scrooge 361. Alackaday!

Oh well--better get going! It's actually a somewhat theoretically interesting thing. Let's kick things off in media res for a change:



"A cool chick." There's some sixties culture for you, which always seems a bit odd when it crops up in Barks stories. Note also the anachronism here--mashing contemporary idioms together with Homeric epic.

That's right--it's our old friend postmodernism. In this story, we see an interesting blending of history and simulacra, myth and demythologizing. How much of this is real and how much is pure artifice? And does this oddball version have any real relation to the actual Odyssey?

(note also the square speech bubbles. This was apparently a new format at the time, but the editors recognized that it didn't really suit Barks, and gave it up tout de suite. There were apparently originally no borderlines around them either, but Gemstone added them for this reprinting. Not that this is anything but coincidence, but hey--things are changing!)

So anyway, Scrooge approaches his nephews with an unusually arbitrary-sounding plan to get more cash.



Now admittedly, this seems somewhat gimmicky, as were a number of late stories (qv, always and forever, "Mythtic Mystery"), but I think this is mostly justifiable. Just how the hell relevant to anything anymore IS a plan to find treasure from Greek mythology? I ask you!

Still, take note of that "mostly."



Would Scrooge really fall for this? you might ask. Well, it turns out the letter has some sort of hypnotic perfume on it, okay? Okay! Compare this, perhaps, to "Cave of Ali Baba," where fascination is also a thing that occurs, also in order to create the illusion of great treasure.

So anyway, it's off to Greece. Scrooge is meant to bring his Number One Dime to identify himself. Of course.



I believe you'll find that the technical term for "duckess" is "duck." But anyway...

She offers Scrooge some totally sweet treasure in exchange for the dime. But the unmesmerized HDL take a closer look through a spyglass, and...



Usetabee you could depend upon the integrity of ancient treasure, but these days, not so much. Scrooge's previous modus operandi appears to be obsolete. In "The Golden Fleecing," you could rely on Greek mythology. The larkies were antagonists, but they were the real thing. Now, however, myth appears to be an empty simulation thereof, with none of its greater significance. And in "Mythtic Mystery," Greek gods are really spacemen (as in that dumb Star Trek episode). It seems you can just fuck around with this stuff with impunity. None of it has any real stability.

Magica fails to get the dime--Scrooge's attachment to it is too great, and her foof bombs prove ineffective. However!



It turns out there really WAS a Circe. Whaddaya know? Fine, but while that does add another layer of ambiguity, one could hardly suggest that this Circe has much connection to the "real" Circe. It's just a device for wacky, transmogrification-oriented hijinx.

Yeah, she finds the wand that Circe used to turn the sailors into pigs. There follows a struggle where she transforms our heroes into various critters. Even their stability as ducks is threatened! But it's not threatened by the actual historical/mythological forces that might have been a factor in previous stories. It culminates thusly:



I find that image amusing. What more can I say?

There's certainly a danger, when writing these little articles, that one will end up just saying the same things over and over and over, but I think this story really does illustrate something fundamental about Barks' ambivalent vision of modernity and post, making it worthy of spotlighting.

"The 'Colossalest Surprise' Quiz Show"

Barks was, if not exactly obsessed, certainly very interested in the idea of quiz shows. We see this in "Voodoo Hoodoo" and "The Golden Nugget Boat;" there are also at least three stories that center around the concept. This 1956 short is one of them. Even though it's not an adventure story, "The 'Colossalest Surprise' Quiz Show' illustrates, in a nascent state, some of the same theoretical problems that Barks was grappling with in the character of Scrooge later in his career.

So our hero is watching the quiz show of the title.



I think quiz shows are emblematic here of the way the world works today, as compared to the way it did in Scrooge's heroic past. Back in the day, you had to be smart and tough in order to make it big--



--but now it seems to be more a matter of luck. There's no comprehensible connection between wealth and merit. Naturally, this drives Scrooge crazy. Most of his earlier adventure harken back to a time when it was all about adventure and grit, but faced with this provocation, his reaction isn't to rail against it as a general concept, but rather to think, man--how can I get in on that? The world is not such a heroic place anymore, alas, and Barks became increasingly unable to elide this realization as he grew older and more cynical.

So anyway, Scrooge learns that he can get on the show just by being first to show up at the station, so he sets his clock and gets there before anyone, and now he's going to be tonight's contestant. Hurrah! But alas!



Karmic payback for trying to make money without earning it? He can't not show up at the station, because he PROMISED to be there (there's that frustrating, anachronistic honor showing up--it's not even that he signed some sort of contract; he just made a PROMISE--and promises cannot be broken)! And the questions are too easy to miss! What to do? Why, hurl himself out the window, of course!



Donald makes the obvious suggestion--why not just play dumb?



He IS kind of a square--that is, not really equipped to play on this world's terms.

So he succeeds in missing every question. But surely you didn't think this plan was going to work?



He can't win--smarts simply have no causal relationship with success, and this mocks the very idea. His effort to engage the system on its own terms fails by virtue of the fact that it's own terms are fundamentally non-rational.



This recalls the ending of "Back to Long Ago." In both cases, the reaction isn't a logical one, but it does make a certain amount of sense if read as nothing more than a lashing out in blind anger at a world that JUST...ISN'T...WORKING...LIKE IT...SHOULD! ARGH!

"The Golden Nugget Boat"

So having written about Gladstone, let's look at how Scrooge is portrayed in 1961, when Barks is feeling old and cynical about his flagship character.

Scrooge, of course, is in a sense opposite of Gladstone--while Gladstone never works for anything, Scrooge has always worked for everything (notwithstanding the early, usually-considered-non-canonical story "The Magic Hourglass"). But is this still the case?

So Scrooge is lecturing Donald and Gladstone about how they need to work hard, like he did. Otherwise they'll never amount to anything. Gladstone disagrees, however: good things fall into his lap. For instance, he just today found this handsome boat carved out of a single gold nugget, which he sells to Scrooge.

As the ducks are leaving, a pass to answer questions on a quiz show and win a trip to Alaska hits Gladstone in the face, as these things do. But he throws it away (see previous entry), and Scrooge gets it.

On the quiz show, we get our first glimmer that things may be changing, as Scrooge wins the prize not by answering any actual knowledge questions, but just by telling tall tales about his Klondike days.



"Windy" indeed. His heroic exploits are becoming a quasi-fictional joke. The question of what exactly his legacy means and whether it still has any relevance looms large here. Still, he wins the ticket--only it blows away (and you can no doubt guess who ends up finding it). Rallying against Donald's defeatism, however, he decides that Alaska will be gone to anyway, using bits of Gladstone's gold boat to pay for passage.



Gotta show those young whippersnappers that he still has It (for a different take on this theme, see 1957's "City of Golden Roofs").

In Alaska, there's a contest going on to see who can find the biggest gold nugget--perfect for his purposes. But of course, Gladstone is here too, and he also enters the contest, damn his hide.

Desperate to win and prove himself, Scrooge starts lookin'. But it is proving more difficult than expected, as the place has been picked clean. This is actually my favorite part of the story:



"Winds play a dirge through his whiskers"--that's a nice bit of writing.

This shows that Scrooge still has the work ethic--but is it even relevant anymore? Unfortunately, it appears that it may not be, because he sure ain't finding anything, and Donald and HDL are getting sick of being out in the wilderness. Finally, they hatch a plot: they beat the remains of the gold boat into a nugget and bury it so that Scrooge can find it and they can get back home.

However--quelle surprise--Gladstone arrives at just that moment, and finds the fake nugget (and isn't this a perfect postmodern artifact?) by randomly tossing a pebble.



After failed efforts to recover the nugget from Gladstone, Scrooge comes to the sad, ineffable conclusion.



The reader kind of believes this, too. But! before heading back, he sadly tosses the same pebble with which Gladstone struck gold, and



This makes him happy, obviously--he's come out on top! But has he? He found this tidy fortune by exactly the same means as Gladstone. Their characters seem to be sort of blurring which is hardly a positive thing. I suppose you could argue that in some karmic sense he "earned" the nugget he finds due to having previously tried so dern hard--and that this is why it's so much bigger than Gladstone's (PLEASE GOD let's not have any Freudian readings here). But sadly, I don't think the comic really supports that interpretation. When I read this story as a lad, these issues didn't bother me. They didn't even occur to me--I just enjoyed the neat giant boat that our heroes make out of the giant nugget.



It's a neat bit of symmetry, but from my current, adult perspective, it seems like kind of a hollow victory, from the pen of someone who's become too tired and cynical to really be writing these things anymore, although fortunately, his later stories would to a large extent redeem him. I won't claim to exactly dislike this story, per se, but from a critical perspective, it is a little bit dispiriting.