"Lost Beneath the Sea"

So okay--we just did a "deep" story; now let's take on a shallow one. I know I've done this before, but I think I can profitably do it again, especially since this may well have the most strongly-pronounced postmodern elements of any Barks work I know (which is most of them)--and not really in a good way. Not that there aren't a handful of things to like here, but "Lost Beneath the Sea" is far from an all-time classic. Let's jump right in.


JEEZ! This is the FIRST PANEL, and already we're about as postmodern as it's possible to GET. Seriously--this is sort of stunning. Was Jean Baudrillard a Barks fan? If not, he shoulda been. Just to spell this concept out if you haven't been paying attention: postmodernity entails empty signifiers. So you have Mount Everest or the Taj Mahal or Hong Kong (I kinda think the inhabitants would object to being carted off to Duckburg, but what the hey), but you rip them out of their context to make them into tourist attractions, and you've rendered them completely flat: they aren't referring back to anything except in an incomplete, fragmentary way. So, there's that.



Man...now we come to this. As I'm sure we all know, Scrooge's Number One Dime was not meant to be a magical good-luck charm. Magica may think it is, but that's just because of her low wisdom score (and to psychologize for a moment, I kind of think that deep down, even she has some inkling of an idea that she's wrong--which, obviously, she can't let herself acknowledge). Barks was smart enough to know that that was just a bad idea. But, as he would ruefully acknowledge later, he slipped up occasionally, never more so than here.

We'd better acknowledge that this is hardly the first time that Scrooge's fortune was attributed to luck: in the early story "The Magic Hourglass," it is said to be dependent on the title artifact (for which reason the story is generally considered non-canonical). In "Riches, Riches Everywhere," he's just so goddamn lucky at mining that he can dig ANYWHERE, and he will automatically find treasure. And I've already written about The Golden Nugget Boat.

HOWEVER, as Barks realized, this was a bad idea, and he generally eschewed it. Not in today's story, however. The idea that Scrooge's success inheres in a magic charm completely alters the character, and not in a good way. At his stage of life in the comics, his empire is sufficiently developed that most of the money that comes rolling in is pretty much automatic--but the reason it's reached this stage is because he's chosen well what companies to buy/found. And the reason he's been able to do that is because of sound investments. And the reason he's had the capital to invest in the first place is that he worked like a demon for it. So there's a whole chain here. You can logically trace his wealth. Whereas if you say "oh, he's rich because he's LUCKY," then the chain is broken; the depth is lost. You might as well just say that he's rich because of magic (as Magica does).

Meanwhile, Donald is having problems:



The problem isn't that Donald is making shit up; the problem is that he's not being creative enough. This is kind of jokey, but it goes to show that "truth" is no longer a meaningful metric.

So anyway, having been fired, Donald and the kids get roped in to help Scrooge on his business venture, to protect the dime. Donald is hoping to find a good story so as to get his job back.



It's as much modern as it is postmodern, really, but the fact remains, the narration box is wrong (you've betrayed me for the last time, narration box!). Blood appears to no longer be thicker.

But to continue--we seem to be lacking much forward momentum here--the ducks miss their boat, and the dime leaves without them.



Yup: it's all thanks to the fact that apparently dimelessness turns Scrooge into the anti-Gladstone. Not much more to say about the wrongness of this conception.



Granted, that IS a pretty nice rendering of a storm. Never underestimate what good art can do for a story.

So naturally, they go off in a submarine in search of the dime. There's some action that I'm going to skim over as not really relevant, but ultimately, their ship gets taken by…these alien guys. The ship with the dime had been taken here too.



Their little undersea grotto is kind of cool, but who ARE these guys? This is what it comes down to: we never get any real sense of who they are or what they have to do with anything.



Okay, they need iron, apparently. Why? IT IS A MYSTERY. Seriously, there needs to be some context here; otherwise it's just not that interesting. But, like many a lesser duck-writer, Barks, in this case, does not provide any such thing.



...he DOES provide the kids beating the shit out of giant metal aliens, though, which has to be worth SOMETHING.



Man, do you HAVE to state it so blatantly? It's sort of funny that the chief wears a Napoleon hat for no obvious reason, I suppose. Anyway, they return the dime so Scrooge can use his luck (gah) to find iron for them.



This is actually kind of interesting, since Barks appears to be trying to have it both ways: it doesn't seem to be luck that allows Scrooge to find the metal, but rather his experience and know-how. But I don't think you can let Barks off the hook that easily: after all, it was quite explicitly shown that the loss of the dime resulted in a tidal wave of BAD FORTUNE; too late to change course now. Besides, I think the idea is that the very fact that there's iron to find comes down to luck. You could, I suppose, argue that there's meant to be sort of a happy medium between luck and skill, but I'm not buying it.

So that's about all. Oh, and Donald doesn't get his job back, because even a REAL story about martians is deemed unacceptable, naturally. Note also that the whole thing about buying national landmarks for a theme park was also abandoned. As I hope I've shown, I don't think this is a completely worthless story, but it's really not very good, and it just goes to show that working in a postmodern atmosphere can be very problematic, even for a writer as talented as Barks.