"Duck in Orbit"

It has been argued that the US market for Disney comics is hampered at least in part by the fact that there are virtually no comics actually produced in the US, and that, for whatever their virtues (which can be considerable), foreign creators don't exactly understand the characters in the same way that Americans do (or COULD, if there were actually a statistically significant number of American creators kicking around these days), and therefore they don't resonate as strongly with US audiences.
There may be something to this, but we really can't complain, given that them goldurn Yurpeans, unlike us, actually WANT to do things with the characters. Fair, I think it is fair to say, is fair. Anyway, sometimes they can bring out interesting new aspects of the duckiverse. I'm not complaining, really, though talented new American artists would be nice (though totally inconceivable, unless the people at Boom! decide to get off their asses--if you want to see how incredibly insular the European market is, just read through this thread.).

Still, sometimes you see something that just makes you say: dude--no. Not acceptable. That's not change we can believe in. Like today's story, "Duck in Orbit," which would be a pretty okay story if not for a problem that will quickly become apparent. The story's drawn by the Vicar the Mad Chilean (sometimes I think that Vicar has actually illustrated every single duck story ever, and all supposed counter-examples are just an elaborate illusion--not that I'm complaining; his work is nothing if not Serviceable) and written by some Dane named Gorm Transgaard, whose work I'm reasonably sure I've read elsewhere but can't even come close to remembering where.

Right, let's do this thing. So here's the set-up:



Nothing much to say about that; a set-up like this could go in any direction. It's the "something else behind it" that turns out to be the problem here.



Now listen: as everyone reading this probably knows, Scrooge has a famous line in the all-time-classic story "Only a Poor Old Man" (published in the first-ever issue of US), regarding the question of how he made his fortune, which is felt to sum up who he is. Say it with me:



Now, what exactly "square" MEANS is an extremely open question. You can find examples in Barks of Scrooge behaving in ways that don't seem too damn square to ME, by any definition. Forget about "Voodoo Hoodoo;" that was before there was any clear notion of what kind of a character he was supposed to be. But is THIS "square," f'rinstance?



Okay, that's an extreme example, and in fairness, Barks' one-page gags are known for often not having much character continuity with his longer stories. But you can see examples of him trying to get the better of his nephews, trying to avoid paying them what he owes them, and stuff like that all the time. That's all been sort of rolled into his character, and we accept it unthinkingly. However, these are small-scale things; furthermore, he's dealing with kin, and we know that, if push comes to shove, he's not gonna leave them in the lurch.

So it's flexible. But if "making it square" means ANYTHING, it bloody well means NOT ENGAGING IN CORPORATE SABOTAGE TO CREATE A BLATANTLY ILLEGAL MONOPOLY FOR THE PURPOSE OF ENTHUSIASTIC PRICE-GOUGING. Come the hell ON. This is just an awful deformation of the character.

Is this actually a consequence of the story being European? It's not a closed case, but I tend to think it is. If you go back to American non-Barks Scrooge tales from the fifties and sixties, you can see him engaging in all sorts of dickery, but the character hadn't really solidified by that point (also, Barks' contemporaries tended to be incredibly hacktastic, but I guess that's beside the point). He has been known to behave fairly reprehensibly in Rosa and Van Horn stories, but again, in those cases it's generally rather limited indignities directed at kin, as opposed to LARGE-SCALE WHITE COLLAR CRIME. Sorry to keep shouting, but geez.

Even if it's not strictly a European thing--I'm certainly open to counter-arguments here--the very least we can say is that it's definitely an example of what happens when someone has a very poor understanding of the character he's meant to be writing. Shouldn't happen at all.



We could see this as more of Scrooge being a jerk, which it is, but more than that, it's just garden-variety bad plotting to get the story's main action going--which may, however, be a sign of the same lack of care that results in Scrooge's mischaracterization. Yeah, the public's easy to distract, but you can't have the circuses without the bread. "Hey, why did my phone bill just double for no reas--Ooh! Pretty lights!" Uh huh (no word on how the 99.99999% of people in the world who miss this brilliant distraction are gonna be pacified).

So Donald over-powers his rocket, and it drags him into space.



The actual "duck in orbit" part of the story is actually pretty darn cool. It's just a shame it couldn't have gotten here in a less idiotic way.



Yeah, if there's one thing scientists hate, it's winning Nobel Prizes and getting dozens of high-profile papers published. It's pretty much what they're known for.

So the rocket crashes into Scrooge's COMPLETELY FUCKING ILLEGAL satellite, and that's that for that scheme.




That's all-right-looking too, though it's probably thanks to the colorists more than anything. All hail "Egmont Office, Scott Rockwell!"

Unfortunately, Transgaard just COULDN'T leave bad enough alone, though, because then we get this remarkably tone-deaf ending:



Yeah, okay, so it's hardly the first time a duck story has ended with Scrooge threatening to inflict violence on Donald. Barks did this plentia times. However, it may well be the first--the first I'VE seen, certainly--in which he threatened him with a club with a nail though it. And, all this, let us not forget, for inadvertently breaking up a plan to VIOLENTLY SHOVE OUT THE COMPETITION AND BLEED THE PEOPLE FOR ALL THEY'RE WORTH. Okay, I'm done shouting now. Inappropriate! Just a bit! This shit just WRECKS what could otherwise have been a decent story. To be fair, it may be that Vicar himself just improvised the weaponry, but that doesn't really make it any better, nor does it disprove the theory about non-Americans and ducks. Again, I want to make it clear that I'm certainly not accusing all furriners of malfeasance. Not "getting" Scrooge to this extent is pretty rare for ANYONE. But there it is.

The bottom line is, regardless of whether it would exactly prevent things like this, I want more American creators. Also, for Boom! to stop letting Van Horn's stories languish, unpublished in their native language. Also, a pony.