"A Game of One-Cupmanship"

Well okay, thanks to an off-hand aside I made in the last entry, I have somehow been dragooned into writing about a story entitled "A Game of One-Cupsmanship," written and drawn by Kari Korhonen and, yup, scripted in English by our own Joe Torcivia. This was certainly not a path I was planning to take, but as I always say, when life gives you coffee, make coffee-ade. Let us therefore do our best to approach it in a scrupulously fair-minded fashion.
(As an aside, allow me to mention that, in writing this entry, I came across this post from '08, featuring comments from Torcivia and David Gerstein, and reading through the discussion, Gemstone's dissolution just broke my fucking heart all over again. I know it's pointless to complain at this point, and if the business model wasn't working it wasn't working, but goddamn were Gemstone's offerings ever eighty thousand times better than anything Boom! is doing.)

As I mentioned the other time--and I don't know why I'm reiterating this; I don't think anyone reading this is too likely to be unaware of these things--Barks wrote three one-pagers where Scrooge scams the proprietor of a diner into giving him, at a reduced price or free, cups of coffee that would ordinarily have cost ten cents. It's only natural that someone would come up with the idea of expanding on this, and this is what Korhonen did.

I have a few overall points to make here, but let's save them 'til the end, and deal with the particulars first.

So Joe has this here diner that he runs with his niece, Carrie. But alas, there is a problem.



Scrooge always monopolizes one of their booths, cutting profits by a third. Granted, this seems like a somewhat silly problem to have--if they're so popular, why don't they expand?--but I think this is the way it is more because there has to be a conflict like this for the story to exist than to show that Joe has poor business sense. Still, intentional or not, it does contribute to the sense of the two of them as somewhat hapless.



I am aware that my prejudice in favor of having all duck stories set in some indeterminate mid-fifties time period isn't rational, and I can open my mind enough to enjoy those that aren't, but here it's sort of baffling--as evidenced by the seventy-five-cent coffee and references to wi-fi and the like, this is meant to be a modern-day thing…but it's also meant to be a sequel to a series of things that are definitely set in the past, inasmuch as they revolve around a conflict over ten-cent coffee. You would think that you would want the sequel to flow from the originals as seamlessly as possible, is all I'm saying.



I'll get more into this later, but this is the kind of thing that's somewhat baffling about the story: it's difficult or impossible to tell whether that "Have a rich and full-bodied" day is meant to be completely guileless, or whether it has passive-aggressive undertones (I mean, it's a decent line, but what underlies it?).



Okay, remember when I said that I can get into duck stories that are explicitly modern-day if I put my mind to it? THINGS LIKE "LINDSAY LOONHAN" ARE THE EXCEPTION. I mean, it's no one's fault, I suppose, and you can even point to Barks stories that do the same thing. That's neither here nor there, though. The point is: PHYSICAL. PAIN. Therefore, I'm going to pretend that "Lindsay Loonhan" isn't actually a play on the name of anyone and that she's just a relative of the never-seen Lulubelle Loon. And you can't stop me.




Above: the only solid evidence of Lulubelle's existence.

Here's a part where Joe pretends the diner's full and Scrooge waits:



Yeah, okay, this is still pretty goldarned weird behavior on Scrooge's part, but if I had to choose a favorite bit in the story, this would be it; it's strange enough to be entertaining, and yeah okay, seeing him mumbling the Ducktales theme amuses me and seems somehow appropriate--like the kind of thing one would do, were the fourth wall a li'l bit permeable--under the circumstances.



Wazzis "just a frail old man?" "Only a poor old man" not good enough for you, Torcivia? Hmph! :-p

It's bits like this that make Scrooge seem more manipulative than innocent.



So this goes on for a while, and seriously, how do things like the above not make you root pretty hard for our downtrodden blue-collar workers? I mean, come on. How can you let them get screwed over here? Well, you can like this:



(The idea being that they both came up with the same idea of giving him partial ownership to keep him out of their hair.)

Seriously, that picture of Scrooge in silhouette there--odsbodkins. He's quite clearly meant to look sort of sinister/triumphant (and now he's preventing other people from doing what he did, 'cause he's a big fat hypocrite). The whole ending can't help but be a serious downer.

Okay, so here's the thing: the operative fact about the original coffee cup gags--and a big part of what makes them work as gags--is that the stakes are so incredibly low. Scrooge cheats the guy, sure, but he cheats him out of so little that it's hard to get too indignant. I would even go so far as to say that the joke is mainly on Scrooge himself, for going to such absurd lengths. How much money must he have paid for folding cups, giant novelty mugs, and sponges to cut into doughnut shapes--none of which, obviously, he could reuse? In the modern-day follow-up, on the other hand, it's the guy's business itself that's in the balance. This puts a considerably different complexion on things, especially because of the gulf between the conflict in the originals (harmless) and in the sequel (not-so).

If it's hard to unequivocally condemn the sequel on these grounds, it's because Korhonen plays it rather coy with Scrooge's character and motives. He is shown to exhibit a kind of dull, passive obstinacy right up until the very end, making it unclear as to whether and to what extent this whole thing was a long con (and yes, this is somewhat amusing in places, but the net effect is just one of obfuscation). I give the story credit, then, for at least exhibiting some awareness that it would be kind of ruined if Scrooge were shown gleefully planning out a hostile takeover and then effecting this goal.

I don't think that this difference-splitting is very effective, for several reasons: first, because he obviously DOES take over the diner under false pretenses--he had to have given SOMEONE the false impression that, in selling to him, they weren't providing him with a controlling interest.

Second--and more interestingly--it is necessary to look at the form of the story. It's unusual among duck comics in that there is no anatid viewpoint character. Scrooge is pushed into the background as Joe and Kari Carrie take center stage. This partially justifies not characterizing Scrooge in more detail, but it also means that our sympathies are naturally and firmly with them and not him, and therefore, the takeover hurts more than it might otherwise. And yet, it had to be this way, because such a story where Scrooge was the viewpoint character--meaning we were explicitly meant to root for him--would just be intolerable. And yet and yet, a story where Scrooge didn't win out would have a hard time avoiding being contrary to the spirit of the source material. So as you can see, we're sort of chasing our own tail here; there were significant structural issues inherent in the concept itself that made the execution extremely tricky. Perhaps not impossible. But HARD.

So I guess overall, I have to say that, in spite of some good moments (and certainly through no fault of Torcivia's localization), the story just fundamentally doesn't work for me. Nonetheless, I'm glad to have read it and written about it, because it gave me an opportunity to think through some of these issues regarding viewpoint and structure and characterization and like that. And for now, that is all.