Requiem for Ducky Bird; or, The Vagaries of Fortune

It really is inexplicable how things work out sometimes. Look at John D Rockerduck, f'rinstance.


…or, don't look at him. Up to you. I don't find him particularly arresting. He's a rival billionaire to Scrooge who plays a minor role in a minor Barks ten-pager--not very interesting from my perspective, yet for some reason, he resonated like hell for a whole bunch of Europeans, and so became a very common (far more so than Glomgold, per Inducks' statistics) foil for Scrooge in European stories, a role that he continues to occupy to this day.

On the other hand, a much cooler one-shot Barks character, who appears in a much better Barks story, and who would seem to me to have had an awful lot of potential for further use--utterly gone. Not even indexed on inducks. Be honest: just from hearing the name, were you able to immediately pinpoint the character? If so, congratulations; you're a true Barksian. If not, though, I certainly wouldn't blame you, since, in spite of the fact that everyone involved with duck comics worships Barks, it has never occurred to anybody to make use of this character. Here's Ducky Bird, from "Mystery of the Ghost Town Railroad:"



(According to some people, "ducky bird" is slang for penis. If Barks was actually trying to get one over on Western, all I can say is WELL DONE. It certainly doesn't seem to be a common term, however--sounds Victorian to me--and I don't think this would be enough to explain the character's total disappearance)

She's the granddaughter of Katie Mallard, whom Scrooge knew in his prospectin' days.



Katie has never been used again either, which is also a bit baffling--a Barksian character from Scrooge's past! How does that not interest everyone?--but I suppose a little less so; she lacks the romance of your Glittering Goldie. Still, I wish she had made an appearance in the L&T.

UPDATE: Commenter Thomas astutely notes that a character who must be a young Katie Mallard does indeed make a cameo appearance in "The Empire-Builder from Calisota:"



Neat-o! I still wish she played a more important role, however.

Now, honestly, I'm reading a fair bit more into the character than is actually clear from the story. I think that's fair, though, given that everyone reads far more into "Back to the Klondike" than the story provides. I think that Ducky would make a good recurring quasi-romantic foil for Donald. She's tough, yet with a certain appealing clumsiness.



My brother argues--and I think there's definitely something to this--that the best female characters in popular fiction are women who are tough, but who don't define their toughness in relationship to men (eg, "no man can defeat me!"). This is getting kind of obscure, but the canonical example of this is the character of Nagi Kirima from the anime Boogiepop Phantom. I think Ducky could easily fall into this category. In my opinion, she would make a great quasi-romantic foil for Donald.

The thing about Donald's relationship with Daisy is that more often than not it becomes nothing more than the Battle of the Reductive Gender Stereotypes, where the characters see one another as more or less alien and can only interact with one another through very simplistic lenses. One sometimes (okay, often) wonders what exactly they see in one another. It would definitely be good for there to be a female character who works with Donald as an equal and can provide at least an implied threat to this status quo. There are occasional attempts to create a character who fulfills this role, like Kay K from the Double Duck series and "Dezzi Digger" from this story*, but these are all one-offs; there's never anything sustained. This could be Ducky! Or she could do something else; but the point is, there she is--why in god's name wouldn't you want to take advantage of that?

*Bullshit spoiler: "Eye of Ra" all turns out to be a dream in the end. This filled me with rage, as it's a surprisingly good story up to that point.

But hey, maybe I'm wrong; I can totally understand why several potentially super-interesting characters from one of Barks' best latter-day stories are systematically totally ignored by everyone. After all, Barks, right? Who gives a shit about anything he writes?

It may surprise you, but the above paragraph is a lie. I am completely and utterly baffled by this. I demand an explanation from my perspicacious readers.