"Night of the Saracen"

I have praised this Marco Rota story in the past. When I went back and reread it, however, I realized...well, I'm forced to admit, it's not exactly a great story. Or is it? Comics consist of both words and pictures, so how much importance do you place on each of these elements? Because if you heavily favor the art side of the equation, it probably is a great story--indeed, it features a climax that may well be the most visually stunning thing in duckdom.  But if we privilege the writing…well, the premise certainly would have lent itself to greatness, but the execution is somewhat lacking.  Details? Okay.

The story begins with Donald dressing up as a Saracen pirate--one of those Sons of Mahomet--for a costume party.



Hmm. This story was first published in December of '83, predating "From Egg to Duck." In that story, we learn that Donald was, in fact, named after doughnuts. Yes, it would have enlivened the proceedings if Grandma had matter-of-factly suggested "let's name him after our murderous piratical forebear!" but that just isn't how it went down, people, and you need to learn to accept that. Sayin' a thing don't make it so! Honestly, sometimes I wonder about you.

'Course, we could always assume that Donald is just lying here--because, let's face it, being named after doughnuts really isn't that cool--but that leaves the question of why there is in fact an ancient pirate with a name similar to his who, as we'll see, looks just like him. Hmmm!



Things get cookin' when they find a treasure map inside Donald's prop sword, which it transpires is an actual sword that Scrooge gave to Donald rather than junking. You know what that means: treasure!



The question remains: is that actual Arabic script, or am I an illiterate buffoon for even imagining that that could possibly be the case?

Anyway, to cut a long, somewhat convoluted story short, the ducks need to find the rest of the sword so as to be able to put it together (the shard is supposed to be on the Italian coast) so as to be able to experience the mysterious "Night of the Saracen," and get some sweet treasure in the process. Sounds good, right? Good.



Rota is very good at drawing panoramas like this. The whole story really benefits from a strong sense of place.



Good sense of tension, also. All the townspeople have fled, leaving only our heroes. They find the missing sword piece--rather too easily; was it really just sitting around for hundreds of years?--and when they put it together, they are treated with a vision of the past, when ol' Don Al-Din was a-raiding.



You have to admit, that first line is pretty badass, and really establishes him as a force to be reckoned with right from the get-go. As for the second line...well, really, who can resist quoting "The Duck in the Iron Pants?" I know I can't!

However, Don's character makes a very sudden U-turn when he comes across a pretty girl hiding in a basement.



...as one does. And here we have the biggest problem with this story. Obviously, the medium presents one with somewhat limited confines in which to work, but even given that, this is the least convincing love story ever. The above is seriously all there is to it. He sees the girl and then suddenly, bam, he completely abandons his piratical ways. It would certainly have been possible to include enough detail to make this at least a little more plausible, but nope. This is all we get.



...also, she has dognose grandparents, an obvious and distracting mistake.



But let's focus on the positive for a moment. Don's crew turns on him when they see that he's turned on them, but they do not meet with a positive end, marking a rare instance in duckdom in which characters are actually unambiguously killed, even off-stange. My main point is this, however: isn't that storm awesome? And it gets awesomer:



WHAM. And, to reiterate:



WHAMBO! Rota really is a hell of an artist, and he pulls out all the stops here. And the business of doomed lovers facing their fate like this strongly appeals to the romantic in me.

But of course, this is a duck comic, so they're not really doomed, and we move rather precipitously from the sublime to the completely friggin' ridiculous.



Um...



Er, yeah. So here's the question, to which I don't have a definitive answer: is this "poem" supposed to be this, er, horrendous? Don's expressions as he's reading it certainly create the impression of goofy windiness, but it seems as though, given what's come before, a certain amount of seriousness would be called for here. However, regardless of whether it's intentional or not, it pretty firmly smashes the shit out of any drama that this romance may have had, and prevents us from taking it at all seriously. Of course, it might have been a bit much to expect Rota--or the author of the English script, Don Markstein--to come up with a genuinely affecting love poem, so we're kind of at an impasse. I think the moral here is: don't include poetry in your duck-comic love stories if you don't want them to descend into bathos. Or unless you're a really good poet, which let's face it you are not.



...and that's all, really. You'll note that the modern-day ducks really don't do much of anything here, rather serving as little more than an overly elaborate framing device. Seems to me that a bolder move would have been to jettison the modern-day stuff entirely, and just tell Don Al-Din's story. This would have allowed for a more protracted, and hopefully thus more effective, romance, and as Rota has shown in his "Andold Wild Duck" stories and elsewhere, he isn't averse to doing "historical" epics of this nature. As it stands…well, the story sure is pretty, I'll give it that.