"A Day in a Duck's Life"

I may in the past have expressed indifference about Daan Jippes' Barks re-draws, but I recently read the new version of "A Day in a Duck's Life" (Barks' last DD story, I believe, from 1971) as recently published in Boom's WDC716, and, well...I read it side-by-side with the original, Kay Wright version (as reprinted in WDC632), and I can't deny it: the difference is pretty stunning. The story itself may be one of Barks' weakest efforts, but the new art helps it immensely, making it far more fun to read than it really has any right to be.
Mind you, this doesn't mean that I think that characterizing Jippes' work here as being "in the classic Barks style" is any less nutty. Wright's art isn't very good, but--probably inevitably--it looks more Barks-y than Jippes does. That's not intended as a value judgment; it is merely to say that, since Wright was working in the same time and place as Barks, with the same dominant aesthetics, his work is more Barksian. Badly-executed in its Barksianism, for sure sure, but Barksian nonetheless. Whereas Jippes' art is very distinctive; you're never gonna confuse it with anyone else's, let alone Barks'. But this is really just pointless semantics.

There's little point in going over the story beat by beat, because it doesn't really have much of a plot, rather jumping from one thing to another without any sense of rhythm. A number of Barks' later ten-pagers did this sort of thing, but here it's really taken to an extreme. Basically, Donald is big into muscle cars. He steals the kids' money. He cuts in on their delivery business. He randomly takes time outs to race some rival car guy. And he inadvertently stops a plane hijacking. It's all pretty chaotic.

But let's look at some differences between the two versions. First, it should be noted, Jippes' version increases the original's thirteen pages to fourteen, mainly by expanding some of the panels to double size. So, f'rinstance, this...



...becomes this:



As you can see, not only is the Jippes version more detailed (what with the addition of a stoop, screen door, and trash receptacles), but it's also substantially more dynamic, with an actual sense of motion. Their contraption is honestly pretty lame in the original; it's much cooler in the remake.

Also, check out these panels, from the hijacking bit:





In the first one, the pilot looks sort of harried, but not anything like as terrified as one probably would be under the circumstances; and Donald looks more apathetic than woeful. Jippes draws their faces much more appropriately.

There are also a few unobtrusive Jippesian additions to the story. Blasphemy, you say? That's as may be, but they are unquestionably improvements.





No "we hope" (and no nephews, for that matter) in Wright's version. This adds just a touch of transition and makes the whole thing slightly less jumpy than it is when HDL just disappear as Donald roars off.

More notably, at one point Jippes adds a whole new panel:





As you can see, in the original Donald just sort of teleports from the tree to holding the piggy bank; it's a pretty egregious continuity problem (though one for which Barks himself has to take the blame). The whole sequence of Donald trying to steal the kids' money probably goes on rather too long, but this is also the place where I think the new art helps the story the most: sure, it's ridiculous, but the manic sense of energy that Jippes brings to the affair meant that I was guffawing throughout the whole thing; the same certainly could not have been said for Wright's leaden rendition.





Seriously, what can one possibly say about that last panel in the original version? It's not just that the nephews look, let's say, mentally challenged; it's also that they look more like they're doing some sort of tai chi thing than they are actually running. Also note that--although "A Day in a Duck's Life" would imply some sort of temporal flow--it's still full daylight in the earlier version (though this, to be fair, is probably more a problem with the coloring than anything else). Jippes fixes all this.

What he can't fix, though, is the fact that the story has no moral viewpoint. It's just empty. Donald steals the kids' money as well as their business, but is there comeuppance? Is there even any hint of possible comeuppance? No, there is not. And I don't think that's intentional; I think it's because Barks just forgot about these things. There's no challenge to anything Donald does; he just muddles through the story, remaining pretty much exactly the same the whole way through. I guess you could argue that this is some sort of commentary on something, but I'm pretty sure that Barks just couldn't be bothered--not that you can blame him, given that he was being called back into service after having nominally retired, but the end product speaks for itself. Even his more depressing late ten-pagers have more narrative ambition--more to chew on--than you find here.

Still, I'm grateful to Boom for publishing the new version; Jippes does the most that man could do to rehabilitate it, and comes surprisingly close to succeeding. And as for Barks, we can take comfort in the knowledge that, with "Horsing Around with History," he ended his career on a relative high note.