"Search for the Cuspidoria"

Big thanks to Chris Barat for donating to Japan relief. If you haven't done this yet, I highly encourage it; the media tends to create a sort of "out of sight, out of mind" mentality; if there's no single big, new, telegenic thing they can report, they'll just sort of ignore the situation, but it's an ongoing thing nonetheless. As I realized when a Dutch reader emailed with his donation (and his request will also be coming up in the near future), I've been a bit Americentric about this--it's not something I try for, but it happens, and it shouldn't, especially given that most Disney comics readers are not Americans. So if it's better for you to give to an aid organization in your own country, that will also be acceptable for my purposes here.
Chris requested the Barks story from 1955 common referred to as "Search for the Cuspidoria." I maybe shouldn't put unofficial titles like this in quotes, but I do anyway, mainly for symmetry-related reasons. As a side-note, isn't it odd how--unlike every other Barks story--the horseradish story has never received a widely-accepted unofficial title? Everyone just calls it "the horseradish story."

I like "Cuspidoria," and what I really admire about it is its efficiency. The premise could easily have been stretched out into a full-length adventure story, but Barks got it done in ten pages, creating a believable emotional arc and resolution, hitting just the right notes to delineate the characters and their feelings without wasting a single panel. It's a virtuoso exhibit of artistic control. I don't know if you've noticed this or not, but that Barks guy was pretty good at this cartooning business. I have a feeling he's going places!

First, let us note a small oddity about the story's publication history. Here is the original opening panel:



…and here it is as it appears in the 1992 Disney Comics reprint (which is the same except for coloring as Gemstone's 2008 version):



Who the heck is this Myron character, and why is he suddenly appearing in this story? Well, my assumption would be that Barks' original version included Myron but he was cut for space reasons (the older panel is definitely more squashed, and there's a lot of white space at the bottom of the page), and later editors "restored" him.

It's not just a matter of messing around with proportions, though--as you can see, the two signs are placed differently in relation to the shop window, their bottoms are at different angles, and the new version uses a different font for "Toys," with serifs. Admittedly, all the changes are for the better, but do they have anything to do with Barks himself? VERY SUSPICIOUS, I SAY. I know it seems ridiculously trivial, but when you're as obsessed with this stuff as I am, trivialities assume a great deal of untoward importance.



The basic concept is similar to that of another favorite of mine, "The Black Pearls of Tabu Yama:" Scrooge is dragging his nephews out treasure-hunting and potentially causing them to miss Christmas. The difference being that in that story, Scrooge has things planned out from the start, whereas here he changes over the course of the story--it's for that reason that this is probably technically superior to that one, even if I still prefer it for various reasons.



Hey, I'm not claiming that Scrooge's bah-humbug routine is super-original or anything, but as a story-telling element, it's very neatly-expressed here.



Another thing I like is that we see Donald as an advocate for the kids. More often, they're trying to get him out of trouble, so it's nice to see him standing up for them like this. That side of his parental role is rarely explored.



The story presents the same somewhat eccentric notion of Santa Claus that we saw in "Letter to Santa," in which his munificence an option, but not a requirement. Makes me wonder what Christmas was like in the Barks household. You'd think that HDL would remember the events of that story and trust in the powers of Santa, but…well, as you can see, not so much. It's surprising to me that the above comes from a story from as late as 1955--scenes of the nephews sobbing on the floor like that are much more characteristic of earlier stories, when the characters' personalities were a bit looser.



Now okay, granted, you could point to quite a few stories prior to this one which would seem to disprove Donald's assessment of Scrooge's character here. That's certainly an issue with the character: given the sort of person he is, he has to do the heart-grew-three-sizes-that-day thing semi-frequently, and then the reset-button has to be hit afterwards and it can get a little, I dunno, goofy from the reader's perspective. Nonetheless, as far as this story goes, it's well-put, and it makes the later inevitable conversion all the more effective.



I like that the nephews are completely un-self-interested here--just straight-up giving Scrooge a card and a blackened bagel with lettuce in it just because that's how they are.

I haven't even said anything about what they're doing here in the first place, have I? This is all it is:



Barks had to skimp on details for the purposes of the ten-pager; one might complain that this doesn't make a heckuva lot of sense: why was Scrooge's money on this ship? And if it's definitely his money, then why the necessity for beating other ships to the prize? Shouldn't it be legally his anyway? But such questions are rather beside the point; the framework may be a little flimsy, but it's just not something you pay much heed to, because it's not what the story's about.

(A "cuspidor," you will note, is a spittoon; if anyone has any ideas about the significance of the name beyond providing a bit of low-level wackiness, do speak up.)



This is typical of Scrooge when he decides to do something selfless--he just bloody well does it. You may recall him behaving similarly in "Island in the Sky." Note, alas, that we never learn the contents of Donald's "big box."



The conspiratorial behavior on his part is great. I don't think we'll ever get a straight answer as to whether or not Santa is supposed to be a real figure in Duckworld.



And they find the boat anyway, as really, how could they not, under the circumstances? A bit of a large coincidence? Sure, but again, that's missing the point; the whole thing is, after all, a big ol' morality play. Scrooge behaved selflessly, so he got the treasure. This sort of conceptualization can cause toxic thinking in little kids--the idea that renouncing something you want should always lead to getting it anyway--but it works well in stories like this. Genuinely heartwarming, and as a bonus, we get a really weird-looking straight-on view of Donald in the last panel there. For what more could you ask?