Epic Duckfail

Plenty of ink has been shed talking about Boom's Ducktales 3, which does indeed seem to have a pretty good claim for being the Worst Disney Comic Ever. Well…maybe. That's a pretty high bar to clear. But that artwork...good lord. For me, the title of Worst Duck Artist Ever has always been co-held by Kay Wright and Vic Lockman (when he drew a handful of his own stories in the eighties and nineties). But you know…as bad as those guys were, at least you could read them and think, yeah, this is a comic. It follows the general conventions of comics, and you can believe that it would be published in a real comic book. A certain baseline competence, basically. Whereas good lord, seriously, click that link to Chris's blog and look at the sample pages. On the Disney Comics Forum, an awesome poster known as DuckburgUSA has been doing these hilarious photoshops which seem to capture the story's, uh, spirit quite well:



An' this one REALLY cracks me up:



I'm not sure who actually is responsible for the art, but I think it's probably unfair to blame any individual creative talent here--this was clearly the result of massive, unforgivable editorial malfeasance.

It's funny, but it's also both sad and rage-inducing--sad that Disney comics (only for the time being, we hope) should go out like this, and rage-inducing that the powers that be at Boom have such little respect for the characters and the property that they don't even care who knows it. Clearly, with the success of their Darkwing Duck comics, they saw these Disney Afternoon properties as a license to print money. It didn't occur to them, apparently, that the reason Darkwing succeeded was because, by all accounts, it was actually good. Presumably, they thought that the real selling-point was nostalgia, and that the goodness was just a happy but ultimately not-that-important byproduct.

Really now look: I may in the past have said and thought uncharitable things about Warren Spector, but you know, whatever: it's true that his involvement in Disney comics is due to entirely to his having overseen a Disney videogame, and thus is based on perceived marketing synergy, which is NOT a good indicator of probable quality, to put it mildly, but hey--who can blame him for taking advantage of that? I certainly would've. While I'm certainly not wild about the fact that the title of his essay in the Gottfredson book references his stoopid videogame, I do understand the precarious nature of Disney comics in the US, so if it's felt that such a thing will raise awareness even to a tiny extent, sure, I can live with it--it's not like it affects the comics themselves.

But for Boom to put him, entirely untested, in charge of writing their would-be flagship title? Well, they pretty obvious did it so they could splash "WRITTEN BY THE CREATOR OF EPIC MICKEY" all over their promotional material--in other words, marketing concerns are trumping actual artistic concerns, and if that's the way it's gonna be, we might as well all just pack up our things and go home.

I don't know what exactly is going on at Boom that would lead to such bullshit going down (writing a blog like this pretty well guarantees I'll never be any sort of insider), but it seems apparent that the short happy life of their "classic" titles was only due to somebody or other grudgingly taking it on faith that somebody liked this unfashionable, traditional stuff; and therefore letting people who knew what the hell they were doing select and localize material. It's sure as hell obvious now that it wasn't part of any sort of overriding aesthetic vision…well, okay okay, it was kind of obvious then, too, to be honest, but now that it's all gone pear-shaped, there's no ignoring it. The 'stones cared about Disney comics. Boom cared about sucking a quick buck out of them. I'm sure there were/are people within the company who are better than that, but they aren't the ones who ultimately had their say.

As much as it sucks that we are currently without a publisher, it's hard not to think that this is in some ways a good thing. It hardly seems possible that anyone could fail to do better than the cynical, raging incompetents at Boom. Yeah, famous last words, I know, but really now...