"The Health Nut"

Hey, kids, welcome to Fethry Week (disclaimer: may last more or less than a week. May not be particularly Fethry-centric. Void where prohibited; prohibited where void.)

Really, I don't know quite what the extent of this will be, but I plan on covering at least a few stories, starting, natch, at the beginning.

Fethry's sort of the ultimate test of duck fandom, in the US at least. Most people are probably at least peripherally aware of most Barksian characters--if only via Ducktales--but Fethry…well, if you're familiar with him, then I think we can safely say you're a fan.

But just because you know Fethry, do you like him? When I first rekindled my love affair with Disney comics, I started with Gladstone's Comic Albums, which left me in safely Barksian territory. So when I started buying issues of Gemstone's comics, I was assaulted with all manner of strange, unfamiliar, and terrifying things. I think I can be forgiven for taking so long to cotton to a wider variety of Disney comics, given that it was all so sudden, and some of that stuff was just plain WEIRD-LOOKING to someone not used to it. Or, perhaps, is just weird-looking, objectively. So anyway, when I first encountered Fethry--my amazon history suggests that that would most likely have been here--my reaction was something along the lines of ARGH--WHAT HATH YOU DEGENERATE EUROPEANS WROUGHT?!? Not realizing that Fethry was an American creation, of course. He does have rather a European look to him--more sort of loose and "wacky" than we associate with most American Disney characters.

Obviously, I've calmed down a bit, though I can't claim Fethry has ever been exactly a favorite of mine. But who knows--maybe that'll change as we embark on this magical tour of discovery. Is it necessary to provide background here? Probably not, but: Fethry Duck was created by artist Al Hubbard and writer Dick Kinney for the Disney Studio Program, an in-house organ devoted to producing comic stories exclusively for foreign audiences. The idea with Fethry is that he gloms onto some fad or other--generally something vaguely hippie-ish/new-agey--and bothers Donald about it for a while. Hubbard and Kinney were quite prolific, producing--if my inducks count is correct--a total of fifty-five Fethry stories throughout the sixties (then, there are a bunch more by Kinney and other artists). Only thirteen of these have been published in the US, which is actually more than I would've guessed, though some of those only appeared in these obscure, late-sixties giveaway things.

The character in some ways is like Gyro: a guy created specifically because he was the sort for whom it was easy to come up with scenarios to slot him into. Gyro has some sort of invention-related issue; Fethry has the fad of the week. Not a bad idea in theory--as opposed to a weirdly specific character like Moby Duck, who was clearly only created because someone wanted to use the obvious pun--but how does it work in practice? Let's look, shall we?



The problem I run into with the original stories is that--there's no way around it--Hubbard's duck art is disconcerting. He's fine when he's drawing Scamp, but with the ducks, it always looks like he's trying to do "realistic" renderings of cartoon waterfowl, which is just…weird. I don't want to overstate things; it's something you sort of get used to and then it's not a HUGE problem, but the fact remains--and it's especially the case the way he draws Fethry, with all that shading and stuff.

Note that HDL don't appear to exist in Fethry-world, or at least the Hubbard/Kinney version thereof.



Still, his matter-of-fact eccentricity can be amusing, as here.



It's entertainingly macabre that the doctor is deceased--from following his own program, presumably. It makes you think of Dr. Atkins, who apparently didn't actually die from his infamous diet, but isn't it pretty to think so? Certainly, it's the case that that's the exact kind of flash-in-the-pan thing that Fethry gets into. Seriously, remember how, five or six years ago, shit labeling itself as "low-carb" was everywhere? And then, seemingly overnight, the market completely collapsed? Let that be a lesson for all of us.



I think that bit of him making his soybean and seaweed thing may be the platonic ideal of the character. The idea of people eating soybeans probably would've seemed much more outre in 1964 than it does now. I also want to note how odd Donald looks in the lotus position.



"'Eat' is psychologically a good word." Definitely some decent writing on display here.



Hey, it's Tabby! That, obviously, is Donald's cat, who features in a lot of Fethry stories. In later stories, he has think-bubbles, mainly expressing dismay and terror at Fethry's latest craze. Kind of interesting that Fethry would spawn a character completely unrelated to Fethry himself. Inducks credits this as Tabby's first appearance. And yet...



That's from Barks' 1946 story "Joe from Singapore." No, the character doesn't play a major role, and no, he doesn't "think," as in Fethry stories. BUT. Here he is. This is clearly where Hubbard and Kinney got the name. And anyway, it is often the case that a character's initial appearance has little to do with later ones.



I think Barks has to get the credit here, if we're going to give him credit for other one-shot characters who were picked up on by others, like Rockerduck and April May & June.



The "realistic" art proves to be a problem here--it makes Fethry's anger and Donald's psychological abuse look more real, and therefore more disturbing, than I think they're meant to.



The story has a cool denouement, though, featuring an unexpected appearance by Ludwig, who is such a badass scholar that he's able to write and publish a book over the course of one night.



Ludwig's well in-character, which is always entertaining. And so, we learn the ephemeral nature of Fethry's obsessions.

I actually kinda warmed to this story as I chose panels and wrote about them. My heart really belongs to the classic, Fethry-free Barks (and Barks-ish) conception of the ducks, but I think it's fair to say that there's also room for Fethry in this world. I realize this is entirely a pipe dream, but I think what would be great would be if whoever the next Disney publisher is would put out a trade paperback featuring, oh, say, a dozen or so of what are judged to be the best of the unseen-in-the-US Hubbard/Kinney stories. It would definitely fill a gap; I can't help feeling sort of resentful of Europeans for getting American stories that we didn't. Maybe it would be okay if the opposite were also true, but...

Fethry Week continues probably sometime comparatively soon.