"The Curse of Flabbergé"

Hey, as you know if you read the companion blog to this one, I recently finished watching the entirety of Ducktales. For that reason, I thought it would be appropriate to highlight a Ducktales story here. And an interesting story it is, too, in several ways (note my carefully neutral tone there).
I won't deny it: I've never been very excited by Ducktales comics. They sort of feel to me like the equivalent of playing Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game, and really, what can I get from them that I would want and that I can't get from regular duck comics? Well, in theory, Fenton, except that he has only ever appeared in four stories, according to inducks (Boom reprinted two of them, and they ain't much); possibly Launchpad, but, although I theoretically like the character, the fact remains, he's all-too-often characterized as A. Dumb; B. Crash-prone; C. That's all; which isn't that exciting. So in short. Shrug. It makes sense for other Disney Afternoon properties, but for Ducktales, it seems on the pointless side.

But anyway, here we have this, which, if nothing else, is certainly more ambitious than most Ducktales stories I've read. All due credit to David for the translation, also; it's very crisp, and it's easy to imagine the dialogue coming from the characters in the show, which surely is the ultimate goal here.

Right at the beginning, there's a thing that baffles the hell out of me. Maybe this is because I am dumb, but if someone could explain it to me, that would be great. Here are the final panels on the first page:



And here are the first panels on the second page:



Somebody seriously explain to me: what? What's supposed to have happened here? Why is Launchpad holding a fish? Wuh? The first time I saw this, I thought the pagination had somehow gotten screwed up, but all the evidence suggests that this is in fact the way it's supposed to be. Huh.



Anyway, this is a long story, so I'm going to skip over a lot of stuff in the course of this. I really like Launchpad overriding Scrooge's tantrum and just carrying him bodily out, though.



...and I like this splash panel. This would've been super-cool animated, also. Okay.



...oh, there are fun references to the show here, too. The writing here feels--because it clearly is--more aware of the show's history than contemporaneously-published stories were. It's a good fit.

As far as the vine goes, surely you would want it to have been shorter? If it's longer, you're just going to smack into the water quicker.



Scrooge's tantrum is also funny. Is that bit about coal meant to be an elliptical reference to the Dumbest Ducktales Moment Ever, where Scrooge scatters peanuts to summon elephants to stomp on his coal to change it to diamonds? If not, it should be.



"Woodchuck Information Dump" is just great. I can think of a few Rosa stories to which it would be especially relevant.



Point is, he gets it in his head that there's this fabergé egg equivalent that he can get his hands on, to make up for the diamond thing not working out. This is the first dubious plot point here: since when does Scrooge just go around buying priceless treasures, unless there's some way he knows he can do so at a deep discount? That would seem to defeat the point, which is to be richer.



Here's the other dubious plot point: the notion that this mystery buyer somehow did something wrong/is not "entitled" to the egg, in spite of having paid for it fair and square. Since when is it illegal--or even immoral--to buy something anonymously? What gives you the right to go chasing after them?



...and seriously, what the hell is the deal with that sense of entitlement? It's "your treasure" in...what sense? Granted, he sometimes gets this way in Barks, to an extent, but never that I recall in so obviously a "dude--it's not yours" situation as this.



Um...okay. From this, more prescient readers--even if you haven't read the thing--may already guess what my biggest problem is going to be with this story. And it's not that catwoman there looks pretty creepy in that bodysuit without the mask, though this is undeniably the case.



...and there's this tie-in with Brutopia; that's obviously David's embellishment (if nothing else, the fact that the story does not feature Barks' standard Brutopian agent would tip you off); I admire the chutzpah, though it doesn't ultimately make the story any more or less problematic.



…and here we have Fethry's ancestor! That makes me grin; I won't deny it. Is this a Ducktales first?



I'm a big fan of the signs featuring the Stalin-esque dictator.




Okay, three things: 1) That's not Old English; 2) no one spoke Old English in the sixteenth century anyway; and 3) or in Russia. Sorry, David, but you know I couldn't let that one go :}



…and by "we," I mean "you," and by "free," I mean "subjects of a tsardom." No...seriously? Seriously??? Royalist propaganda in a Disney comic? Dorfman and Mattelart would have a field day with this. I mean, yeah, by all means, get rid of the Stalin-esque dictator, but...I mean, no, robber-baron capitalism didn't exactly do Russia any favors either, but at least it had the potential to lead somewhere else. Whereas here we have...stasis.

You may recognize this as very similar to Barks' "Treasure of Marco Polo," which was problematic in its own right, but that story was non-specific enough to be a bit less so. Whereas this is specifically about Russia, which we can actually look at and say, huh. Things were kinda bad under the Tsars--again, not that they improved after the Revolution, but the idea that the answer is to regress...

Do I think that the writer (Régis Maine, take a bow) intended this reading of the story? No. I mean, I hope not. That would be super-bizarre (though it's also hard to see how he couldn't have noticed it). I imagine that this particular concept was just a sort of extension of the popular Anastasia myth. And it's not as though Europe's democracies are teetering on the brink of dictatorship, so it's not exactly malignant, really. But it is one of the most hilariously weird things I've ever read.