The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Chapter Two: "The Master of the Mississippi"

According to Rosa's essay, it was mandated that most of the installments in the series not be longer than fifteen pages. To his credit, none of them feel notably compacted in spite of this limitation; he managed to work well within these limitations. The question must be asked, however: why? I mean, I suppose you could, if you were so inclined, make an a priori argument that letting them go on for too long would lead to a lot of self-indulgent noodling around (as though the series isn't self-indulgent by design).

However, when you look at the entries that did exceed that length, the shocking truth is revealed: "you" were very foolish to think that, and you should probably be beaten about the head and shoulders. By and large, the longer entries are among the best in the series, and this one in particular--which, at twenty-eight pages, is the longest of all save "Prisoner of White Agony Creek"--can make a pretty plausible claim to be the best. It doesn't have the emotional impact of some, but purely as an adventure story, it's hard to beat. It's easy to see how Rosa could have cut it down had this been necessary, but I am thankful that it was not, and it makes me think somewhat wistfully about what might have been had he been given greater leeway throughout the entire series. The fact that this and the almost-as-long eleventh chapter are probably my favorites may say something in this regard.

(Or maybe some of the shorter stories wouldn't have benefited from being longer--there's definitely some superfluous material scattered throughout the series. But I must question the ability of some random editor to infallibly determine which would work and which would not.)



Why is the story great? Well, because it has lots of great action and exploration and a real sense of place, as the above indicates--Louisville is effectively presented as a bustling city. Also, Ratchet Gearloose, a character created by Barks hisself. And he gets off a funny line in that second panel there. How can you lose?



Just LOOK at all that background detail. It's ridiculous! In a good way. Yes, Rosa's obsessive detailing can be visually exhausting at times, but at its best, there is nothing in Disney comics that is more fun to look at. Pothole is a great character, too, and his future influence on Scrooge is very well-done, from windiness (his constant tall-tale-y evocations of the extreme muddiness of the Mississippi) to stinginess (paying employees thirty cents a day--obviously, market forces wouldn't quite allow Scrooge himself to be that stingy in the future). He's just fun to read; Rosa, happily, seems to have felt the same way, resulting in his reappearance in one of the extra chapters.



Also, the introduction of THE TERRIBLE BEAGLE BOYS! Ol' Blackheart looks quite striking in the shadow there in the first panel, though really now, the coyness about refusing to show them without their masks seems kind of meaningless to me. How do they look maskless??? I'm gonna say exactly how they do masked, only with slightly more skin exposed (I suppose it works on the same principle as the black-bar-over-the-eyes-to-protect-anonymity thing). The Mardi Gras masks are an effort to explain something that really didn't need explaining; it strikes me as a little distracting, though not too terrible.



...so yeah, river hijinx ensue as Pothole, Scrooge, and Ratchet search for this lost ship. This set of panels always cracks me up. Something about the slow, methodical authoritativeness of the way the ship falls.



As I said earlier: a real sense of place and time in this story. Is "Old Man Erickson" a reference to Byron Erickson, who was--I think--Rosa's editor at the time? Of course, "Erickson" isn't exactly a rare name...and he's not exactly "old" now and was even less so when this story was published...oh, forget it. It was a dumb idea to start with.



Some of Rosa's treasure-hunting can feel forced, but this one (a real thing, natch) is well-done, in part because so unexpected and so unusual for a duck-comics treasure hunt. Just plain nice!



This isn't terribly deft, however. As I've alluded to before, Rosa's treatment of Scrooge is contradictory: on the one hand, he's far more of a jerk than he ever was in Barks; on the other, Rosa idealizes the whole integrilicious, value-of-hard-work stuff more than Barks ever did. And that leads to this--even though the idea that the character would feel ambivalent about finding this treasure is just absurd. By all means: point me to a place in Barks where he passes up treasure because it came too easy! You can't do it, my friends! He may occasionally grouse about other people having profited too easily, but that's not at all the same thing.



As you can see, we're dealing with the earlier, meaner Beagle Boys here. An appropriate mirror of Barks' own development of the characters, though I tend to doubt it was intentional.



Gotta love Pothole's attitude. In terms of attitude towards money, he seems more akin to Donald than to Scrooge (cf the opening of "The Second-Richest Duck").



The story skips forward a few years (to after the events of Barks' "Fantastic River Race"); if any part of it could be seen as superfluous, it would definitely be this one--but there's some fun action, and it does establish the Beagles as perennial foes, so I'll take it.



Also: boom. Never forget.



And so it ends. The idea of Pothole settling down to write dime novels is a good one. A bit I always like from Rosa's text on this story: "Barks' story has Scrooge say he was the "cannon on the Wabash Cannonball"…but I can't figure out what that's supposed to mean. But it sounds good!" Of course, what it actually means is that Barks was writing one of his last Scrooge adventures, and being characteristically goofy. But that's all right--this is a completely non-obtrusive way to stick in a Barks thing, 'cause why not? Why not indeed?

Great stuff! Tune in tomorrow for "Buckaroo of the Badlands!"

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