The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Chapter Eight B: "The Prisoner of White Agony Creek"

So now we come to the last (sob) story that Rosa ever wrote. And it certainly provides a fitting cap to his career. It is excessive, in ways both good and bad, but in either case quintessentially Rosian. Note also that the title, for once, doesn't refer to Scrooge himself. That's how devoted Rosa is to this romance!

I feel as though there may be a certain anti-climactic aspect to this entry after all this talk about whether talking about this story will alarm the powers that be. It's a li'l transgressive, sure--but it ain't that earth-shattering. Crikey.



We open with this framing sequence. I've noted before Rosa's didactic tendencies, but it's something you really notice with his nephews serving as this kind of Greek chorus speculating about his deepest values.



I really dig this part. Often, there's not that much distance between the worldviews of Donald and the kids, but here you see it very distinctly: their innocent question and his reaction to it clearly show that he understands things that they do not. Not that Donald always needs to be portrayed this way, but it's neat to see it here.



The story picks up as Scrooge is dragging Goldie off to work on his claim. That part of "Back to the Klondike," briefly glossed over, has always seemed to me to have surprisingly sadomasochistic undertones, which idea Rosa does nothing to dispel. At least he's able to provide a believable reason why she would be willing to go along with this, and it's easy to believe that Scrooge--especially given his lack of experience in these matters--would be entirely convinced that he's shanghaiing her solely to help him dig for gold.



There is of course a later scene in this story--you know the one--that gets all the press, but this is the bit I always get hung up on: I am simply amazed (and delighted!) that Rosa was somehow able to slip a joke like this into a Disney comic. It's things like this that make you wonder if he didn't plan this story as a last hurrah, and took a "fuck it--I'm just gonna see what I can get away with" attitude.



There's all kinds of stuff like this, where the two of them feel ambivalence about one another. It's not exactly subtle, but damned if it isn't effective. And as for the above, really now, you cannot tell me that Rosa didn't relish the opportunity to draw Goldie in a negligee.



Look, I'm not even going to try to pretend: I love the shit out of this Scrooge/Goldie stuff (even if it does get a bit Harlequin-y), to the extent that any sort of rational analysis just goes by the wayside. I understand why some people don't care for it, but fuck 'em, man. I mean, yes, I also enjoy plenty of Disney comics that have a somewhat lighter touch, but while I'm reading this, I just devolve into a gibbering fanboy who simply cannot conceive of anything more awesome…



…but that only applies to part of the story. I am somewhat less enthused about the switch to three-and-a-half duckless pages of seemingly randomly-chosen historical figures being set up as Scrooge's antagonists. It's not that these people couldn't theoretically have been here; it's more "okay, but why? What purpose does this serve?" The judge there at least has this weird running joke where he wants to hang people on the slightest pretext (although, per wikipedia, in spite of his posthumous reputation, "he is known to have sentenced only two men to hang, one of whom escaped"); the other two don't really do much of anything to distinguish themselves, though Masterson may well be Arpin Lusene's father:



(I was gonna say "grandfather" until I remembered that Rosa's "present-day" stories all take place mid-century-ish.)

I mean, at least the historical figures in "Vigilante of Pizen Bluff," as part of an Old-West Show, had some excuse for being where they were. These guys are just completely unmoored from anything. It's quite postmodern, really: just random bits of history floating in the ether with neither rhyme nor reason.



Oh, that wasn't enough for you, eh? Well, then how about we also toss in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, 'cause why the hell not? This is excess to the point of comedy. Can you imagine Barks taking this long to set up one-shot villains like this? Mon dieu.



Anyway, back at the claim, things continue much in the vein that they were before, and I still think it's great. It appears that Scrooge has a certain level of self-awareness about the malign influence that money has on him. It's almost--almost--enough to make me think that his frequent unpleasantness in modern-day Rosa stories is meant to make us dislike him.



The other thing about these guys is that, given their elaborate introduction, you would expect them to be at least somewhat formidable--but no, Scrooge dispatches them with ease. So were they really worth all that build-up?



He only gets konk!'ed thanks to the ambivalent Goldie's distraction. No getting around it: anthropomorphic ducks kissing passionately are really weird-looking, whether here or in "Donald's Crime."



The lack of critical acuity that I'm bringing to this is not enough for me not to note that, for anyone who is reading critically, the idea that Scrooge spends his evenings staring at a lock of his non-love-interest's hair is a li'l on the creepy side.



Yeah okay okay--and then there's this. I feel like no panels I've ever included in an entry were more preordained than these are. So…yup. What can I say? I seem to recall Rosa saying (probably on the essentially-defunct Disney Comics Mailing List) that the original idea was to have the snow melting off the roof in the rightmost panel, but that was apparently a bridge too far for the censors--though it's hard to say why, really, if they were willing to let him get away with the "between the legs" bit. I don't know whether he knew that this was going to be his last hurrah when he wrote it, but regardless, it seems appropriate that he should go out by pushing the thematic limits of the form absolutely as far as they would go. I strongly suspect that nobody else would've been allowed to get away with a story like this, but I'm glad that Rosa was. You could undoubtedly make a psychoanalytic argument that this segment is--from the perspective of Scrooge's development--the natural final culmination of the character's development.



I do enjoy the judge's speech there. Although…depending on what exactly Scrooge and Goldie were doing in there…in certain states…and given that he's talking about the law in Texas…oh, never mind.



...but of course, that's not gonna last, for reasons that are obviously necessitated by the nature of the comics themselves, though the reasons aren't very heavily clued within the story itself.


…and thus, Rosa's career ends, with the word "no." It's the reverse Ulysses!

There's a pretty obvious problem with all this Scrooge/Goldie stuff, that I'll get into next time. But for now, that is that. Tomorrow, the final installment of this Klondike trilogy, "Hearts of the Yukon."

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