"Guardians of the Lost Library"

Before anything else, I just want to make the following dumb book joke--as befits, I suppose, the story under consideration:

Richard Ellsworth Savage, from John Dos Passos' novels 1919 and The Big Money, now has his own cheesy spin-off action show.  An idiosyncratic choice, to put it mildly.

Man oh man--there's no doubt that this is a highly unusual story in Rosa's canon, so much so that I hardly know how to coherently approach it.

Okay okay, let's start by pretending that there might be someone reading this who isn't already familiar with it (though in that case, you should probably read it before moving forward, since I'm gonna be providing SPOILERS here).  The idea is that Scrooge's frustrated efforts to obtain a copy of the Junior Woodchucks' Guidebook lead to a quest for the Library at Alexandria for even more treasure-finding info.  The story was written for some sorta "Year of the Book" that Norway was having in 1993, so the idea is to play up the awesomeness of reading--and how better to do that in a duck context than with a guidebook-related storyline?

Let's eschew a straight, linear progression here and get straight to the point.  You know how Rosa likes to pile on the exposition in his stories?  Well, here's a story that consists of almost nothing but exposition, as Scrooge and HDL track the library's knowledge hither and yon.  Usually, the exposition is there to drive forward the story.  Here, the story (such as it is) is present to drive forward the exposition.  Pretty thin stuff.  It seems to be sort of structurally inspired by Barks' "Fabulous Philosopher's Stone"--traveling from location to location on what seems like a wild goose chase, with some history thrown in--but there's way more telling and way less doing.  It seems to me that it's actually more reminiscent of those old comic adaptations of "educational" cartoons--"Donald Duck in Mathmagicland," "Donald and the Wheel," "Uncle Scrooge and Money."  Indeed, Rosa suggests in his commentary that he felt he might have gone overboard in terms of the history and given short shrift to the action.  He goes on to note, however, that a lot of people disagree with this assessment, and he ain't just whistling "Dixie."  Here are some assessments from inducks users: 

"Clearly the best story Don has ever produced."

"This sure is one of best disney comic book stories ever produced.  Brilliant.  Belongs to hall of fame of Scrooge stories."

"Unrivaled.  If I could vote 11/10 I would have done it."

And in the "well, I guess that's meant as a compliment..." department:

"...the convoluted plot twists make this story outshine even THE DA VINCI CODE!"

I, however, find comments like this just baffling.  Granted, the way he strings together all this disparate historical information while adding these books to the mix is very clever, and granted, he does his best to cram in a bunch of jokes, many of which are pretty good, to leaven the didactic feel.  But…it's still didactic as fuck.  This stuff just goes on endlessly, and my eyes start to glaze over at a certain point.  I mean, I suppose if you like the history qua history, fair enough, but as a duck comic...?

As I said, the jokes are oft effective and make it work better than it ought to.  This whole business with the monks of "San Slanti," f'rinstnace--an absurdist touch that makes the history go down more smoothly than it would otherwise.

Or, hey, there's this, which subverts the ol' "there's no rule that mules CAN'T play basketball!" trope to amusing effect.

Still, even if you don't have any problem with all the exposition, the fact remains, when our heroes are unearthing ancient secrets so promiscuously--seriously, this story is just lousy with the bastards--they start to lose a lot of their luster, to the extent where it's yeah yeah, Alexandra, Cleopatra, whatevs, YAWN. 

…there are also jokes about sewage and vomit, and I'm not gonna sit here and tell you I couldn't do without such things.

There are a few other problems I want to touch on as well.  Note, f'rinstance, the seeming contradiction here: if HDL are so utterly convinced that there's nothing the guidebook doesn't already know, it's kinda mysterious why they would be so keen to go on this hunt in the first place?  More importantly, anyone paying close attention to stuff like this should really be able to figure out the denouement right from the beginning.  I'll admit that I wasn't and didn't, but I certainly got the picture well before the end.  I'm just saying, for such a long, involved tale, the central mystery isn't as mysterious as maybe it ought to be.

(Still, note the "impromptu first aid demonstration" guy--part of a little running mini-narrative in the first part of the story that for my money is the most entertaining part of the whole thing, and something you could easily just skim over.)

Much more irksome to me is the use (or lack thereof) of Donald in this story.  Granted, Donald is portrayed in different ways in different stories, and the fact that these ways may sometimes seem contradictory doesn't automatically invalidate them.  The man contains multitudes.  But that doesn't mean that I have to like this, or that it's a good use of him.  This aggressively illiterate behavior on his part is atypical (the fact that this is more or less the only Scrooge adventure ever that Donald doesn't tag along on also pounds this home), and it's so transparently the case for no other reason than to provide an ironic counterpoint to the "yay books" message--I feel like he's been malformed just so he can play his part in this little morality play.  I just don't think it's fair to him, is all, even if the repeated "X flips and bursts into flames" is kinda funny.

I always stumble on the apparent distinction between "plays" and "comedies" here--and I don't think I'm denigrating Sophocles in any way when I say that "fun" isn't really a word I would apply to him.  Aristophanes, yes; Sophocles, not hardly.  I *would* be quite keen on this quest if we could find a lot of lost Greek theater, however...

…goddammit.

Well, here's the punchline, not that it's any big surprise.  A few things to note here.  First, this "girls! Ick!" business.  Now, of course, Donald isn't the only one with a mutable personality; sometimes HDL are more kid-like, and sometimes they're basically miniature adults.  Rosa generally is more likely to go with the second choice, and he certainly does in this story.  There's a part of me, then, that wants to approve of this attempt to modulate that a little, because it can get to be a bit much, but the dominant part of me has to note that it doesn't really work--it just feels jarringly out-of-place to stick in this one looktheyrereallylittlekids! bit like that.

More importantly, this whole "adding lots of modern knowledge" business draws attention to the fact that this story singularly fails to answer all the relevant questions here.  "Modern knowledge"--what does this mean?  Well, presumably some of this is World-Alamanac-type material, and some of it must be Boy-Scout stuff (with all this convoluted mythology surrounding the guidebook, it's easy to  lose track of the fact that the Woodchucks are actually a scouting organization), but that leaves open the question of where the modern "magical" knowledge comes from?  The stuff about talking to aliens, f'rinstance?  Are we to assume that this actually constitutes ancient knowledge because something something Erich von Däniken?  Even if so, you get the picture, though: there's no reason to assume that the book's proprietary information is exclusively focused on old stuff.  When Gemstone reprinted this story in their last-ever (goddamnit…) issue of Uncle Scrooge, they did so back-to-back with another story that tries to get to the bottom of this whole Guidebook thing.  It takes a much different approach, obviously, but when you think about it, the two aren't so incompatible after all--after all, that "modern knowledge" has to come from somewhere.

As I think about it, though, I'm not actually sure whether this whole "guidebook origin story" thing works for me, however it's done--how does that li'l book contain all that information?  Because the Woodchucks organization is awesomely competent, I've always thought, as exemplified by HDL themselves.  But now we're supposed to buy that they're either custodians or beneficiaries of some mysterious savant?  That makes them seem more passive than I feel like they really should be.

…and then there's the ending, which I'm really not sure how to read.  Are we supposed to think that Scrooge has finally cracked here, what with this nonsense rationale for how he supposedly saved money?  Or are we supposed to take it seriously (in, obviously, a cartoony sort of way)?  It sure looks to me like the former, but I can't say for sure. 

Ultimately, it's hard to know how to rate this story.  It's certainly competently assembled, in spite of a few hiccups, and it does what it sets out to do (also, I like that General Snozzie gets a good workout).  Calling it a bad story does not seem justified.  On the other hand, calling it a good one?  I don't know.  I'll allow that I do enjoy it, kind of, but sort of in a similar mindset to the way I enjoy the aforementioned "educational" stories (though this is clearly miles beyond them in quality).  In the end, I see it as an interesting curio, but certainly not in Rosa's top ten.  If you're one of the people who DO think it's the greatest comic EVAH, please explain to me your rationale.  Thanks.