"War and Peace"

Listen, I have just one word for you people:

Okay, make that two words:

(Okay okay, three if you count "and."  SHUT UP.)

(In addition to everything else, the Literature Classics editors actually did a decent job of putting together an English-language title--something that's not at all guaranteed with these things.)

FUCK.  I really can't get over how good Carpi could be.  I am seriously considering trying to learn just enough Italian to limp through this with the help of google translate.  I'm not sure I've EVER seen Disney art quite this good (I'll grant you, Donald's thought balloon there adds a perhaps unnecessarily sour note to the proceedings, but that's not reflected in the story itself).

Now, I HAVE read War and Peace, but that was when I was a college sophomore, more years ago than I care to think about.  I remember liking it but finding the "war" parts to be a bit tedious; the main point, though, is that I remember virtually nothing about it, so I'm just going to go through this story as a Disney story, without any reference to the source material.  I think that'll be fine.

Well, the story starts with Scrooge, annoyed with always being stuck with the bills for his dissolute nephew's carousing, determines that he should marry this here Helena Kuraghin (is her character model based on someone in particular?  It's quite distinctive).  With Carpi at his best, you just get all these great background details--there's a similarity to Rosa in that regard, though obviously their styles could not be more different.  My favorite here is the angry band--note that in their ferocity, they've straight-up flung a balalaika into the air.

Also worthy of note: the script is pretty good here.  It really is.  Yeah, it can be a bit stiff, but you also get great lines like Helena's in the bottom right panel there.  I assume--anyone who knows and who cares to can confirm or deny--that this is all a fairly direct translation from the Italian, but that's what I assumed about those other volumes in the series that have really awful scripts.  Is Carpi simply a better writer than most of his peers?  It would not surprise me.

Now, this whole Helena business--which takes place before the main story really gets going--is sort of typical in a lot of ways, and yeah, it's hard to deny that it's a bit on the sexist side.  But in that regard, I feel a bit like I do about the Ducktales episode "Metal Attraction:" yes, it's undeniably problematic; I can see that, but it's executed with so much energy and panache that I can't help kinda loving it anyway.  Dig Donald's pose in the upper right and his wish for violence against the serenading violin.

Anyway, that ends when he alienates her by insulting her cooking, and we get this: I like how Donald has the upper hand; as you can see, the plan is to protect Scrooge's wealth by disguising it as cannonballs (one guess as to what goes wrong with this scheme).

Actually, this is not a particularly Beagle-oriented story, even though they do appear with designs on his wealth.  I'm mainly just including this image because: behold!  A rare example of Disney characters failing to be taken in by disguises!  And these are actually pretty good disguises, comparatively speaking.  Ain't no justice.

There's a bit of duckless material, as Czar Alexander meets with Napoleon.  See?  "Emperor of Light Opera."  That's a pretty good insult, of a level of sophistication you really would not expect.

Then, toy cannon battle, which seems to me to be another detail of the sort that other artists just wouldn't think to include.  It's just fun to look at, which is important for a visual medium.

So anyway, this means war.  Donald is supposed to be taking the special cannonballs to safety.  But he isn't.  Check out ol' Gladstone Bolkonski, there.  Enjoy him now, because this is his first and last appearance in the story.  I do not think that cameos like this are a particularly good idea.  They're really just distracting, and they work against the story's having a self-contained, coherent structure.

But once again, dig all the great detail here.

Meanwhile, we have this bucolic scene.  Sometimes I think Carpi would've been as suited to illustrate faerie tales as he was to do duck comics.  Just look at that tree/house hybrid.

Donald's on his way to try to intercept the special cannonballs headed for the front when he stops here.  The business with his horse finding love too is just another great detail.  Donald meeting his love interest by rocketing in like this may be familiar from "Sandoduck."

Simply beautiful.  What else is there to say?

But now…it's off to the WAR:

"Holy shit," is the phrase that I uttered quite involuntarily when I first turned the page and saw this.  No, your eyes do not deceive you: it's a double-page spread.  If I think back on the thousands of Disney comics I've read, I can't absolutely swear that I've never seen this done before, but even if I have, it's certainly vanishingly rare.  Of course, most stories probably don't really call for such a thing--but for this, based on one of the epic-est entries in the Western canon, it seems reasonable.  And holy god is it ever awesome.

(Someone may point out at this point that Boom's Darkwing Duck featured a number of double-page spreads.  Undeniably true, but those comics are really a different sort of thing than what we generally think of when we think of Disney comics, aren't they?  Besides, this is cooler.)

…oh, and then he does it again, possibly even better.  Not only can't Carpi stop, but I would go so far as to say he won't stop.  

So but the cannonballs have been seized by the French.  How do get them back?

Well, she might help.  Good for Carpi: this is the first time in one of his stories I've ever seen Daisy take so active a role.  Fetching disguise, too.

So here's my thought: if you read Tolstoy or other nineteenth-century Russian novelists, you'll know that they tend to include large chunks of dialogue in French, as the language was à la mode among the Russian aristocracy.  English translators handle this in various ways: sometimes they just go ahead and translate it along with the Russian, perhaps putting it in Italics to distinguish it.  Sometimes they relegate the translations to footnotes.  And sometimes, when they're feeling really ballsy and hate their readers, they just straight-up leave it in the original, and if you don't read French, screw you.  Anyway, my only point is, it would be pretty funny in a perverse way if this comic did that too.

"Girl duck."  Well, I admitted that the translation wasn't perfect, didn't I?  "Waggon," however, is a variant British spelling, which for some reason I did not know.

So the idea is that they recover the cannonballs by quickly moving them from the enemies wagons to theirs while distracting the French troops with food.  This is fine, and it seems like we're basically done here, but…

(The idea being that the Russian army desperately needs cannonballs and Scrooge's special ones are the only ones to be had.)

Yes, it's a duck story that ends with Scrooge losing all his money.  Have you ever heard of such a thing?  A nice touch the way his glasses crack when he's acceding to the inevitable.  But I don't think he's pretending, Donald.  Even if he recognizes the necessity, he still loves his cash.  Really, now.

(And shouldn't that be "motherland?"  Mother Russia?  Hello?)

How's that for romantic?  I'd be lying, however, if I said I understood Scrooge sneaking around in silhouette like that.  I thought he was going to America?  This may well be a specific Tolstoy reference that is going over my head.

That's about that.  I find it amazing that such an auteur as Scarpi is basically unknown in the US.  I mean, I'm actually not sure how many really great stories he did--I've been unimpressed with various of his art-only efforts, and I read this and this which were good-not-great--but when he was On, mon dieu.  The fact that he's basically unknown in the US is some sorta crime against art.  The hypothetical new Disney publisher really needs to get on that shit.