"The Golden Throne Legend"

Hey folks; sorry about the recent radio silence on this end.  I've had various non-Disney-related things to attend to (shocking, I know).  I do have some interesting stuff planned for the near-ish future, including those last two Gottfredson entries (though at this point, we seem to be ramming head-on into the fourth volume's release).  But right now, it is necessary to say one thing:

Happy Seventieth Birthday to Marco Rota!

(Seriously, how come Google doesn't have a custom logo for this occasion?)

I think there is a real case to be made that Rota may in fact be the single best Disney artist.  Like, ever.  This is not the same thing as saying he's my favorite artist, if you see what I'm saying, but his skill has to be acknowledged, and I do enjoy his work a hell of a lot.  His early art from the seventies isn't necessarily all that distinctive,  but at some point during the late seventies/early eighties he came into his own, and became one of the most instantly-recognizable artists out there (in a good way, of course).  'Tis not for nothing that Don Rosa has stated that if, hypothetically, he were writing more stories, he would want Rota to take on the artistic duties--the two of them could not have more dissimilar artistic styles, but I guess talent knows its own.

(I've always felt like there should be some significance to the fact that 'Rosa' and 'Rota' are one letter apart--just as I feel like it should mean something that one of the guys from Wings has a name one letter away from one of Paul McCartney's best-known Beatles songs--it seems like the universe just likes throwing in weird little congruences like that for teh lulz.)

Rota's writing is more hit-or-miss--sometimes, as in the well-beloved "Money Ocean," he can really knock one out of the park, but he's also prone to the same sort of vague, elliptical, slightly disorienting stylistic quirks that many Italian writers are.  Today's story doesn't exactly transcend his weaknesses--in fact, it has some quite glaring problems--but I wanted to write about it because it's an important one for me in terms of the development of my aesthetic sensibilities: I had kind of an aversion to reading stuff by people other than Barks or Rosa, but for whatever reason, I read this one, and it was the first time I thought, wow, this isn't by either of those two, but it's really good.  Maybe there's more to life!

Right from the start, we see Rota's facility for drawing dramatic storm scenes (the best example of which comes in "Night of the Saracen," of course).  We also see his somewhat more realistic (insofar as dogfaces can be "realistic") people.  This particular story is Australia-centric, which I like because it's uncommon in a treasure-hunt story, for obvious reasons: you don't find the sort of cultural context there that would be very conducive to such things.

Rota does manage to create a pretty good pretext for this to work, though.  Also: Magica!  Who as it transpires represents the largest structural flaw in the story, as her presence is one hundred percent superfluous: she shadows the ducks on their search, then gives up and leaves, and no one ever even knows she was there.  Hmm.  Still, she wears some cool disguises, so that's all right, and that picture of her in silhouette is neat.  Also, my mind is blown by the existence of this "Every Witch's Guide to Omnipotence."  How long has she had that?  Is it a variation of The Woodchucks Guidebook?  A rival guidebook from a different publisher?  The foundations of my world are being shaken here.

And then there's this whole confusion, which I find funny because it's so ridiculous: see, they went to Bangalore, in India, but it turns out they needed to go to Kangalore in Australia, because kangaroos, don't you see, yes, right, okay…the word for "kangaroo" is similar enough in many other languages that this absurdity would work.

There's no denying that someone dropped the ball here big time, though--maybe it was Rota himself, but in that case, the person responsible for the English dialogue, Annette Roman, should have caught it, since it would only have required different dialogue for one panel.  The problem, if it's not clear, is that if "an ancestor" sold off the original, then why the heck does Scrooge decide that he should gallivant off to Western Australia to try to find it, as though it had been lost in the initial shipwreck?  And why does this assumption turn out, in fact, to have been correct?  A very obvious mistake.

One thing that really does work, though, is the sense of community we get here--something that was made clear right from the beginning:

This sort of thing causes me to forgive a lot.

Just look at that.  Also, an apparent reference to Echo & the Bunnymen's classic single "Bring on the Dancing Horses," which is worth massive bonus points, even though I have to assume it was Roman's doing rather than Rota's.

I was and am really taken with this conclusion, which takes a different perspective on Scrooge's relationship to the treasures he looks for.  Ordinarily, he either gets his treasure or doesn't, but in either case it's all about him, whereas here he serves as a more or less incidental figure to these guys, helping them to recover their heritage without ever knowing it.  I find that really neat.  There's a sense in which, even though they don't get that much screen time, they're the real protagonists.  Are we going to rain on the parade by asking why, if they're so dang poor, they can nonetheless afford to just sit on this huge cache of gold and stuff?  We sure aren't!  We're just going to say, doggonit, we like this story.  The end.

It is of course the case that there's plenty of Rota material--written both by Rota himself and by others--that has never seen US publication.  It is devoutly to be hoped that, in the event that a new publisher ever deigns to show itself, this problem will be in large degree remedied.  But in the meantime, have a good one, Marco, and many more--you make duck comics classier.