"Grandma Duck, Homespun Detective"

They call it "instant justice" when it's past the legal limit…

And now, we turn our attention away from Italian silliness for a while to spotlight some good, old-fashioned American silliness.  This story was done as a Wheaties giveaway in 1950; I got a copy from ebay and scanned it.  You can download it here if you want, but don't say I didn't warn you.

This was drawn by Riley Thomson, a lesser-known artist who did a number of duck stories, often featuring Grandma.  He's also credited as an animator on a number of Disney movies, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Fantasia.  Ultimately, he seems to have focused all his attention on the Br'er Rabbit Sunday strip, before unfortunately dying in 1960 at the age of forty-seven (internet doesn't seem to say how).  The Disney-comics world didn't lose an all-time great talent or anything, but as we'll see, it certainly lost a distinctive one.  Let's be clear: this is a terrible story--but in really bizarre ways that make it worth looking at.

When I read these promo comics booklets, I often ask myself how well the writers are making use of the space available to them.  Because when you have all of thirty three-panel strips to work with, it's not so easy to come up with something particularly involved.  A few of them do an okay job of it, but most of them…do not.  Well might one ask our writer here: "Why the hell do you spend the first ten pages of this thing on this beyond-lame set-up where Gus is trying to avoid Grandma for some reason before telling her she won the thing and gets the trip to the dude ranch?  If you cut that shit down, you would actually be able to develop the "detective" business more meaningfully.  What's the deal?"  One might well ask, but that question would not register, because the point here is not to tell a great story; the point is to fill up them pages.  And if you can get a third of the way there with this pointless throat-clearing…fuckin' score.

But yeah, the art--as I said, definitely distinctive.  Most Western duck artists were more or less following the Barks template, so it's kind of surprising to see one who most definitely is not (along with Al Hubbard a bit later, of course).

Our writer's characterization of Grandma is, as we will see, somewhat bizarre--less "homespun" than "very probably senile."  But hey--that "stagecoach" shit?  Semi-canonical!

(And to free-associate for a moment, I'd like to note that, after writing that Marco Polo entry, I went ahead and saw the John Ford movie Stagecoach--pretty solid.  Holds up well, uncomfortable Indian-battle notwithstanding.)

So what do you do when Gus is laughing at you 'cause he doesn't believe you REALLY murdered a bunch of Native Americans with your bare hands?

…aren't you glad you asked?  Clearly, she brought along this costume, scavenged from one of her many victims, in the event of JUST SUCH AN OCCASION.

That first image of Grandma there does…not suggest a high level of artistic competence (I mean, if anything else here did).  And then that bottom right bit of dialogue suggests that the writer had some dim notion of how a "grandma" was meant to sound, and boy oh boy do we ever wish he (just assuming here!) didn't.

But I mainly show the above panels to demonstrate that the "dress in Indian regalia" business is not a one-and-done gag; it goes on for a while.  You would think, therefore, that it would have some relation to the case of mistaken identity that she later undergoes.  But you would be totally wrong.  It actually has nothing to do with anything.  It's just there, begging everyone to notice how goddamn strange it is, and then it goes away, and that's that.  I mean okay, if you really want to press the point, you could argue that her being mad at Gus is her impetus for both dressing up and sitting next to this dude, who turns out to be the detective and who accidentally gets off the flight at its stopover and leaves his bag, causing the crooks to think she's him…but really, now.  Why are you so desperate to defend this nonsense?

"Dudey slickers."  Boy oh BOY is it hard to resist the urge to make a five-year-old's joke here.  Note that this is the last we see of Gus; he just vanishes after this panel.

And here's the other WTF moment in the story: she's so enraged by the dirty window that she smashes it with her umbrella.  Pretty clear that our writer here hadn't the faintest idea of how to characterize Grandma.  And don't you like the way the manager just pops up out of nowhere in that bottom panel, looking like some kind of acid casualty with his spiral-y green eyes?  This shit is bonkers.

Also: obese, disturbingly buxom Clara Cluck.  I thought you'd want to see that (no, the character isn't specifically identified as Clara, but the inspiration, if that's the word you want to use, seems obvious).

Anyway, the desperate bandits appear and do their desperate(?) thing.  You rarely see a gun being shoved against a character's head quite so hard.  Note that their contempt at the idea that she's good at making pancakes is even more inexplicable than Gus's incredulity at her Injun-fightin' stories.

…and then, realizing to his great relief that he'd finally managed to run out the clock, our intrepid writer brings this thing to a merciful close.  Note detective brandishing tommy gun, 'cause why not?  And, finally, note that at no point in the story entitled "Grandma Duck, Homespun Detective" does Grandma Duck do anything remotely approaching detective work.

It's kind of amazing that Disney comics turned out to be as enduring as they did, given that there were way more people turning out hackwork like this than there were Barkses or Gottfredsons.  Still, I enjoy nonsense like this; it's part of the ol' history, and I will do my best to keep it alive, even if I couldn't exactly recommend it to anyone.  Cheers.