The Horseradish Story

THE GREAT UNANSWERED QUESTION: How come this is the one Barks story that has never received a semi-official NAME in the US?  This is a very strange bit of trivia.  I suppose it was felt that there was a certain charm to just calling it "The Horseradish Story," but still.  Of course, since we all call it that, there's no real reason we CAN'T think of it as the semi-official title, but YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.  It does not position itself as a "title," just as a marker that refers to the story.  Stupid things!  Be less idiosyncratic!

This was the oldest story in my dad's collection, though of course I didn't know that at the time.  It certainly shows that Barks was able to get into the swing of things quickly enough--it stands out from the overall oeuvre much less than "Only a Poor Old Man" and "Back to the Klondike" do--though it does have a level of inspiration and freshness that mark it as written by a man stretching his wings and figuring out what he could do in this new field, so different from the Donald adventures he had previously been working on.

Don Rosa is the only other artist who even tries to create the kind of verisimilitude that that splash panel does.  You may find exceptions to that blanket statement, but they are few and far between.  It's impressive, as is the way that the story just dives the fuck into the action right away.  No dicking around.

One really great thing here, I think, is this "small print" business (duck comics were certainly the first place where I came upon the concept that contracts could be used to trick people).

So ol' Seafoam fell for the trick, BUT LOOK--his descendent does have his glasses, and is not so easily bamboozled!  McDucks are sharper than they used to be.

Ha--or so you would think, but then you get this really brilliant business where the kids do essentially the same thing to him, and he falls for it hook line and sinker.  He may be annoyed about it, but he doesn't suspect a thing as he signs it.  Looks like, in spite of everything, the McDucks are as fallible as they've always been.

Scrooge is lucky, though, even if he doesn't know it.  When he gets fooled, it isn't by his enemies; it's just by his family members, who only want their perfectly reasonable and legitimate wages.  I think this is really, really good--Scrooge is much less appealing if he always come out completely on top.  He needs things like this to create some balance and make him sympathetic.

Incidentally, if it's actually two hundred twenty-six dollars, we can't be talking about an even number of hours--the math doesn't work out.  Still, it's approximately seven hundred fifty-three--which doesn't really work out, since if they were working for thirty days, it would only be seven hundred twenty hours, and they would be earning only two hundred sixteen dollars--though this, of course, is assuming that that's how the pricing works, and that they're not each getting paid thirty cents an hour for something less than twenty-four hours a day, presumably subtracting sleeping, meal time, and other miscellaneous breaks.  In that case, everything's completely messed up.  Dammit, someone better at math than me needs to figure out exactly what's going on here.  THIS IS IMPORTANT, PEOPLE.

Finally, I'd like to note that I totally feel Scrooge's pain here.  There's this wide misconception that horseradish is a food, when actually it's a chemical weapon.  Same with wasabi.  It's truly alarming that people willingly consume these things.

Don't you always wonder what the heck HAPPENED to ol' Seafoam?  He just disappears, never to be seen more.  Very mysterious.  But, it's all part of the economy of storytelling: he was no longer relevant, so away he went.

Did I learn what a "fathom" was from this story back in the day?  I sure did!  I think this is the kind of Scrooge-chasing-Donald-with-a-cane action that I can deal with: it punctuates the action in a comic way without seeming distractingly heavy-handed or abusive.  TAKE NOTE.  I still have no idea why Donald would've thought a fathom was equal to an inch, though, or why Scrooge seems to imply that this misconception is common amongst land-dwellers.  It looks to me like something of a non-joke.

Probably in a later story, Barks would've had the kids make this deduction.  Rosa woulda done it like that from day one.  But I for one am glad that Donald gets to do the honors.  It just makes him a more dynamic character when he gets to do smart stuff like this on occasion.  I think it's unfortunate, though inevitable, the way characters get forced into roles and then have a hard time emerging from them.

Let's just take a minute to appreciate the changing weather.  One rarely gets this sense of passing time and associated drama.  Just look at that dialogue there between Donald and Scrooge.  It just snaps.  And "a roaring pinwheel of flailing storms" may be, let's say, not the most coherent way to characterize a hurricane, but it sure stays with you, dunnit?

Once again, this is VERY SERIOUS BUSINESS: can anyone find some kind of source for "horseradish" being used as a slang term meaning "nonsense" or similar?  It must come from SOMEWHERE, mustn't it?  But the internet sure doesn't seem to know where.  It's always seemed so weird to me, the way the announcer laughs at his own weird pseudo-joke.  Who IS this guy?

…and seriously, is McSue the most evil villain in all of Barks?  I say yes (you say no but you will change your mind).  Sure, there have been villains who were gleeful about their villainy, and ones who tried earnestly to murder the ducks, but have we seen any who combined all that with trying to murder their partners?  Not so sure about that one.  Point is, he's great, and by comparison, he makes that lame Ducktales adaptation seem even worse.

So pretty normal story, right, albeit extraordinarily well-executed?  Well, yeah, but then you come to this bit, and if that's not the most profoundly self-revealing statement Scrooge has ever made, I don't know what is.  Not "I'm too stubborn to give up."  "I just haven't the strength to give up."  And why doesn't he have that strength?  It doesn't take a lot of extrapolating to conclude that it's because the entirety of his sense of self is wrapped up in his fortune; letting go of it--in a Buddhist sort of way--is the one thing that, for all his strength and smarts, is beyond him.  It further follows that his endless questing after MORE TREASURE is his way of staying alive: without the constant acquisition, what is he?  Nothing (this also accords well with the character as Rosa depicts him in "The Richest Duck in the World").  Okay, so admittedly, none of this is anything any of us haven't likely already figured out about the character, but to see it presented so starkly, and from the horse's mouth--irrefutable proof that, on some level, Scrooge knows this about himself?  That's really something else.  And that expression on his face really helps to emphasize the fact that he does.  All this went right by most of the story's original intended audience, I'd wager.

I think this works because it's so understated: Donald just being decent because that's what he has to do: no elaborate explanations of why this is; just the understanding that everyone knows that he has to save McSue because this is just what you do--which, of course, is also the answer to Scrooge's rhetorical "why?" as Scrooge himself well knows.  I daresay his last line on the top there overdoes things a bit--personally, I'd just leave it at "oh, phooey!" and leave the rest to the reader--but it's still very good.  I keep thinking of how clumsily, by contrast, Romano Scarpa handles Ethical Dilemmas in the likes of "The Lentils from Babylon" and--shudder--"The Last Balaboo."  BARKS FTW.

My other favorite thing in the story: this part.  Nowhere else do we see the Duck family acting of one accord in this way; I know it's partially just that I'm a big ol' sentimentalist, but the solidarity always makes me smile--and it doesn't hurt that Donald's line there is so damn badass.  You've also really got to appreciate the art in the bottom left--in spite of the characters appearing in the distance in silhouette, it's still easy to discern which ones are which and see what they're each doing.  That's the kind of care that not just any artist would lavish on a story.

…which brings us, at any rate, back to the end.  Granted, it's only a page and a half between McSue kicking the box overboard and HDL's reveal, but at this conflict is sufficiently well-defined, with such a sense of consequence and gravity to it, that it really feels like an amazing bit of unexpected salvation after all had seemed lost.  That's the thing, really: I like almost all of Barks' Scrooge adventures, but as we move later and later into his career, fewer and fewer of them can muster this sense of something really, really important being at stake.  The Horseradish Story, while more "conventional" than its predecessors, maintains this feeling of urgency, and thus serves as a good transitional work and one of Barks' best.