"Hoosat from Another Planet"

It's been HOW long since I've written here?!?  My goodness!  Would you believe I was kidnapped by somewhat incoherently-drawn space people? And as evidence, I present: this, a late Gottfredson/Walsh effort, for your consideration. Consider it! I order you!

Okay, so the opening of the story is sort of convoluted, so just suffice it to say: having used the black pearls that he had found in the previous story to pay his outstanding taxes, Mickey is broke again, but everyone thinks he's rich so they're bugging him for money and so to get away with them he agrees to go off uranium prospecting with Goofy. And how I see that this is the second story I've written about in a row involving uranium prospecting (EDIT: uh, almost in a row). Always with the uranium! You people are weird.

As you should not be surprised to learn, being that this is Walsh, the whole uranium thing drops out of sight pretty quickly, so let's fast-forward to HERE, where things start to actually happen. Here's Ohm-Eye! He really invigorates the story, especially in the early going. A bit Eega-Beeva-esque for sure.

Rich philosophical implications here. Exactly the kind of thing they explored with Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, although Walsh does not dig as deeply into it as you might wish. Well, it's Walsh. What do you expect? You should be grateful that you're getting anything at all.

AWWWW. Sure, it's hokey as heck, but it's sweet anyway.

Anyway, they get captured and taken to...this guy. Who is odd as heck, not so much for anything he does--there's no particular story reason why he couldn't just be Some Guy--as for his metal shell. My first thought was "atomic bomb," which you gotta figure was also on Walsh's mind on some level. Well, maybe you don't. You can do what you want! But I do. I also briefly thought "is it just gonna be Pete inside that thing?" but no. To the story's benefit, I think. More weird, out-there stuff, is what we need.

Saved! In kind of a lame way, but eh. This trope is familiar through maybe-apocryphal (I have not done my research) stories about Pocahontas. This is Hoosat, for the record, but she's only referred to by name off-handedly by Mickey and Goofy. They must have learned her name off-page.

Just look at this. It's not like Walsh really goes much of anywhere with the character, but this is creepy as anything. He isn't there, in a physical sense. It's just--maybe this is a stretch, but--free-floating atomic anxiety. Brrr.

Of course, on that note, there's also this macguffin, bleerium. It's extremely obvious that you're not a scientist, Mickey. No need to be explicit about it.

I mean, HERE'S a thing. Note that Bomb King (as I'm calling him 'cause why not) used Hoosat's exact same rationale for why it doesn't matter when Mickey tried to get clemency for Ohm-Eye. The characterizations for these guys are not necessarily super-coherent, as I suppose happens when you're making up a story on the fly. That "what difference does it make?" is kind of a leitmotif throughout the story, but I think it would be a bit of a stretch to say that there's a coherent philosophy at play here.

I really want to draw attention to that last panel, as it works quite well. The electrical man looks sort of shell-shocked at hearing that he has no emotions, no feelings, but at the same time...that's kind of just the way they look. So there's uncomfortable ambiguity.

But, of course, we're encouraged to see Ohm-Eye as having feelings, and as such, by extension, the others too. If you really wanted to press the point you could argue, oh, he only has feelings because he was changed by his contact with Mickey and Goofy, but I'm not really buying that. Point being: I haven't actually read the last Gottfredson book yet, but barring something truly extraordinary, this is surely the biggest body count in any Walsh story. Man, I tell you: when I first read "The World of Tomorrow," I assumed it was just an aberration. Truly, I hadn't seen nothin' yet. And the cold-booded, mechanized killing here is surely more disturbing than any I'd seen previously.

Look, they go to space, okay? It's not bad art, but really, I'm just sticking this in here so there's less of a jarring transition between them being on Earth and not.

Actually, one other thing--I can't believe I forgot to point this out: note that the planet "Unlaxx" (why the scare quotes?) is three hundred thousand miles away...or slightly greater than the distance between Earth and the Moon, and orders of magnitude less than the distance between Earth and Mars or Venus.  Science!  I know they didn't have wikipedia at the time, but you'd think it wouldn't have been THAT difficult to find a reasonable-sounding distance.

"Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!" Though, really, the space people do kind of have a point.

I, like Mickey, am Not A Scientist, but I still can't help feeling that maybe perhaps just abruptly shoving a material with the power to destroy the universe that you haven't studied at all into a vacuum isn't the absolute best idea. But who can say? I could be wrong!

Oh, yeah. One of those "space areas." Sounds legit to me. I have to admit, though, that is a pretty cool visual.

Take a look at these dudes. They're instrumental to saving our heroes, but they never speak, and they're never characterized in any way other than finding everything goddamn hilarious. I suppose it's a blueprint of the ideal Walsh reader: you have no idea what's going on, but you laugh like a maniac anyway. I only sometimes fall into that category, however.

Drama! Not covering yourself with glory there, are you, Goofy? Just another example of Walsh mischaracterizing characters for a laugh(?). Or, I mean, here, just to continue the "he's not a really person" theme, but to what end? Really.

Boom. Couple more notches on the barrel of Walsh's gun. What's shocking to me about this is how off-handedly, casually brutal it is. Leaving aside the question of whether Hoosat and Bomb King deserved to die--they're vaguely drawn enough that it's hard to really compare them to other villains--the way they do is just...jeez. If you're gonna kill off characters, you really, really need to give it more weight than Walsh likes to do--though, oddly enough, doing that would probably be deemed inappropriate for a Disney comic; dwelling on death in a morbid fashion. Anyway.

But OH! Walsh makin' fun of the Cold War Paranoia! Go Bill! Even if this part seems superfluous and tacked-on!

But back to things I don't like: I am positively insulted by how abruptly he writes out Ohm-Eye. I suppose this is basically the same as the way he killed off his antagonists: he didn't want them for story purposes anymore, so bye. Still, it kind of sucks. I think if Eega Beeva's okay, you don't have to worry about people laughing at you, dude. It's such a featherweight rationale.

Actually, it's too bad no one's ever seen fit to bring back Ohm-Eye. I suppose you could say that what with Eega and Atomo Bleep Bleep, another weird space-person is superfluous (okay, Atomo's technically not a space-person, whatever), but Ohm-Eye is substantially more different from Eega than Atomo is. I think it would present a lot of good story and character possibilities. Actually, I think that in general about a lot of Gottfredson--and especially Gottfredson/Walsh--characters. They could really liven things up.

Anyway, that's about it for this story. You can see Walsh's strengths and weaknesses here: he's good at making individual interesting moments; not so much at constructing coherent stories around them.

One last question: where do the names of these stories come from? I could believe that some of them were internal King Features things, but this one seems pretty obviously to be a take-off on Brother from Another Planet, so I dunno. Are they all just like untitled Barks ten-pagers? Or is it a mix. When were the names chosen, and by whom? I know at least some of them existed in Gladstone I days, but how about for stories like this, that they never even came close to printing? It is a mystery!

Anyway, sorry about the long silence. NOT THAT I OWE YOU ANYTHING! But even if I have been busy, I like keeping this blog active. Hopefully it'll be so in the future.