"The Delta Dimension"

And now...ladies and gentlemen...boys and girls...tadpoles and pollywogs...terries and fermies...almond joys and mounds...peanut butters and jellies...stalactites and stalagmites...et and cetera...the time has come for: THIS!

Yes, the first of Fantagraphics' "Disney Masters" books is out, featuring THREE classic Scarpa stories. And they really are good stuff; they all contain next to no characteristic Scarpan bullshit. The contrast between these and his more slapdash efforts is actually kind of dramatic, especially when you read all three of them together like this. One wishes that the man had consistently made an effort. Anyway, two of them are new to the States, but we're going to start by highlighting the only one that's previously seen US publication, the oft(?)-requested "Delta Dimension," from 1959. It was first printed in the US in Gemstone's short-live Mickey Mouse Adventures digest--the only vintage Italian story to be so. To me, that pointed to a tantalizingly awesome direction in which the series could have gone, but then it was cancelled. OH WELL. These hardcover books we're getting now are sweeter anyway, I'll admit.

Welp, let's start. I like the fact that Goofy is reading about the many exciting adventures of Flip the Fish. That is all.

It's this whole thing where there are strange weather phenomena and what's causing them?!? If there's one complaint to be made about this story, it's that it's awfully slow getting started. Granted, a lot of Scarpa's stories have this sort of slow opening (I was going to say "build up," but they're clearly not actually "building up" to anything--they're just making time)-- following, to some degree, in Gottfredson's footsteps--and this wheel-spinning isn't painfully dumb in the way that it could sometimes be--but boy oh boy it does go on. Well, you'd best just relax and take it as it comes. The best way to enjoy it, for sure.

Ho ho! Just a publicity stunt! I cannot help finding the environmental implications of this somewhat alarming, but that truly is an unfair quibble, given how basically disciplined Scarpa is here.

Not hurting anybody NOW, but in ten years...okay, never mind.  But this acid storm business is really extremely alarming. It makes me think of the Rhyming Man's plan to riddle the world with horrible poisons.

Yup, even if he's cloaked in shadow, I don't suppose it's much of a surprise to anyone that this is Dr. Einmug, of "Island in the Sky" fame. He's back, baby! And I really do enjoy such call-backs. THEY ARE COOL. LA.

And OH HO, Scarpa getting metatextual here. DOES that photograph look like 1936 Gottfredson Mickey? Well...

...actually, yeah; it's not a bad likeness. WELL DONE, SCARPA. Or is that an actual Gottfredson image taken from the earlier story? Hard to say. I don't want to bother checking now. If it is, tell me.

Blah blah, more gear-grinding as our heroes look for the source of this sinisterness and mildly amusing stuff happens. Yeah!

More old-school mice in those paintings! Yee haw! It's pretty well-done; I do like this MYSTERIOUS FIGURE cloaked in shadow an' all.

Cyanide hail? Now you're just freaking me out. Gah.

Ecce Atomo! I've written at least a bit about him in the past, but he seems to me to be Scarpa's most obviously Gottfredson/Walsh-inspired character. He's very Eega-Beeva-esque, to the point that he struggles a bit to justify his existence. But! He speaks in cartoon German. So there you go. Which certainly makes sense with the Einmug connection. I actually kinda think that's an English-only thing, though. I certainly don't remember it from when I was reading Atomo stories in French. It's a good idea, though; it at least goes some distance to differentiating him from his obvious inspiration.

Meson...temperature...element...fourth dimension...yup, checks out. Carry on.

In the original US printing, the footnote pointed you to the issues of WDC in which the story had last been printed. And now, you know THAT fascinating fact. Which you probably could've guessed anyway. Aren't you glad you're reading this blog entry?

Wouldn't it be cool if atoms were really intelligent? It would. Well, maybe they are; how would I know? I'm no scientician! It's cool that he has electrons, though I don't think that is ever any kind of plot point.

Man, Einmug's looking pretty darned devilish in that first panel there. You do not want to fuck with him when it comes to science.

Anyway! Meet Bleep Bleep and Bloop Bloop!

Right, so to me, this is by a wide margin the funniest shit in the entire story. We all know that Scarpa--like a surprising number of Disney artists--was a cultural reactionary. It's part of what made "The Miner's Granddaughter" so weird. But even with that in mind, the fact that the most ominous, sinister thing Scarpa could think to have his bad seed do was angrily read "Teen Pop Annual" is just the best. Was he worried that all those durn teens with their jukeboxes and sock hops were also all potential nazi collaborators? I think we can assume as much. All the well-adjusted, non-threatening kids spend their time studying French verbs and math. Make a note of it.

MARK ME, FOOLISH UNEBELIEVERS: It is a thin fucking line between the 1910 Fruitgum Company and stealing atomic secrets. Lock up the kids!

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Whoa, who's THIS guy? What kind of unpredictable malarkey is this?!? Cancel my subscription and give my money back. He's pretty brutal here: one hundred percent willing and eager to rain poisonous death on Mouseton. This raises questions. Obviously, he's not going to end up murdering a bunch of people, but if we see that he's one hundred percent willing and eager to do so, don't we basically have to treat him as a character who would do such a thing and thus not even a tiny bit potentially sympathetic or lovable, ever? Well, maybe, but maybe we have to go up a narrative level, as it were, and note that the thing about that is that Mickey's always going to stop him, the narrative demands it, so do we really need to treat it as a serious thing, or can we take that into consideration? I don't care! Look, a cool bug!

I found it by googling "cool bugs," and you have to admit, it IS pretty derned cool.  Nature is fucking unbelievable sometimes.

The most (intentionally) amusing thing about this story is the way Pete and Mickey kind of have two relationships, like they're actors. They're enemies, and yet in the interstices between their fighting, they act like at least friendly acquaintances. Like actors playing roles. My goodness, maybe this relates to what I said above.

Oh, Mickey. You make yourself look truly unnecessarily dumb by getting taken in like this all the time. But then...maybe it's not unnecessary! What does anything mean ever?!?

You still look dumb, though.

But seriously, big props for this part. The megalomania is done really well, and it feels like a really appropriate follow-up to "Island in the Sky." Well done, Romano.

But damn, man. You sure did kill him off brusquely there, and doing it right as he's turning good seems needlessly sadistic.  Well, I suppose not technically "kill," but it amounts to the same thing.  This definitely has a Walsh feel to it. That's what you get for listening to that dreadful pop music, I guess.  Someone should do a story where Bleep Bleep searches for his brother.

Question, though: when Einmug brings the atoms out, they're children. Are we supposed to assume that all the intelligent atoms are like that, or was it just arbitrary that he happened to get the ones he did? If the former, Bloop Bloop is gonna have a hard time adjusting to shrunken life with the other atoms and no pop music.

See what I was saying earlier? This is amusing on a level that one doesn't necessarily expect from Scarpa.

This stuff too. The climactic fight here is a definite highlight of the story.

And now it's over. Yes. I said this re "The Blot's Double Mystery," and I'll say it again: WHY A 1313 LICENSE PLATE?!? You're just confusing things. Well, in that story I guess Martina was confusing things, and here Scarpa is. Maybe it's just an Italian tradition but it's weird 'n' I doan like it.

Well, that's okay. It's still definitely good work. You'll note that I did very little nitpicking of the story; that's because, as noted at the start there's very little to nitpick. Minimal bullshit! Which is great for everyone involved. I highly recommend that you check out the book it comes from as well as the future ones in the series. Well...most of the future ones in the series. I look forward to the Bottaro one with keen intensity, but I think I'll have to pass on the Paul Murry volume: I feel like at this point in my life, going into a boredom-induced coma is just not something I need. Here's my theory: Murry fans are the reason that insipid legacy comic strips like Hagar the Horrible and Beetle Bailey continue to appear in newspapers. They're not funny, they were never funny, but a small but extremely loud cohort of geriatric fans with bad taste means that it's more trouble than it would be worth for harried editors to get rid of them. And that is that.

But anyway, you should definitely support publishers when they do good things like print Italian classics. And that is all for today.