"Dinner at Grandma's"

And now, this, from 1955's CP 7.  You know, the thing is, I actually wrote this entry as well as the next few before doing those damn Connell stories, and now that I've done them, I'm actually feeling significantly more charitable about these.  Not that I think my criticisms don't hold, but CRIKEY, sure, they were written by people wanting paychecks with no thought of l'art pour l'art, but they at least make an effort, sort of, and the characters, as dumb as they can be, don't generally seem like bizarre space aliens.  They're more or less earning that paycheck.  So good job, Lockman et al!  Please read this entry in that spirit.

To start, let me say that I LOVE LOVE LOVE this opening splash panel.  Nice work, Strobl!  He may not have been a virtuoso, but the general competence of his artwork is a nice contrast with a lot of the previous stuff we've seen.

One thing I'll say about this: more often than not, you look at a Disney story's title, and you get at least a kind of general idea of what the story's going to be about. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing when this isn't the case--you're looking at a guy who enjoyed a novel entitled Caliban's Filibuster--but it is a little comical here just how willfully this one not only doesn't tell you anything, but actively misleads you.  Because that right there is a pretty promising title; you'd expect, probably, some fairly low-key, character-based hijinks ultimately relating to this dinner.  But...well.  Let us see.

Pretty funky font ya got there, I must say.  Also, kind of terrifying faces on the nephews there in the second panel.  So it goes.  Inducks says Lockman is the writer, which I can buy.  It doesn't have much if any of what we think of as characteristically Lockmanian wordplay (which if I'm not mistaken didn't really start manifesting until later in his career)--this is about as close as you'll get--but the plot certainly calls him to mind.  OH MY GOSH, SO MUCH FORESHADOWING!

Well, here's the initial set-up, such as it is: Donald doesn't have enough money to buy Scrooge a present, so he needs to get a job at "one of the stores."  Obviously Donald's employment situation is always extremely nebulous, but this just raises the question: so, like, what, he was okay with being habitually unemployed, but now, NOW, a job is necessary?  How did he get money to buy the OTHER gifts?  Is he just habitually in and out of work?  Well...okay, obviously so, I guess.  The way it's presented just feels strange.  Probably just the execution, really.

Well you might wonder: whence this shit about hummingbird-powered chariots?  Is this a Christmas thing?  It doesn't FEEL very seasonal.  What's going on here, anyway?

...yeah.  I'm fairly sure this would be an excellent way for Mr. McDuck to never be able to hire anyone and quickly go out of business.  I feel like Lockman took the notion that Scrooge is obsessive (true) and warped that into "...so he's obsessive about everything, even when it contradicts who he's supposed to be!"  And to be fair, that's not just Lockman; that's Barks too on occasion.  As with Donald and his employment or lack thereof, it's all down to execution.

I do find the use of the word "devilment" here funny, though.

Yeah, okay.  Pretty sure the application form would've been upfront about that, but WHATEVER. This is all pretty trivial stuff.  What I'm really concerned with is that sales chart.  You'll note that they're all real cities, until you get down to sixth from the bottom, and...there's a city called "Stoney."  I'm really at a loss here, honestly.  All I can find is Stoney Creek, Ontario, which wasn't even a city when this was written.  I've got nothing.  It's the most incredibly trivial thing ever, but it will haunt my dreams.

I guess at this point, if you have ANY sense of what these things are like, you're getting a dim idea of where this is going.  I like (for some value of "like") "Outer Congolia."  It's just so indiscriminate in its Orientalism: yeah, Africa, Asia, what's the difference, let's just mash them both together.  Well done, Victor.

And, you know, as unexpected as it is, it's not necessarily a bad idea to divert a Christmas story into some kinda weird globetrotting thing.  It's just...man.  You just know what these things are like, and you know it's not going to be any good, don't you?  Harsh but fair.  Alas.

Donald's extremely reasonable reaction to all this.  How long ya think that's gonna last? Yeah yeah, I know that's the norm, it's just...well, obviously I've hit on a recurring theme in my reactions to this story.  But it's no joke; it really is almost entirely in the execution.

Well...it's more than thirty cents an hour.  Presumably.  Or at least, so you might think if you had never ever read a Disney comic before and had no idea who these characters were.  And if that's the case, hey, welcome to the blog, Erin Brady!  But the rest of us are just left vaguely wondering what the catch is gonna be.

(And now, we must take a brief time-out to rush that burn to the emergency room, as it is very, very sick.)

RIGHT.  One last reminder of Christmas cheer before we get going to--sigh--Outer Congolia.  Not a bad image, even if like me you have some general consumerism-related qualms.

Oh GAWD.  We needed this in our Christmas story?  To be fair, the natives don't talk in pidgin throughout the story, but they remain childlike, superstitious, and basically exactly how a white American with massive unexamined assumptions would portray them.  Yeehaw.

Okay.  I suppose we can read this as making a broader point about exploitation and this king attempting to eliminate the numinous quality of the holiday because he sees it, even in its weakness, as a threat to his power the blood of the lamb and all that...

...or, we can just read it as a childish, dumb story where he literally orders everyone to give him their Christmas money.  Really...who can say which is wrong and which is right (Donald and Lydia made love that night)?

I don't know why I'm bothering to follow this in the amount of detail I am; it's really not worth it. Just because it's unlikely that most of you have ever actually read this, I guess.

Yes, well.  Barksian precedent and all, but, as you may have gathered, this is no "Golden Helmet."

You might think Lockman would've tried to salvage some holiday festivity here by having Donald reconsider his megalomaniacal plans on account of something something Spirit of Christmas, but no.  It's just 'cause the king's required to eat Gross Shit.  We are simply having a wonderful Christmas time.

Yay. The idea that succession would work this way...well, actually, you think back to all those Borgias and Medicis and their Renaissance popes and you realize, eh--maybe not all that  implausible.  It's all good!

HOH!  Look who's here!  The convolutions of this story are whiplash-inducing, but fuckin' eh, man--Santa!  Finally, at least the chance for a little Christmas-yness, so I WILL TAKE IT.

JESUS CHRIST STROBL.  What are you DOING?

SANTA

KNOWS

EVERYTHING.

EEEEEEVRYTHING

Just try to tell me that didn't give some poor kid nightmares.

Still an' all though, I do kinda like this "helping Santa Claus" stuff.  Kinda charming. Expanded upon, it would probably have made for a more interesting story than the one we got, even with Lockman's somewhat limited talent.

...surprise.  Yeah.  Okay.  But wait!

Wut.

"I happen to be a rare coin authority?"  This is certainly one of the more egregious example of the old trope you'd see from your more hackish Western authors (or, was it always Lockman all the time?) where a main character suddenly has a really idiosyncratic character trait for this story only. Well...maybe they're all equally egregious.  Regardless, it remains...something.

It occurs to me, actually, that the "rare coin authority" thing would be fine as the premise of one of Barks' mastery stories.  It's just when you jam it in all of a sudden for no reason other than to serve a tiny plot point that it becomes...dumb.

Anyway, ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS. Apologies for the obviousness of that link, but really.  Ain't exactly a 1916 quarter, is it?

Yeah..."they'd have more fun." I mean, sure, "Scrooge is secretly generous sometimes" is a thing, but please consult the above panels and notice that he's really just being the world's biggest asshole about having fucked over his relatives, and then consider that this "fun" they're having is vindictive glee at having fucked him back harder, and I forget, is this the True Meaning of Christmas?  Yeesh.

Sure, I like the tableau in that bottom panel, kind of, sparse as it is; I'm on the record as being an easy tableau lay.  But as for the rest of it...jeez.