"Nightmare on Webfoot Walk"

Well, hello, boils and ghouls. What frightful little creatures of the night you are. I'd better give you a treat, then, hadn't I? Old Man GeoX has something very special for you tonight. Something...spine-chilling. OoOoOoOo!!!

Yes, it's time for this blog to RISE FROM ITS GRAVE. I feel sort of guilty that I've been neglecting it so long, but...well, it happens, I guess. For various reasons. No need to go into them here! Suffice it to say, I've tried to make up for it with something special: a new translation. Click the link above! For the first time, instead of a series of loose image files, I've made the whole thing into one PDF, which seems much more sophisticated. I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier. Anyway, that's what it is! It's a story by Marco Rota. Actually, I probably would've done this years ago, but I was thinking IDW might do an official version. But! Now that IDW has decided that insipid mediocrity is the correct business strategy going forward, I see no reason to hold back. I feel like there aren't enough really spooky Disney stories, at least in English, so I'm glad to add another one.

The original title is just "Nightmare on Duck Street," which...come on. Don't be silly. Or, perhaps more accurately, be more silly. Notice the billboard in the background featuring Goofy for no reason. That's fun.

I may be the only one to find this amusing, but I, GeoX, am paying tribute here to Barks' occasional tendency to have characters to refer to themselves by their full names for no reason.

Anyway, what we have is: Donald falls asleep in Gyro's lab, and when he wakes up, things are straaaaange! Truth be told, the story isn't really structured like much of anything: a series of vignettes like this, and that's about it. But there's some surreal, occasionally unnerving stuff here, and that is enough for me.

Believe it or not, I did not make up this silly joke about taking public transportation. It's taken directly from the French text. Hurray!

Donald gets dragon'd. Yup...I don't have much to say about this; it's just nice'n' festive.

Urgh. Unfortunately, we inevitably come to this part. Sad to say, for all of Rota's many virtues, he's also an old-school sexist. If you wanted, you could see this particular instance of that as being related to the character rather than the author: Donald's dreaming (um, spoiler), so he's created this straw-Daisy in his head. I think Rota is betrayed in that regard by his previous work, however.

My creative flourishes in this story are really pretty limited and restrained; I didn't change much. But I did make up a lot of shit for Daisy's dialogue here. In the original, it's a pretty tedious thing where she tells him to do these chores and he claims not to understand so she just keeps repeating them. Blah. At least now it's sexist in a slightly less boring way, I hope!

Really like this bit with Grandma and Gus. One of the spookiest things is having your expectations turned upside down. You can trust Grandma AHH NO SHE'S HURLING PIES AT YOU FOR NO REASON! I can understand why someone wouldn't like this story; why they wouldn't want to see the regular order overturned. But I think it works pretty well.

I like these giant and small and regular Beagles. When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead. Good fun.

And the idea that they've taken over the city--one kind of wishes more was done with that; there's some potent horror potential in there.

As there is in the idea of Scrooge going nuts and blowing up his fortune.

Freakin' hell, man. And don't forget giant-living-coins Scrooge. Looks like a super-hero/villain origin story. As I say: there are a lot of great moments here, there really are.

And of course let's not forget THE ULTIMATE SHOCKER. This is just awesome. Exactly what the doctor ordered. The MAD doctor!

I'm sorry to say, however, that the ending is a huge anti-climax. You might expect things to go back to normal, but you'd hope for some kind of stinger, which you don't get. Compare this to Rota's "Halloween Huckster" and the difference is apparent. To be fair, this wasn't actually written to be a Halloween story; setting it in October was my own addition. To be EQUALLY fair, I don't think that really matters. The story is what it is, and it lives or dies based on how well it is. OH WELL.

Anyway. Apparently Donald's not being a dick now, so that's an improvement...? And that is ALL.

Well...almost. I've taken the unprecedented liberty here of creating an alternate ending more in keeping, I hope, with the season:

Which do you prefer? Well, no matter; I've included them both in the translation, so you can delete whichever one you hate more.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN, ALL! I realized in the course of doing this that these translations are easier than I thought they'd be, so maybe we'll see more in the near future. WHOOOooooOOOOooooOOOO!