"The Mighty Trapper"

 Okay, why has it been a month and a half?  It JUST HAS.  No excuses!  Here we are!  Blah!  I talked about this one briefly with regard to that Seventy-Fifth anniversary book, but let us now examine it in more detail.

Here, I feel, we start to see those Barksian dynamics really coming together.  Donald being a blowhard and telling these tall tales--it's good; a lot of specificity, and the Donald-vs-Nephews dynamic is very familiar (also, dig that picture of a weird bearded duck).  Somehow I especially like his face in the first panel.  And yet, in another sense, this story is slightly alienating to me, focusing as it does so heavily on indiscriminately murdering the shit out of all kinds of animals.  We are a long way from Junior Woodchucks territory here.  You know, I occasionally like to read Trollope novels, but good lord, the interminable fox-hunting scenes are both distasteful and very boring to me.  And yet, they don't generally have much bearing on the overall plot, which makes this rather worse.  Or so I believe.

...speaking of foxes.  What is this?  Fox hunting isn't an American fixation.  And there's just no sense in the story of WHY it's axiomatic that All Wildlife Must Die.  

YEESH.  What more is there to say?  Also, doesn't Donald giving out furs--even ones where all the hair falls out (did it come from a defective fox, or what?)--suggest a higher level of socioeconomic status than general suggested?  I don't know, people!

I mean, dig it!  Look at it!  "There's a fox!  Oh boy, I'm going to slaughter it right away!"  Also, he's got traps in the attic: does this suggest that his bragging to HDL was actually based to some degree in reality?  I hope not.

...Donald is setting this trap so as hopefully to crush the fox's leg so that then he can kill it at his leisure.  I mean, I'm just spelling out the obvious implications.  And my mind is boggled.

But I don't want to exclusively focus on the weird, unintentional implications of violence (even though it's kind of the story's main thing), so here's this, which I think backs up my notion that the dynamic here is going to persist throughout Barks' work.

...and this can't help but recall the "Think Box" story, where he likewise pays a visit to a shop at an unreasonable hour to make weird demands.  And MY GOODNESS, look how evil he looks in that first panel.

...I am extremely skeptical of the efficacy of the "sprinkle the dog with ashes" plan.

While I've been talking about this story's murderous aspects, I do have to admit that this militates against them, at least a little.  Because obviously he's not going to kill this dog--that would traumatize the hell out of children, and nobody would like it, as Barks must well have realized--nor is there any implication in that direction.  He has the trapped animal, and now...he's just going to sort of stand there next to it, I guess.  It is very apparent that Barks spent no time thinking about what all this trapping stuff actually MEANT.  Which maybe means that me talking about it is equally meaningless!  But, too late, apparently.  Bah!

Say goodbye to the dog, as he won't be seeing him again, or her! Is this responsible pet ownership? What did Donald DO with it after this? Hmph.

Some detail here on where "bohimaton" comes from, which is actually kind of a shame--to me, it's a lot funnier if the word is just the result of Louie's brain suddenly breaking.

Um, have you forgotten the premise, dude?  They think that YOU caught a wolf, so if they do it, it's going to make them think they're equal to you at worst--which is bad enough, maybe.  Though come to think of it, what explanation are you going to give them about what HAPPENED to your alleged wolf?  I'm not sure this plan was ever really a "plan," per se.

I ask you: what the HELL would you possibly do with a wolf that you caught using this method?  You'd have to get a stepladder or something, and how would you extricate it without getting attacked or at least letting it escape?  I mean, I'm glad it's not a death trap, but if there were any chance of you actually getting a wolf, you'd just be BEGGING for trouble.

"Hundreds of spectators?"  Slow day in Duckburg, apparently.  This is VERY hard to envision.  It is a pretty amusing denouement, however.

Hey look, Mortimer sells mousetraps now.  Okay, that's pushing it.  WHATEVER.  Anyway, if nothing else, we can also see Barks' tendency to not know how to effectively end stories.  This is the kind of thing you can see any ol' place.

Okay, Taliaferro strips in this issue (well, obviously the images here are from a reprint, but you know): there's not much that's of any great interest, but:

...I'm pretty sure that's the opposite of scalping, actually.   I just wanted to point that out.

Also, Daisy kills a cop.  Good; you can argue all you want about the accuracy of ACAB, but THIS one certainly seems to be a bastard.  I was going to sort of tie that more explicitly into current events, but then I realized, jeez, if I did that I'd be ending this entry on quite a dark note.  So, I just decided to leave it at that.