"The Wax Museum"

Boo!  Why no entries for a number of months that I can't bear to contemplate?  Well, no real excuses; the summer was pretty rough, and since then I've been fairly busy with my fellowship in Tallinn.  Anyway, I haven't been completely inactive with my blogs; on my main one, I'm almost finished blogging every Freddy the Pig book.  Whaddaya want from me?!?  Blood?!  Well, it IS Halloween, so maybe that's not unreasonable.  Wax museums are scary, right?  I've never been to one, but probably they are.  

These are all dramatically different reasons to fire someone, aren't they?  The first is for doing something specific, the second is for the sake of a pun, and the third because—presumably—they hired him as a barber without having given him any kind of tryout or anything.  It feels like it's not wholly coherent, somehow—that it doesn't really provide a picture of what fundamental thing about Donald causes these serial sackings.  Then again, maybe that's the point—he contains multitudes.  I enjoy the first one in particular—seems like a remarkably forbearing bakery that lets him get away with the first two dough-mixer naps.  I want to work there; I'd only do it ONCE!  I might get my name on an employee of the month plaque.

Okay, gotta go off on a little tangent here.  Inducks labels the hardcover Fantagraphics as having “dialogue altered.”  What does that mean?  We must find out.  So I compared the two, and it didn't take long; it's right on the first page:

Mmm.  You know, I'm not one to look at these things and start hollering about censorship or free speech, which is always disingenuous, irrelevant, and unhelpful.  But fair's fair: this is not an impressive feat of work on Fantagraphics' part.  It completely throws off the rhythm of this opening montage.  There needs to be something else in that panel.  Otherwise it just looks like a setup that's had the punchline shorn off, as indeed it is.  And as casual racism goes, “from an Indian war chief?” is fairly anodyne.  The funny thing is that in this same book we also have the extremely offensive “Black Wednesday,” published unedited.  

Okay okay, I'm just playing dumb if I pretend I don't get the rationale: that story would be impossible to scrub of racism, so ya gotta just bite the bullet and print it.  But for this one, where all you have to do is excise one little bit of dialogue, at the very low cost of making the opening of the story marginally worse?  Not a high price.  They would think.  And they might be right, but man, wasn't this project meant to present all of Barks' work, warts and all, in the same way the Gottfredson books did?  Does any of this matter, or not?  Come on.

Well, I suppose maybe the violin job would have been sort of “scientific,” if he actually had to build violins.  But you would definitely not just hire someone off the street for that.  Still, that's the good thing about wandering around Duckburg: if you do it long enough, you're sure to pass a wax museum or something, and they're sure to need guards.  That's just the way the city works, and if you don't believe it, note that this is a remake of an earlier story in which night watchmen were ALSO being sought after.  It happens!  In the real world, jobs that don't come via spam subject lines rarely describe themselves as “easy,” but that is neither here nor there.  

Sick burn.  If they hadn't insulted him, maybe he'd've gotten some sleep and we would've been deprived of this story.  Reminds me of this, though this story came first.  Probably.   Also, does he always fling his hat off in a random direction when he gets home, or is that another result of his rage?

If you look up “pumpkin bowling” on the internet, you'll get results.  Of course you will!  You can watch videos of people doing it.  Nonetheless, it's not something most people think about much, and it definitely seems odd to just be doing it at home like it's nothin' (this wasn't published as a Halloween story, so it's not that).  Though actually, if we take all this stuff together, we see that Donald has quite a varied array of, I guess, leisuretime equipment: if he's not bowling with pumpkins, he's training as a gymnast, and if not that, he's brushing up on his tap-dancing.  A real renaissance man.

THUD.  I do kind of admire Donald's devotion to routine.  When it's time to sleep, he is going to SLEEP.  Don't mess with him.  If asking someone to stay awake is “messing with” them.

So you could read this as “dang, look at his devotion to being asleep: it's so great that even a terrifying tableau of Dracula menacing a dude isn't enough to keep him awake!”  But I don't know about that: in spite of HDL's assumption that Donald's going to be kept awake out of sheer terror, there's no indication that he IS scared of anything that's going on.  Some people don't find Dracula scary!  What can I say?  I kind of think we're meant to see it as just being down to the intensity of his interest in sleeping, but that remains unproven.

Note also that one of the Fabled Folk is “Alice.” ...in Wonderland?  Is she a fabled folk?  Seems an odd choice for that wing of the museum.

Gotta love the way he takes everything in stride.  He seems at least a little concerned about who shot the arrow, but the idea that it was Robin Hood completely satisfies him.  The question of how could a dummy have shot an arrow is of lesser importance?  Let's take a nap in this fiery pit of eternal perdition before we drive ourselves nuts thinking about it.

Is Donald just concerned about keeping his “easy job?”  Maybe, but even if he gets to sleep through his every shift, the process of being woken up and dragged in by his nephews doesn't seem that easy, or pleasant.  Or does he feel a more general sense of responsibility?  Is he heroic in a possibly-Quixotic sense?  I think these things get mixed up and are ultimately not entirely resolved within the story.

Oxygen poisoning IS a thing, of course, but was “don't get oxygen poisoning” a popular fifties thing to say?  Who KNOWS what they were getting up to in the fifties?  I admire that that guy had enough commitment to his jester/baroque musician costume that he lugged a giant flippin' double bass along.

Also, note the rare non-dog-nosed humans.

I just like this.  It's funny.  Whatever motivates him, Donald's single-minded commitment to dealing with the situation is great.  Also note that he's significantly more active than he is in the story of which this is a remake--in that one he saves the day, but only by shooting his gun in his sleep because he's dreaming about fighting bandits.

Also, “I don't know how they move on their own power, but I haven't time to find out now” is one for the ages.  We don't worry about the madness; we just embrace it.  And admire his notable lasso skills.

And, well, so it ends, a little anti-climactically, as is the norm.  Sweet gig, though I kind of suspect that if you looked through the whole of Barks, you'd find that this isn't even the biggest riot ever caused by Donald.  Though admittedly, he rarely gets rewarded for them.

Will there be other blog entries in the future, where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives?  Check back; find out.