"The Flat-Footed Floogle"

 You definitely shouldn't get used to me churning out blog entires at this pace (who knows, maybe there'll be a six-month gap between this and the next one, though I hope not).  But I'm enjoying this, and here's another Dick Moores story that NEEDS ATTENTION.  To be clear, I'm not planning on writing about his entire oeuvre, nor am I lobbying for a Dick Moores Library.  Still, as weird as it sounds to say, this is true: I'm very likely the biggest living fan of his (I mean, of his duck work--he spent most of his career working on the comic strip Gasoline Alley, of which I know nothing).  How about that?  And yet, even I have to concede that a large percentage of his work is both bad and unwriteaboutable.  You're getting a very curated selection here.

(incidentally, the wikipedia page for Gasoline Alley informs us that it features "storylines reflecting traditional American values," and it just goes to show how toxic the right has made that phrase that it can't not sound ominous as hell.)

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"The Money Bird"

I don't know why I'm so into these old non-Barks Western stories!  Am I like an aging libertine whose palate is so jaded that he has to venture into the realms of the bizarre and possibly illegal to receive any sort of frisson of pleasure?  Maybe!  Was it a good idea for me to make that simile?  Definitely not!  But here we are!

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"Bottled Battlers"

 So here we have another Barks script given life by others.  There's the usual rigamarole with the art: the story was originally drawn by Tony Strobl, but then Daan Jippes swooped in and redid it.  I'm always a bit skeptical about these redraws, and never more so here: there's no cut art to be restored, and Strobl puts in pretty solid work.  I don't have any real complaint about Jippes's art either, but I dunno: regardless of their relative levels of talent, Barks and Strobl came from the same cultural milieu, so to me, his art just seems to fit the story better than Jippes', even if the latter is a more technically proficient artist.

...okay, actually, since I might have a few non-regular readers, I'll explain for the total layperson: Carl Barks was the best Disney artist, and certainly the most prominent.  He retired in 1967, but after his retirement he was convinced to come back to write scripts for other artists to draw, of which he did several dozen.  The original artwork for most of these was pretty indifferent (although I have a soft spot for some of the artists in question, particularly Tony Strobl), which is why most or all of them were redrawn by the Dutch artist Daan Jippes in the '00s.  There; that probably covers that.

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