"A Case of Grumps"

Hello all.  Yeah, yeah, but as I noted in comments to the last entry, I DO have something big-ish and dumb-ish coming for the holidays, or something.  In the meantime, though, I wanted to stick something here so I look less dead.  So I grabbed a story more or less at random from Daisy and Donald.  This one is...whoa!  A late Bob Gregory joint!  How's this going to turn out?  Let's find the truth.

And off the bat, I have to say, I'm grateful that the top panel tells us that Donald is saying things with a "grump!" and that the bottom panel clarifies that he needs a cure for grumpiness--because solely based on the visuals, I would have NO idea what mood Donald was meant to be in there.  Time for Daan Jippes to redraw this, please!  Actually, why doesn't he just devote his career to converting the entire late-Western canon into something more readable?  That would be good.

Jolly good fellowship.  Clearly, that's what we need more of.  Would no doubt help with this Male Loneliness Crisis I keep hearing about.  I'm not sure if "grumpy" is the first word I'd use for today's white nationalist types, but...fair enough.

Hmm.  This sounds like the premise for a movie I may have once seen.  Or...several.  Ahem, moving swiftly on--this story is weirdly focused on giving handkerchiefs to unfortunate people.  Was that ever a thing?

And now, this.  Like that Barks story where Donald has to help Gladstone on Thanksgiving, only dumber.  Though the expression on Gladstone's face in the bottom left is...something, certainly.  You know exactly how Jippes would redraw this panel if for some insane reason he did redo this: it would be SUPER over-the-top frazzled/hysterical-looking.  So, I mean, this version here may not look GOOD, exactly, but at least it's kind of different.  You know.  Score one for Gregory in this fight, I guess, though the final outcome of the game isn't looking super-good for him.

Speaking of art, though--I'm not actually convinced that Gregory was particularly confident about his, given the need for a text box to specify.  In this case, he's being too hard on himself; that could easily be omitted with no loss in communication.

YOU MUST PRETEND TO BE AN ORDINARY GANDER!

This is the slightly interesting part of the story--this stuff with Gladstone.  Surely this general idea, or something like it, has to have appeared in other stories, but it still feels unusual enough to be interesting to me.

Well, sort of.  It's also quite confusing!  Is Gladstone not allowed to have a chocolate malted because his luck is bad?  What's happening here?

I mean, that DOES seem to the case.  I don't know what else to tell you.  The idea appears to be that Daisy and Donald started acting like Gladstone was unlucky, and then by the power of negative thinking, he actually BECAME unlucky.  I don't really think that's what Gregory was trying to communicate, but I also don't know what else he could have meant.  Probably just another case of a lazy writer not thinking through what he was writing.  It happens.

Gawd--I mean, I know this is pretty obvious, but the fact that this woman has no identity except as her father's daughter does stand out.  Gregory wasn't TRYING to be sexist here--clearly, he just wanted to communicate the essential information, that she's rich, in the most parsimonious way--but goddamn, dude.  Is he going to marry her?  Or is he going to forsake his sweetheart for the rich girl, and then it'll turn out like An American Tragedy?  I mean, why not?  His luck is still gone; he just THINKS it's back.  There's a premise.  Also, I want to congratulate myself on a reference that very few will get without looking it up.

And now, an ending that, again, is just confusing.  The ending would make you THINK that Daisy is now grumpy because Donald's hitting on other women, but...that really doesn't seem to be the case?  Neither a woman with a young daughter nor one referred to as "Mrs" codes as a possible love interest, so what are we even doing here?  This is one place where the Jippes redraw would, at any rate, make the gag more comprehensible.

Anyway, it is what it is.  Apologies for this low-effort entry, but does anyone really want to argue that this was not a very low-effort story?

Actually, just for kicks, let's look at the cover of the book where this masterpiece was printed:

Seriously, tell me, what is the joke here?  Is it just that Daisy is good at winning pandas?  Both Donald and the carny seem distressed by her behavior, so...maybe?  You tell me.