"Billfold of Bills"

 Imagine you subscribe to Walt Disney's Comics and Stories in the 1940s, at the same time that Barks starts his run of ten-pagers.  Pretty sweet deal.  Obviously you don't know Barks' name, but you know that SOMEONE is writing these, and you're not naive enough to believe that all Disney comics are written by Walt himself (if only because they're so stylistically varied), so you know you're witnessing someone's artistic progression ("You" here is "you" as an adult, by the way.  From personal experience, I can say that kids are less discriminating).  So how JARRING must it have been when 1950 rolls around and, for reasons unknown to me, Barks takes a semi-hiatus from WDC, and most of the ten-pagers are written (or at least drawn; who knows who was writing them) by Jack Bradbury or Paul Murry.  And we can historicize all these stories and appreciate their good aspects as we find them, but at the time--I don't know.  I guess it's impossible to really conceptualize.  There have to have been a fair few discerning adult and even child readers, and they would have to recognize that the ducks in these Temu ten-pagers are NOT the same as the ones they were used to following.  What is HAPPENING?! I imagine them wondering, clutching their brows.  Well, time to take a look and see what they saw.  Not that I plan on covering ALL of those stories.  But this one in particular I'd say is at least worth a look.

(Holy shit, "Temu ten-pager," what an awesome turn of phrase; everyone must pay me homage, and also money.)

(And as for the name I've given this, it was printed titleless and, not surprisingly, never given one retroactively; I don't find any of the foreign-language titles that inspiring, so I'm officially declaring the three-word English description on the inducks page to be the title.  That's right, OFFICIALLY!  Quail before my might!  It kinda sounds like it was written by a non-native speaker, it doesn't make a lot of sense, and it's not actually related to the story in any discernible way. So, you know.  But at least it has a bit of character!)

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"The Wonderful Whizzix"

 Yeah yeah, I know: back-to-back Moores Mickey stories were not what anyone was hoping for, probably. I understand the vox unpopuli! And we weren't going to GET them, except that I just read this, his most famous (not for the first time, I think, but I remembered nothing about it), and realized, dammit, I have to write about this one. Or at least want to. I promise we'll have some ducks next week. But for now, we have this. As Debbie Anne noted in comments last time, this story is allegedly the inspiration for the Herbie the Love Bug series. I have never seen a Herbie media product in my life, but the first two movies WERE written or co-written by none other than Bill Walsh, so there DOES seem to be some Disney-comics DNA there. Interesting.

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"Goofy's Mechanical Wizard"

 I dunno, people, I'm having vague thoughts about poetry after Auschwitz here.  Not just with this blog, either.  You know, I watch frivolous youtube videos about, you know, videogames and that, and I can't help sort of thinking "argh! What are you doing?!?"  Well, what am *I* doing?  Also, am I REALLY saying that one can't create art (or whatever my blathering counts as), given the circumstances?  Strauss wrote a number of operas during the third reich, including Capriccio in 1942, and he definitely was not a nazi.  I mean, living a completely joyless existence is kind of what they want for us (to say the least), so I'm gonna say fuck you to them, but man.

Am I going to preface every entry like this from now on?  Hopefully not, but man, I'm not a robot.  It just feels odd to be writing stuff in the here and now without some kind of acknowledgement of...this.

In comments to the last entry, Joe said that Moores' Mickey stories are generally superior to his Donald (also true of Romano Scarpa).  And I thought, have I read any of those?  Probably.  Not really sure.  But I certainly don't know them very well, so here is THIS.

As you may know, Moores did inks for a number of Bill-Walsh-era Gottfredson stories.  So we DEFINITELY know he's at least somewhat familiar with the master, in a way that you sometimes sort of question whether duck writers were with Barks.  So did any of that rub off on him?  Let's find out.

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"A Big Bust"

 Boy oh boy.  What do you do when your country is cranking up its theme song yet louder and louder?  Well, if you're me, you retreat into your happy place, which it turns out is Dick Moores stories.  That's a bit of a twist, for sure.  Interestingly, or not, this appeared in Donald Duck 33, along with "The Skiing/Clock Bandit" and "The Money Bird," meaning that I've now covered that entire issue!  What an achievement!  It's not just about completionism, however, because I think there really are some interesting things to be said about it.

I suppose they were probably just grocery shopping, but that wagon filled with indistinct things for no reason is still kind of funny.  Also: "the statues and paintings of all the great men."  You know, I hope my affection for Moores is not perceived as condescending, but this observation may not help my case: I find that charmingly naive.  Obviously Moores had zero intention to be at all political here, but people who aren't too self-reflective about these things JUST CAN'T HELP IT, so here we get his endorsement of great man--definitely always "man"--theory.  In the ol' Hall of Fame Museum.  I think before I go there I'll stop at the ATM machine to get some cash. 

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