Duck Album #1

That's what I'm calling it, but be advised that there was no actual Duck Album line; they were all just released as Four Color Comics.

FIVE STORIES IN ONE!  God I spoil you people.  Does that equal five times the fun?  Well...let's hold off on that.  But what happened was, I was rummaging around for something to cover this week, and I stumbled upon THIS.  I've always been a fan of these Duck Albums, or at least the general concept, so I was pretty psyched to realize that A) this is the first of them; and B) I had somehow never read it before.  Is it GOOD?  Well, it's pretty standard Western.  Far from their worst, though probably closer to that than their best if I'm being honest.  They're not overly substantial, and none of them would be worth covering individually, but there are enough cumulative weirdnesses in here to be worth highlighting, hopefully.

Nice cover, too!  Inducks wants to credit all of these images except HDL, who get a big ?, to Barks.  Is that right?  Donald, Daisy, and Scrooge look Barksian; I'm not sure about Grandma and Gladstone.  Well, regardless, here we are.  And, as I've noted many times in that past, what I like about these albums is the general frame narrative: the idea that the Duck family is looking at these pictures and reminiscing.  So I was a bit taken aback by this existential crisis:

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"The McDuck Foundation"

(DID YOU KNOW? this is my first entry, alphabetically, that starts with "McDuck."  A thing like that.)

In our last entry, I was thinking a bit about the idea of Scrooge being secretly generous, which made me think I should revisit this Scarpa story which treats on the same concept (no! Spoilers! Did I spoil this entire entry in the first sentence?).  This is an early Scarpa story, from 1958, and it's even more of a narrative mess than usual.  As always with these stories, it's hard to know to what extent you want to harp on such shortcomings, and to what you just kind of gloss over them because they're not really the point of the story, which is more just goofing around and having fun.  Though I do think there are places where the putative "fun" is submerged in the goofing.  Well, we'll see.

At any rate, we must give credit where it is due, and in this instance, the story definitely hits the ground running with this phantasia of "generous Scrooge in Classical Rome."Read more »

"The Paper Route Panic"

 Okay!  A li'l NBW for you today.  I remember this one fairly fondly from when I was small, and someone else seems to as well, as "The Paper Route Panic" has the distinction of one of vanishingly few NBW stories to be reprinted in modern times, by Boom in 2010, in their Donald Duck Classics: Quack Up hardcover.

*Non-Barks Western.  Stick it in your head!

So we open with the big thing, which is: HDL's favorite musical act is a novelty cowboy singer!  Why the heck not?  You just wouldn't see something this idiosyncratic in most stories, I think.  That IS one advantage these NBW Western writers had: they didn't (I have to think) see themselves as really part of a "tradition" per se, so they went ahead and did stuff like this.

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Do you desire more writing on Disney comics?

Well, in that case, perhaps you should turn your eyes to The Mouse Maestro, if you haven't already.  They've got some really good articles on mouse comics, more or less in the same vein as this blog.  Would I have already known about this if I were less weirdly misanthropic about my fandom these days?  Maybe!  But there it is.  I'll add it to the blogroll when and if I figure out how; I swear, blogger's changed since I first set that up, and I can't quite figure it out.  Yeesh.

(And this is probably obvious, but no, this does not count as next week's entry.)

"Operation Galleon Grab"

Somewhat belatedly, I acquired a copy of the Disney Masters book of this title, and then I read this story.  Maybe sometimes it's interesting to have an entry about something that I haven't lived with for a long time and maybe don't have super-settled thoughts about.  Perhaps.  It's a rather shambolic story, as Italian stories so often are, so--enjoy it for what it is.  Our writer here, Osvaldo Pavese, isn't notable for much beyond prolificity, but!  This IS currently his top-rated story on inducks, so you can bring whatever excitement you think is warranted by that little fact to this blogpost.  

(Also, it's his Duck Comics Revue debut.  An amazing honor for any creator!)

We open like this, with this guy interrupting HDL's fun.  And I'll tell you why I like it so much: okay, we all know that "everyone is fooled by super-obvious disguises" is the rule in Disney comics.  Just how it is.  But even so, the fact that the absolute FIRST THING you will do when you pick this up is think "oh yeah, that's a Beagle Boy"--that's funny.  Really stretching the concept to its limits.

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