"Buffo or Bust," "Uncle Scrooge Crawls for Cash," "Wrong Number"

Yeah, we're doing this again.  What can I say?  I enjoy it.  I was out of town on vacation this week, but I had these preprepared in advance, so...here we are.  

Buffo or Bust

So we open at the famed Hall of Fame, filled with pez-dispenser-looking busts of such luminaries as Snooty Military Guy, Snooty Bowtie Guy, and Snooty...other guy.  One of Duckburg's hotspots, no doubt.  And as much as I hate to say it, Scrooge's desire to adorn his office with a Classically-styled bust of himself suggests a level of narcissism that reminds one of...well, you know.  As far as The Great Buffo's reaction...well, okay, we can say he's a temperamental artist, so that's how he's going to react to a request like that that he perceives as insulting.  Still, did he actually have, like, a price chart anywhere?  Seems like the better move would have been to just shout A THOUSAND [or whatever] DOLLARS, TAKE IT OR LEAVE IT at Scrooge.  But I am not here to critique The Great Buffo, and given the lack of other information to draw on, I will remain agnostic about Donald's claim that he's "an old bully."  This is not Buffo Comics Revue.  Though I will say that "you are greater chiseler than I" is not bad wordplay, especially for a non-native English speaker.

But at any rate, Scrooge gets hurled into an implausibly-deep mudhole outside, and the rest...is history.  Now, I certainly COULD enumerate all the reasons why Scrooge's clever strategem would not work, but it's so obvious that I fear it might not be notably interesting.  This is a story (story?) that REALLY resists over-analysis (although I do want you to at least picture the horrific blob of mud and plaster that would realistically result from this).  

One thing I will say, though: okay, fine.  Cartoon logic reigns; it all works out perfectly.  But...just the same, what are you doing?  You could call into question the entire premise of the story by asserting that Scrooge would find the whole idea of having a bust of himself made--even for just a dollar--to be wasteful, senseless frippery.  But that's only one interpretation of the character; we can also imagine that he'd be down with it.  The problem remains, though: a plaster bust?  I think we can assume that the busts in the Hall of Fame--the ones that inspired him to this extravagance in the first place--are made of, like, bronze or marble.  That they're serious, permanent artwork.  Whereas Scrooge's is much cheaper and isn't going to last.  It cost him ten cents to make, and boy oh boy is that ever going to show.  If the idea, as it seems to be, is a glorification of himself, it's going to have the opposite effect: it'll make him look like an absolute lunatic.  Crikey.

The punchine also suggests that Scrooge has a fairly shaky grasp on the point of commissioning a famous artist like this.  The measure of great art is not how perfectly it mimics reality.  This is obvious, but your plaster cast is not actually a Buffo in any recognized sense, and I feel like if Scrooge prominently represents it as such where he displays it--with a plaque or something--Buffo would probably have a pretty good legal case against him.

Uncle Scrooge Crawls for Cash

...seriously?  You expect me to write five hundred words about these three panels?  And possibly also "A Pledge DELL COMIC to Parents?"  I think we may have exceeded the theoretical limit here.  Are we flying too close to the Sun?  Well, I guess we'll find out.

As the story (story? does a random Beetle Baily comic or whatever constitute a "story?" opens, Scrooge is lying in a hospital bed, looking remarkably down around the mouth.  The question is: does he feel that way because of pain related to his injury, or is he just intensely bored, and possibly thinking about all the money he isn't making by sitting in this bed on a fine Tuesday in September (just speculating)?  Probably a bit of both.  And, when you think about, it why DOES he need to be there?  It's just a broken leg.  That doesn't generally require extended hospitalization.  I suppose there's at least the possibility that there's more to this than we can see, but I dunno--given the ease with which he trots out on his hands like that...I dunno.

(What?  You're telling me we can't find a satisfactory explanation for something that was never ever meant to be explained, and Barks would probably think I was insane if he knew I was writing this?  Pshaw, I say!)

So how do we think he WAS injured, anyway, if we posit that a broken leg is all that's going on here?

Well, back in January we looked at "Two-Way Luck," the one where he finds a giant emerald; he broke his leg there.  Of course, it didn't seem to be bothering him much, but if we wanted to, we would posit that he was just feeling good because of adrenaline.  When that wore off, OW.  A letdown for sure, but you'd think he'd still have some residual cheer over the emerald.  Otherwise, I dunno.  It could be anything.  Assuming he's in Duckburg here--not definitely true but not an unreasonable supposition--it's probably a more domestic kind of thing.  A Money-Bin accident?  There was a momentary glitch in the whole "swimming through money" ability?

Whatever the case, the sound of money cheers him up, as it will do.  And I just realized: I guess this is obvious, but I didn't quite grasp the fact that he just flung himself out the window yet.  I guess I had some weird notion that he left the hospital in a normal way (I mean, apart from being upside-down), and just went around to where the coin was.  Well, I'm happy for him.  Truly.

Now, obviously this isn't a major work of art; it was not meant to be.  But it DOES suggest a potential dystopian world where Barks was never permitted to write real stories; he just had to do daily gag strips.  The art style might elevate them a LITTLE over standard things of that type, but I still think we dodged a bullet.  Is it the case that this exists solely because of the phrase "the penny drops" (meaning, you come to a sudden surprising realization).  That's not about hearing things, though; it's being conflated with "[one] could hear a pin [or penny; you sometimes here that as well] drop."  Okay, I guess that's a little clever.  Not super-clever or anything, but slightly better than I thought.  Still probably not anyone's favorite.

Gawd, it turns out it was alarmingly easy to write that much about almost nothing.  I don't know what that says about me.

Wrong Number

LIME GREEN, AND TANGERINE, THE SICKLY SWEET COLORS OF THE SNAKES I'M...no?  Different wrong number?  Okay.

Back to writing about something at least a little less ridiculous.  Now okay, fair enough, these one-pager "analyses" are kind of jokes, plumbing depths that don't exist.  That may not be entirely the case, but it's never completely not.  But!  This particular one-pager happens to be one of my very favorites.  I will defend it to the mild inconvenience.

So: it's sometimes been said that one good thing about these is that they often reveal facets of the ducks' lives that larger stories don't.  Sure, a lot of it is just goofing around, but some of it adds to the richness of Barks' oeuvre.  Like this example here.  I love it right the heck from the beginning, with Donald's "Ask Daisy to meet us at the theatre."  Just look at that!  Just some adults having a normal adult social event, which doesn't seem all that amazing, but how often do you see that in larger stories?  If it happens at all, it's just so the event can be distrupted or there's some kind of luck thing associated with it or something.  Not here, and it rules.

The OTHER thing I like about the story is Scrooge's behavior.  It does the quite good trick of both being a silly, throwaway gag, AND making him seem like a quite appealing character.  Sure, okay, fine, he's engaging in this extended conversation so he doesn't feel like he's wasted money.  But he DOES have the conversation, and gives every sign of enjoying it!  Just a duck making a positive human connection with another person.  How about that?  And you can say "well, he just did that to get his money's worth," but how is he gonna get his money's worth if he doesn't enjoy his little chat?  Come on!  It is HEARTWARMING AS HECK.

Now, it is true that this conversation--to the extent that we see it--only involves him asking about Mr. Smith.  Never talking about himself.  And would it be BETTER if, at some point, he just casually dropped some weird piece of information about himself that would later become canon and inform a whole generation of later stories?  You bet it would!  But in this instance, let's take what we can get, shall we?

A few more trivial notes: first, is it considered canon that Daisy lives on a street called Citrus?  I mean, it could be if we wanted it to be.  Be the change we want to see in the world.  Does Barks ever indicate where she lives elsewhere?  I doubt it.

And second, in addition to everything else, I really appreciate the way Donald's annoyance and confusion are portrayed here.  I mean, it's only a three-minute call; that isn't TOO much to get through, you'd think.  But it does really help in selling how absurd the situation seems.  Anyway, chill, dude, it's over now, and you're gonna enjoy a great production of (let's say, because who's gonna stop me?) John Ford's "'Tis Pity She's a Whore."  Cheer up!