"Rescue Enhancement," "Going to Pieces," "That Sinking Feeling"

Okay, this week we shall vamp about some Barks one-pagers. If you think the fact that our entire subject matter is three pages seems kinda scanty, note that I have written five-hundred-plus words about each, making this a regulation-length entry (wait, there are regulations?). Whether you think those words were worth writing...well, that remains to be seen. It's a fun thing for me to do, though, because what always happens is I look at the comics, think, boy, THIS doesn't seem very promising for saying anything much, and then I dive in and spin things out and realize, hey, yeah, actually, I can do this ("your duck bloggers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should").

Rescue Enhancement

(Okay, this one's actually just three fourths of a page, the bottom being an ad for a one-shot called Christmas in Disneyland)

So! Here's the story: Scrooge, unfortunately, is stuck on a deserted island, as so many have been, mainly in New Yorker cartoons. And I hate to tell you this, but his very small "help" banner does not appear to be attracting the desired attention. But let's back up for a moment: the fact that he's still fully dressed in a seemingly dry suit of clothes does raise a few questions. He'd clearly be at least a bit more bedraggled if he's fallen off a ship. I think the most likely scenario has to be that he was kidnapped by unusually humane pirates who, in lieu of throwing him overboard, deposited him on this islet. They also left him a uselessly small "help" banner, possibly to mock him, which DOES indicate that their putative "humanity" also has a sadistic side. Where did he get the posts and twine that he needed to erect it? Man, at this point I feel like we've reached the outer limits of what we can possibly overexplain in this trivial one-pager to make it make sense. Same with the question of why they left him a suitcaseful of cash, although actually, that would probably be easier to justify. Some sneaky trick on his part, no doubt. If you wanted, you could write a whole dang prequel explaining how he got here! What excitement!

What to do? And will it involve money in some way? Boy, there's tough one. And it's kind of an interesting case: on the one hand, it's a pretty obvious thing to try. If you're stuck as he is, you're really left with a very limited moveset. Even with all his ingenuity, I'm not convinced he can use a tree, a starfish, and (if he can somehow catch them) a flock of seagulls to solve the problem. Look, I was wracking my brain to come up with a Flock of Seagulls reference, but I'm not convinced there IS one. Sure, I could do it if I used a deep cut, but if it's not "I Ran" or "Space Age Love Song," no one's gonna get it anyway, so...alas.

ANYWAY. If this were a different kind of story, you could imaging him digging around and finding rare minerals with which to trigger an attention-grabbing explosion or some such. But no. So, ya gotta go with what ya got. But do you really expect him to have such a wide smile on his face as he at least gestures in the direction of giving away money? Sure, he can try to renege, or accurately note that he never promised anyone anything in so many words, but that's clearly a lost cause. Look, when you're being dogpiled by a submarine captain, a cruise ship, a battle ship, a nineteenth-century sailing vessel, a viking in a longboat, an inuit in a kayak, possibly a Native American(?) in a canoe, and also two small miscellaneous ones, it's probably a bit of a lost cause.

But boy. Do we REALLY think they're all so money-obsessed? I mean, maybe we do, and you can imagine that the malign, seductive aura of it is reeling them in. Still, is the measure of a man really so limited? This is the question we are left with.

Going to Pieces

So, Scrooge is just standing there on some sort of indeterminate street kind of thing. Seems like he's in a good mood as he questions his nephews about where the heck they're off to. First, Gladstone comes trundling by, and boy oh boy. Barks chose Gladstone because he needed someone with a car in addition to Donald, clearly. But I just flatly refuse to believe that Gladstone has an "old car." There's a sort of rueful overtone to his dialogue: "this old car of mine." Like, maybe it has problems, and maybe it doesn't always work right, but ya know, it's this ol' car of mine. What do you think I'm going to do, get rid of it? I don't know; maye it's meant to be an expensive vintage car; you can't really tell. The official position of this blog: all cars basically look the same. Your car commercials are meaningless because there's nothing to choose between. Unless of course it's a cybertruck; those are indeed uniquely hideous. But the point is, I really doubt he'd have a car like this. Buying parts (to then install them himself?) seems far too much like work.

Really, I think it would've been better if Barks had used Daisy here. I briefly commented a few weeks ago on her socioeconomic status, and I think it would be realistic for her to compare to Donald, who has not just an old car, but an old, OLD car, which in this case Barks appears to have gone out of his way to make look especially decrepit, what with those misshapen wheel wells and smoke coming from the radiator. Note that 313 has been established by now. I'm not sure what if anything to make of the fact that Scrooge looks really happy looking at Gladstone's car and only somewhat happy looking at Donald's.

Then, HDL scoot by to set up the punchline. I like them on the scooter like that, but it also kinda feels as though there's going to be some sort of thing with them buying parts. And then, there's not. Well, that's fine. It IS a pretty decent joke, mainly on the strength of how convincingly Barks renders Scrooge's ancient jalopy. Though to the untrained eye (not that any such would be reading this), it's not entirely clear what the literal joke IS, exactly. I mean, obviously it's "he's super stingy, and therefore he's maintaining this ancient-ass vehicle." But sans context, it could just as easily be a simple "ha ha he's old" thing. I dunno.

Here's a question: is he supposed to be sitting in his car in the first and second rows? His body does look sort of unnaturally cut off, as if something's being intentionally hidden. I guess it kind of does make it more funny if he's spending the entire comic sitting there as Random Enraged Dude (the funniest thing here, to me) fumes behind him. But it's still kind of odd: my initial assumption is that there's a small time-skip before the penultimate panel in which he starts driving, but if not, why does he suddenly get mad for no apparent reason?

One thing I will say is that something about this somehow strikes me as a little off. Clearly, it's a simple rule-of-three thing: two normal ones and a wacky one. And yet, the build-up still strikes me as somehow insufficient. I kind of want there to be another one before we get to Scrooge himself--like, Grandma comes up with a horse-and-buggy, and like, maybe she's going to a blacksmith to get her horse reshod (yeah, she usually just has an old motor-car, but we can be redundant with Scrooge). But I have to admit, that's not really such a great idea either, if only because it would kind of constitute ANOTHER "wacky" one, thus trampling all over Scrooge's thing. OH WELL; it's still not terrible, and some jokes are just fundamentally better than others.

That Sinking Feeling

This actually appeared in the same issue as the car one (22, featuring "The Golden River"). And what's immediately anomalous here is that apart from the suitcase in the title panel, it has nothing to do with money, as "Going to Pieces" at least implicitly did. You can suggest that Scrooge's valise there contains money or Important Financial Documents,™ but were that the case, I don't think he'd be so willing to ultimately leave it behind, as he does. Actually, I guess maybe he DOESN'T leave it behind; he's carrying it in the one panel, and then it just vanishes. He doesn't carry it back aboard the ship. So is he just relying on the crew to preserve it and give it back to him when he manages to make land? Maybe.

Well, that minutae isn't too important. Let's think about "a captain always goes down with his ship." I am, ahem, fairly certain that that just means "until everyone else is rescued," not that he has to drown on principle even if there's no clear reason for it. I guess that is part of the joke; it's funny to see a phrase like that completely decontextualized. But I can also imagine a rather macabre scenario where they're saying it to him because there are still passengers aboard the ship; the crewmen don't care, they're still vamoosing, but they feel like as long as they're leaving others to die, Scrooge should stay with him. There's a dark scenario. And, to be clear if it's not, one that I'm just suggesting for fun. Much more likely, I'd say, that they're stuck in some sort of Derridean nightmare where all signfiers (such as "a captain always goes down with his ship") just shine emptily, not actually referring to anything.

Under the circumstances, Scrooge's response seems perfectly fair. If they're going to let him sink beneath the waves based on a phrase that doesn't actually mean anything to them, why shouldn't he employ a goofy loophole ("The Goofy Loopholes"--what a great band).

I suppose it's in a similar vein that that last panel raises a whole slew of questions. Scrooge is going down wearing a primitive diving suit. Okay. Mostly when he goes underwater, he uses fancier equipment, but that's just for story convenience; it makes sense that he'd cheap out in a situation where there's no need to make a bigger narrative. But what I'm hung up on is the fact that as the ship sinks, his oxygen tank is in the lifeboat. I guess there's kind of no where ELSE it could be, but still, how is this going to work? Are they going to just tow him along, now that he's fulfilled his requirement to go down with the ship? Or, that having been taken care of, are they just immediately going to pull him up after he sinks? And how does all this jive with the sailor standing up and saluting, presumably in response to Scrooge's less-than-noble less-than-sacrifice? I feel like they are making something of a mockery of this buck-stops-here precept. Shameful!

Well, I guess we're about finished here! I actually find this sort of over-analysis quite fun, so don't be surprised if I give you more of it in the future.