"Something to Quack About"

 Sometimes, whatever interest a story may have is purely exogenous.  Such is the case here, as we have the first post-Barks ten-pager.  In WDC 312, it was "The Not-So-Ancient Mariner"--and in 313, BOOM, "Something to Quack About" (yes, there were also a number of Barksless issues of WDC before then--we're trying to simplify a little here).  How does this work out?  Well, let's GIVE 'em something to quack about, shall we?  If this were Lockman, I feel like that would be "Something to Wak About."

This is a Strobl/Gregory production, which might make you at least tentatively hopeful.  This was, more or less, before Gregory's fall into I-don't-know-what, and Strobl is always Strobl.  That house there may not quite be Barks, but hey, it still doesn't look too bad.  But if, like me, you're intensely curious about what their "collection of Duckburg artifacts" consists of, I am sorry to say you will find no answers here.  Note also that this is a "Donald and Daisy" story, as were "The Beauty Business" and "Mariner" and many subsequent--was Western trying to reach more girls?  I wish I knew more details.  Read more »

"Canute the Brute's Battle Axe"

We've written about Vicar (aka Víctor José Arriagada Ríos) before, though not that often.  He was a remarkably prolific Chilean artist who was absolutely EVERYWHERE in US comic books during the nineties(ish).  He seemed like sort of a default artist: you're gonna automatically print new stories by Rosa and Van Horn, and there's always room for Barks reprints, but if we wanted something international--Vicar it was.  Not always.  But often.  And that is why, even though "Canute the Brute's Battle Axe" was originally published in 1980, it screams 1992 to me.  Let's check it out, shall we?  Not concidentally, it happens to currently be Vicar's highest-ranked story on inducks, so this could be something!  It's definitely something.  Of course, Vicar didn't write his own stories, lending them an undeniably variable quality.  This one was written by Tom Anderson, whom I've only had recourse to covering once before, in that highly unsatisfactory "Return to Bear Mountain" story.  If I can drop a small spoiler here: whatever else it is, this story is better than that one.

We open with a bit of a bang.  The great Fayodor McDuck, whose name looks like a typo!  This was pre-Rosa, of course, and so you'd be more likely to see extrapolations like this.  And dig the art, man.  You may appreciate it more if you think about the sorts of new content Western was putting out at the same time.  I think this would've caused heads to explode had it been localized contemporaneously Then again, you could say the same about an awful lot of European material, so maybe that doesn't prove much.  But either way, I like it.

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"The Hypno Thief"

 Today, we are returning to the work of Dick Moores.  It's actually sort of surprising that I haven't already covered this.  It definitely made an impression on me when I read it as a youngling, and rereading it from my current vantage point...it still kinda does.  I think it's worth looking at for more reasons than pure nostalgic self-indulgence.  Let's see.

And the first and possibly only thing I have to say is, LOOK HOW GREEN IT IS!  My GOSH is that ever green!  I'm not sure how this can be, since I assume the same colorists were coloring all these stories, but somehow, the colors in Moores stories do seem to really POP.  At least some of them.  Like, remember this?

Maybe it has something to do with the art itself, though I can't figure how that would work.Read more »