"So Far and No Safari"

 The last installment in the epic trilogy!

...is definitely the wrong way to look at this story.  "The Second-Richest Duck"/"The Money Champ" are a rare example of Barksian continuity; this and them really isn't, unless you consider the bare presence of Glomgold (bearing little resemblance to his past incarnations) to be all you need.  For most intents and purposes, Flinty as he appears here could just be a random pigface villain for all the difference it would make.

We open with this somewhat weak gopher stuff; if anything, this story seems more like Barks deciding to go back and do some more riffing on "The Mines of King Solomon" than anything related to previous Glomgold stories.

BOY, though.  I tell you what.  This talk of gassing the gophers to death feels REALLY jarring and raises some VERY inappropriate associations.  That's just not the kind of thing that tend to come up in Disney stories, and for good reason.  I guess I'll choose to believe that we're talking about sleeping gas, and that the plan is just to relocate them outside.

Anyway, what's going on is this, which I just find confusing.  Okay.  So HDL's gopher calls got the gophers out of his lawn.  But then...they summoned OTHER gophers, for some reason?  Is "my lawn" here meant to be something different from "my back yard?"  Someone explain!

It's just the period it was written in, but there is some rather odd character art here--just look at the nephews bottom right or Scrooge top left.  It gives the story a slightly off-kilter feel.

And this "how us big wheels make big deals" thing is a kind of half-hearted theme throughout the story (cf "Pipeline to Danger").  Donald occasionally makes snide comments about how tycoons do or don't make deals...and that's about it.  I don't think it's an insult to say that Barks wasn't working real hard on this one, and it's a tribute to his talent that it's nonetheless pretty good, overall.

It IS pretty funny, Scrooge eagerly making calculations and nearly crashing into the mountain.  But what's this?!?

It's Feral Glomgold!  He's definitely drawn in a more, let's say, bestial way than he was in his previous appearances, which suits his role here.  Please disregard the fact that the colorist has, very distractingly, made him into a brunette.  That's neither here nor there.

Boy, leaving HDL behind?  Have you learned NOTHING from the many times they've saved your bacon?  Well, clearly it just has to be that way because they need to save you AGAIN, and them being with you right now would interfere with that.  But maybe you wouldn't have gotten into trouble in the first place if they'd been there to help!  Ever think of THAT?  Yeah, I thought not.

As for the natives, you know, they are what they are.  I don't think there's much I can say about these depictions that I haven't said.  I'm more interested in "they're on their way to the local Disneyland."  So that's probably true--given the generally postmodern milieu of the story, if the locals said anything about what they were doing with the money, it would probably be something like that.  But also, man--did Barks ever write anything else that nakedly metatextual?  I'm down with it, for sure.

"Kraal."  Presumably Barks got the word from one of his NatGeos; there's no way little kids would know it--but he stuck it in there anyway.  That's what I call not talking down to your audience, and I love it.  Also the racing lions, silly as the image may be.

Let's just chill and enjoy the art here.  What else are you going to do?  Those are some sweet hippos, I'll tell you that much.

Is this the closest Scrooge has ever come to his demise?  Maybe!

Hey, remember that Strobl story I wrote about that also has "safari" in the title?  And remember how HDL didn't understand the phrase "inaccessible plateau" from the Guidebook?  Well, here we have another sort-of permutation on that: the information may be in the book, but the twist is, it was indexed by maniacs, so good luck finding it.  It's funny: later on, the story is going to list the names of a number of animals that probably won't immediately be familiar to readers.  They certainly weren't to me.  But then you look them up and yup, really animal.  The one exception is the lizard wizard bird, which, sadly, is not.  Weird.  And I don't even know what to say about "imagine a book that knows about such things as the lizard wizard!"  Yeah...imagine that.  Barks is clearly just being intentionally silly here, and god bless him for it.

I'm not sure if you can "buy" an indexing system, but Scrooge is certainly right that there's room for improvement here.  Anyway, as I alluded to earlier, a lot of this is really just Barks vamping, but when you're this good at it, I am not going to complain.

Just some more of that, for fun.  All this business of "recommending animals" is quite something.  Very odd and interesting tone here.

It will be "continued" after an ad for Cheerios with Rocky and Bullwinkle, for the record.  Great fun.  Glomgold has a "snug mansion," at any rate.  And say what you want about his portrayal here, but "the ducks shall make fine feasting for jackals" goes pretty hard.

...but also, you've gotta come up with something else.  Repeating the "feast for jackals" thing kinda makes you look like a one-trick pony.

And anyway, these jackals look pretty adorable, so I wouldn't worry about it too much.  It'll probably be fine.

How did you "miss" jackals in an alphabetical list?  Tell me!

Give credit for this, I guess: unlike most Disney disguises, this one is actually fairly good, as long as his voice doesn't give him away.

See?  There's not much to say about the "natives" here because it's just postmodern goofiness, with their organizational bureaucracy and all.

And we get a climax that may, again, make you think of "The Mines of King Solomon."  Anything can indeed happen.

And yeah but so anyway, the ending is the only thing here that makes me think of the Glomgold of old.  We do not find out who gets the mine, and we are not expected to care.  Donald and HDL certainly don't.  Now, part of this is less about Glomgold specifically and more about Barks being late in his career and not taking any of this terribly seriously.  Still, I like to imagine that, in spite of not having depicted Glomgold in a particularly nuanced way this time around, there's still just something about that character that made him come back around to this thing where he and Scrooge are basically the same.  You know, we occasionally see auctions like this that are seemingly poised to go on forever, and you wonder, how is this going to work?  What specific cost is there that's acceptable, but that would make them balk if it were one shilling more?  I feel like this wouldn't end until one of them literally loses consciousness from exhaustion.