"The Money Champ"
So threeish years after "The Second-Richest Duck," it's time for "The Money Champ." Please look forward to it.
Somehow, I never noticed til right now that it's actually "Uncle Scrooge AND the Money Champ." That's kinda weird, innit? It's just Uncle Scrooge IN the Second-Richest Duck," but here "The Money Champ" is posited as a different person. I mean, clearly it means nothing; just a brain fart on some editor's part. But still.
Anyway, we see what we don't see often, and actually, I'd question whether we've seen it EVER elsewhere: this idea that all the peeps are idolizing Scrooge for his awesome richness. And it's one of those things that you just accept for the purposes of the story, and I do, more or less, but also, WOW do I ever not idolize anyone for having money. I guess I do like the guy telling some random sailor about it.
Unlike "The Second-Richest Duck," this one wastes NO TIME in introducing Glomgold. This idea of slapping someone with a glove as a challenge is definitely something I was introduced to by this story.
A rare example of continuity in Barks, is what this is. I absolutely don't believe that Scrooge wouldn't immediately remember him; the challenge last time was an existential threat to his self-identity. I don't think you'd forget that. Rather, I'd think you'd spend years obsessively following the ins and outs of Glomgold's fortune, even if that would get tedious from a storytelling standpoint.
See, I really enjoy this kind of thing. Their argument momentarily forgotten, Scrooge and Glomgold both with this shellshocked expression over having been fined five gold mines. This is what I was talking about last time! Scrooge and Glomgold as frenemies, bonding over their mutual richness and its vicissitudes, is something I want to see.
This looks like kind of a fancier version of their argument in Flintheart's bin in the previous story. Don't you wish you had a ski slope made out of nickels?
It's also like the previous story in that we have these kind of ridiculous ways of measuring wealth that allow for the necessary level of physicality. In both stories, you just don't think about whether it makes sense, but I do think it's harder in this one, because goddamn, man--in the name of proving you're the richest, you are both going to lose A LOT of money by liquifying all your assets. I feel like at the very least, this fact maybe should've been lampshaded a bit, because it's just this nagging thing that I can't stop thinking about as I read the story.
I know I've commented many times on the Disney comics thing where extremely obvious disguises always fool people, but here we have an example of an extremely obvious alias doing the same. You couldn't be bothered to come up with something less obvious, Flinty? Well, seemingly you didn't need to, so I guess you win this round.
In the past I'm not sure I ever registered the fact that this contest took place at the old airport. It's not that vital a detail, but it's nice that Barks stuck it in there--you know a lot of writers would just have made it take place in a formless void (but not specifically Ginnungagap. That would be a hell of a thing).
So, about those piles of money: they are MASSIVELY too small. According to the internet, a pile of a trillion silver dollars would extend well into outer space, and of course, this is not just a trillion; it's a bunch of bigger, made-up numbers. Dunno what point I'm making. Just nitpicking, I guess, though it WOULD be interesting it there were a story that treated this theme in a more realistic way (you can do a "realistic" story about piling money beyond the exosphere, right?).
What can I say about "you'll have to furnish your own salt?" Probably not much. Though I do find the emotional rhythm interesting, going from rage to this kind of bemusement. To Donald's delight, of course!
I don't know if Scrooge should be getting suspicious of people who are "too kind" to their money, but it might be just another example of him displacing his own idiosyncracies onto Glomgold, as we saw in the last story. Also: Dewey does, Huey does, Louie does. There's absolutely no reason to phrase it like that except for fun, so Barks did it anyway, and it's great. Also also: "none of your ideas have [made sense] for a long time." I like to think that that doesn't just apply to this story; that it's a more general commentary on Scrooge's MO. I mean, from Donald's perspective, it's kinda true. Imaging wanting a pile of money more than an ice cream soda!
There's not much of this stuff in the airport underground, but I like it and wish it were a more prominent part of the story. But man, there's just something that bums me out about "I just stopped being so trusting" there. Maybe it's just the world we have to live in these days, but I mean...yeah, okay, under the circumstances it's clearly good advice, but what it says about us as a species...ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!
Meanwhile, Duckburg's common clay of the new west are as changeable as ever. How long have they been standing there, do you think? How long is this whole process taking? That panel, above, with HDL looking at the money piles appears to be taking place at night (though that might be a coloring thing), and indeed, doing this in a single day doesn't seem realistic. I guess the people of are just congregating and staying for...I don't know, eight hours a day? Twelve? That's devotion, of a sort.
Gotta love Flinty's pile being CHUF'd like that, but it seems unlikely to me that that spear would actually reach far enough to CHUF the pile. Look at Scrooge in that bottom panel: the spear is not getting a huge amount of penetration. Also, where did he get a spear?
Fortunately, now the crowd's whimsicality works in Scrooge's favor, so we feel comfortable using culture war signifiers ("big-town") against him. I suppose the fact that they're doing that here relates to what we were recently talking about re Duckburg's size. In this story, it must be pretty small, if they're that excited about A Rich Guy living there.
Okay, "tomorrow." So this seems to be taking place over at least three days. Srsly, "the biggest event in Duckburg's history?" If that's not a sad indictment of the town, I don't know what is. Also, NOW the audience is all "oh, I hope Scrooge wins?" You people are fucking impossible. If this were the real world, they'd all be swing voters. Not people to be relied upon in any circumstance.
Yeah, okay, granted, clearly Scrooge has a better claim here to the moral high ground than he did in "The Second-Richest Duck." I dunno. I feel like he might be a little TOO righteous here. Like, I doubt this is actually the case, but you can imagine some editor thinking that that last Glomgold story was a little TOO morally ambiguous, and ordering him to make things a little clearer for the impressionable youth.
And now that I've started thinking that way, I can't help it, even if it's a completely fake narrative that I just made up: THE MAN wanted to be sure we'd know how bad Flintheart is, so that's why we get this anti-FG propaganda! Grrr!
I'm kind of associating the Jivaro juice with the magic ice that consumes the world in Cat's Cradle. Although I guess if this worked that way it would...just make everything in the world small? Possibly I haven't thought this through.
I do enjoy this business with Glomgold going on a rampage and shrinking everything in sight. It certainly has a joie de vivre. I'm not sure whether shrinking something renders it legally void, but this is Duckburg. The law works differently there.
I like the truck shrinking. I find Donald's line about his TV being repossessed kind of weirdly hacky. And as for HDL, they know judo, which is something we should keep in mind.
Hi. Yes. I understand that this is all fun and games, but have we forgotten that there are a bunch of people watching this, including The Mayor and The Governor? What in the world must they be thinking here? We're really just blasting away at our rival with this enormous damn cannon? Even if this all worked out according to plan for Glomgold, I feel like...it still wouldn't work out. I wonder what the bulldozer guy helping him out is thinking. "Am I actually going to get paid for this?"
SHRINNNNNNNK! Do you have a particular way you hear that sound effect in your head? Anyway, that's that done. I know that green vortex thing is supposed to just represent the cannon getting small, but it also seems to represent Glomgold's hopes and dreams. :(
...and I love how it's immediately undercut by this, which would be great even if it weren't just to set up the return of the hat-eating thing.
I feel like we already got the point; we didn't necessarily need Scrooge to clarify that Glomgold lost because Crime Doesn't Pay. I'd be fascinated, though, to know what would have happened has their pyramids, in fact, been declared identical.
But then, at the last moment, Barks again undercuts Scrooge's victory with this bit of silliness. Even if Scrooge IS supposed to be a fairly unambigous good guy here, Barks really doesn't seem to want to make us really feel that. This story is less different from "The Second-Richest Duck" than I remembered it being, really.
Anyway, we see what we don't see often, and actually, I'd question whether we've seen it EVER elsewhere: this idea that all the peeps are idolizing Scrooge for his awesome richness. And it's one of those things that you just accept for the purposes of the story, and I do, more or less, but also, WOW do I ever not idolize anyone for having money. I guess I do like the guy telling some random sailor about it.
At any rate, though more than anything I feel like it's an objective correlative for Scrooge's mood, and throughout the story we'll see Duckburgians acting as almost a Greek chorus to his trials.
Unlike "The Second-Richest Duck," this one wastes NO TIME in introducing Glomgold. This idea of slapping someone with a glove as a challenge is definitely something I was introduced to by this story.
A rare example of continuity in Barks, is what this is. I absolutely don't believe that Scrooge wouldn't immediately remember him; the challenge last time was an existential threat to his self-identity. I don't think you'd forget that. Rather, I'd think you'd spend years obsessively following the ins and outs of Glomgold's fortune, even if that would get tedious from a storytelling standpoint.
See, I really enjoy this kind of thing. Their argument momentarily forgotten, Scrooge and Glomgold both with this shellshocked expression over having been fined five gold mines. This is what I was talking about last time! Scrooge and Glomgold as frenemies, bonding over their mutual richness and its vicissitudes, is something I want to see.
This looks like kind of a fancier version of their argument in Flintheart's bin in the previous story. Don't you wish you had a ski slope made out of nickels?
It's also like the previous story in that we have these kind of ridiculous ways of measuring wealth that allow for the necessary level of physicality. In both stories, you just don't think about whether it makes sense, but I do think it's harder in this one, because goddamn, man--in the name of proving you're the richest, you are both going to lose A LOT of money by liquifying all your assets. I feel like at the very least, this fact maybe should've been lampshaded a bit, because it's just this nagging thing that I can't stop thinking about as I read the story.
I know I've commented many times on the Disney comics thing where extremely obvious disguises always fool people, but here we have an example of an extremely obvious alias doing the same. You couldn't be bothered to come up with something less obvious, Flinty? Well, seemingly you didn't need to, so I guess you win this round.
In the past I'm not sure I ever registered the fact that this contest took place at the old airport. It's not that vital a detail, but it's nice that Barks stuck it in there--you know a lot of writers would just have made it take place in a formless void (but not specifically Ginnungagap. That would be a hell of a thing).
So, about those piles of money: they are MASSIVELY too small. According to the internet, a pile of a trillion silver dollars would extend well into outer space, and of course, this is not just a trillion; it's a bunch of bigger, made-up numbers. Dunno what point I'm making. Just nitpicking, I guess, though it WOULD be interesting it there were a story that treated this theme in a more realistic way (you can do a "realistic" story about piling money beyond the exosphere, right?).
Also GODDAMN the people of Duckburg are fickle. Satire! I kind of wonder what Top Hat Guy there makes of all of this.
What can I say about "you'll have to furnish your own salt?" Probably not much. Though I do find the emotional rhythm interesting, going from rage to this kind of bemusement. To Donald's delight, of course!
I don't know if Scrooge should be getting suspicious of people who are "too kind" to their money, but it might be just another example of him displacing his own idiosyncracies onto Glomgold, as we saw in the last story. Also: Dewey does, Huey does, Louie does. There's absolutely no reason to phrase it like that except for fun, so Barks did it anyway, and it's great. Also also: "none of your ideas have [made sense] for a long time." I like to think that that doesn't just apply to this story; that it's a more general commentary on Scrooge's MO. I mean, from Donald's perspective, it's kinda true. Imaging wanting a pile of money more than an ice cream soda!
There's not much of this stuff in the airport underground, but I like it and wish it were a more prominent part of the story. But man, there's just something that bums me out about "I just stopped being so trusting" there. Maybe it's just the world we have to live in these days, but I mean...yeah, okay, under the circumstances it's clearly good advice, but what it says about us as a species...ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!
Meanwhile, Duckburg's common clay of the new west are as changeable as ever. How long have they been standing there, do you think? How long is this whole process taking? That panel, above, with HDL looking at the money piles appears to be taking place at night (though that might be a coloring thing), and indeed, doing this in a single day doesn't seem realistic. I guess the people of are just congregating and staying for...I don't know, eight hours a day? Twelve? That's devotion, of a sort.
Gotta love Flinty's pile being CHUF'd like that, but it seems unlikely to me that that spear would actually reach far enough to CHUF the pile. Look at Scrooge in that bottom panel: the spear is not getting a huge amount of penetration. Also, where did he get a spear?
Fortunately, now the crowd's whimsicality works in Scrooge's favor, so we feel comfortable using culture war signifiers ("big-town") against him. I suppose the fact that they're doing that here relates to what we were recently talking about re Duckburg's size. In this story, it must be pretty small, if they're that excited about A Rich Guy living there.
Okay, "tomorrow." So this seems to be taking place over at least three days. Srsly, "the biggest event in Duckburg's history?" If that's not a sad indictment of the town, I don't know what is. Also, NOW the audience is all "oh, I hope Scrooge wins?" You people are fucking impossible. If this were the real world, they'd all be swing voters. Not people to be relied upon in any circumstance.
So this is just a cosplaying white guy. I enjoy that. He talks about having been among these Jivaro head hunters, blah blah, but while I do have to admit that his potions do what they're meant to do, he seems to me more akin to those seventies comic book ads about random weeaboos who will sell you their hidden mystical martial arts secrets that let you murder a guy by punching them and stopping their heart. I don't take him that seriously, is all I'm saying.
Yeah, okay, granted, clearly Scrooge has a better claim here to the moral high ground than he did in "The Second-Richest Duck." I dunno. I feel like he might be a little TOO righteous here. Like, I doubt this is actually the case, but you can imagine some editor thinking that that last Glomgold story was a little TOO morally ambiguous, and ordering him to make things a little clearer for the impressionable youth.
And now that I've started thinking that way, I can't help it, even if it's a completely fake narrative that I just made up: THE MAN wanted to be sure we'd know how bad Flintheart is, so that's why we get this anti-FG propaganda! Grrr!
...I mean, not completely. I still kind of like it. I just sorta-kinda wish that if this character arc was brought up, it was resolved, or at least further addressed, in some way. Oh well!
I'm kind of associating the Jivaro juice with the magic ice that consumes the world in Cat's Cradle. Although I guess if this worked that way it would...just make everything in the world small? Possibly I haven't thought this through.
Also, those dudes holding the jug are ALSO white guys. They're just goofs that the first dude recruited for this amusing little cosplay experiment.
I do enjoy this business with Glomgold going on a rampage and shrinking everything in sight. It certainly has a joie de vivre. I'm not sure whether shrinking something renders it legally void, but this is Duckburg. The law works differently there.
I like the truck shrinking. I find Donald's line about his TV being repossessed kind of weirdly hacky. And as for HDL, they know judo, which is something we should keep in mind.
Hi. Yes. I understand that this is all fun and games, but have we forgotten that there are a bunch of people watching this, including The Mayor and The Governor? What in the world must they be thinking here? We're really just blasting away at our rival with this enormous damn cannon? Even if this all worked out according to plan for Glomgold, I feel like...it still wouldn't work out. I wonder what the bulldozer guy helping him out is thinking. "Am I actually going to get paid for this?"
SHRINNNNNNNK! Do you have a particular way you hear that sound effect in your head? Anyway, that's that done. I know that green vortex thing is supposed to just represent the cannon getting small, but it also seems to represent Glomgold's hopes and dreams. :(
...and I love how it's immediately undercut by this, which would be great even if it weren't just to set up the return of the hat-eating thing.
I feel like we already got the point; we didn't necessarily need Scrooge to clarify that Glomgold lost because Crime Doesn't Pay. I'd be fascinated, though, to know what would have happened has their pyramids, in fact, been declared identical.
And we still have the dang audience cheering there! So would they be cheering Glomgold if he'd successfully cannon'd Scrooge's money? They are a mystery. As is that "I still have to go to jail" line. That, if anything, feels like it's there by editorial fiat. If he has to go to jail for, I guess, menacing Scrooge's money, winning wouldn't change that, if you want to call it "winning!" What are we doing here?
But then, at the last moment, Barks again undercuts Scrooge's victory with this bit of silliness. Even if Scrooge IS supposed to be a fairly unambigous good guy here, Barks really doesn't seem to want to make us really feel that. This story is less different from "The Second-Richest Duck" than I remembered it being, really.
Labels: Carl Barks
posted by GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. at
11:11 AM
12 Comments:
You would asume with Glomgold being from Africa and all, that Barks will take a shortcut and simply have him bring some local voodoo witch doctor to shrink Scrooge's fortune... but nope, he goes an extra mile of creating a backstory for this guy and uses him to temp Scrooge first. What a man!
The more I think about it, the more I like Flinty's first story. There is just so more going on character-wise and set-up is more fun, while this one fees oddly more standard. Still, it's interesting that DuckTales or European comics did remember him as part of BIG THREE of Scrooge's villains, since he was only in three Barks stories, I guess "The Money champ" established him the role that becae the standard.
It fascinates me to no ends that the hat-eating gag established here somehow transferred itself to Rockerduck and became one of his defining gimmicks.
"According to the internet, a pile of a trillion silver dollars would extend well into outer space"
I think it could have a height of 220 meters and a diameter also of 220 meters (a realistic size); that cone will have a volume of 2,787,640 cubit meters [220*(110^2)*pi/3], or 2,787,639,881,285 cm3; if a silver dollar had a volume of 2.74 cm3, then we have a trillion dollars (but not what a Portuguese would call "um trilião de doláres" - that would be much more)
Yes, there is always the problem that they are supposed to have much more than a trillion dollars
In 2022, I remembered that story, more specifically the arc "South African millionaire who started his fortune with precious stones lost the title of richest in the world because some money he spent in a polemic business"
Were you bothered by the thought that they'd lose tons of money by liquefying their assets when you read this as a child? Because child-me didn't have that thought. Child-me thought, you just sell the mine for what it's worth, and then later you buy it back for the same price.
@Elaine: *That* didn't bother me as such, but the out-of-characterness of Scrooge trading away all his cherished specific coins for impersonal silver dollars, now that did bother me.
Well, who else is up there? There's Magica naturally. But after her you've got the Beagles, who while iconic were always too dumb to deserve the title of Arch-nemesis, and Rockerduck who never was more formidable than Glomgold.
Scrooge doesn't really rank a lot of top enemies, which is probably why the 87 Duck Tales borrowed Pete a few times and Duck Tales 2017 creates Beaks before poaching several of Darkwing's foes plus the Phantom Blot and Don Karnage.
...that would make more sense, as a childlike thing to think. I really can't trace the history of my feelings about Scrooge selling everything off. Chances are I just didn't think about it one way or the other as a child, but it definitely would've struck me when I first read it as an adult.
That Glomgold think he is so rich! I wonder if he feels so rich if Uncle Scrooge will punch him in the beak! Ha! Not so rich now? Huh? HUH?!
I guess. It's just interesting to me - Glomgold only appear in three Barks stories (one where he is more of a episodic character) and from what I understand was not realy used by other artists in USA until Rosa... while at very least Bealges and Magica made plenty of apperances both by Barks and other artists, so I can see when they wanted to make DuckTales, Magica and Beagles where conisder to be regular villians... Glomogld just was tad more obscure at that point is all I'm saying. Then agian so many people re-use Goldie despite being one-shot character (Rockerduck is a special case)
In general I'm always fascinated by characters who made only one or a few appearances in the original series but left such a big impact that they became iconic and kept getting reused long after the original run ended. You'd almost assume they were a much bigger deal in the original series.
One example I always think of is Falbala (Panacea), a character from Asterix who, since the '80s, has appeared in tons of merchandise, movies, promotional materials, Asterix theme park meet-and-greet appearances, spin-off material, etc. If you'd never read an Asterix comic, you'd assume she was part of the regular cast, if not one of the main characters. Yet, when Gościnny was writing the series, she appeared in only one book and an obscure (at the time) short two-page story. And it's not like there was much to her as a character beyond her nice design and Obelix having a crush on her (her de facto fiancé appeared even less but stick around as well). She didn't return to the comics until the final few books by Uderzo in the 90's, seemingly at least partly in response to popular demand. I'm actually a little surprised the current series, by the new authors, hasn't used her yet...
My point is, I feel more-or-less the same way about Glomgold (or Goldie). If I'd only ever seen Disney material from the '80s onward, including animation, without reading the comics, I'd probably assume Flintheart Glomgold appeared in Barks's comics as often as the Beagles. Yet he appeared in only three stories, and only two of them actually focused on him. Fascinating stuff! It really makes you appriciate how much of an impression those stories must have left.
"I'd be fascinated, though, to know what would have happened had their pyramids, in fact, been declared identical."
Scrooge would have put his hand into his pocket. "Well, I have something here, tied to a piece of string..." By losing by a bigger amount Flintheart saved himself from that humiliation.
I don't remember what else I thought about the story as a kid but the sudden "champion" talk by the regular Duckburgians was jarring. They act weirdly like a hivemind throughout the story, which is not unusual now that I think about it. In the first story the whole "who is the richest" felt like it was that important to only those two in the wilderness.
It feels weird that Scrooge sells his assets and changes all his money to fresh currency, but he actually does that often, doesn't he? When a more fantastical story is needed he does not let nostalgy stop him.
The Finnish translation used SI units for the money pile volume, since those are more familiar here. That allowed for the surveyor to get a last roast in, when Flintheart asks how much is twenty cubic desimeters. "Have you forgotten your school math? It's about... no, it's exactly twenty liters", which is what he had paid.
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