"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 »

"The Wonderful Whizzix"

 Yeah yeah, I know: back-to-back Moores Mickey stories were not what anyone was hoping for, probably. I understand the vox unpopuli! And we weren't going to GET them, except that I just read this, his most famous (not for the first time, I think, but I remembered nothing about it), and realized, dammit, I have to write about this one. Or at least want to. I promise we'll have some ducks next week. But for now, we have this. As Debbie Anne noted in comments last time, this story is allegedly the inspiration for the Herbie the Love Bug series. I have never seen a Herbie media product in my life, but the first two movies WERE written or co-written by none other than Bill Walsh, so there DOES seem to be some Disney-comics DNA there. Interesting.

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"Goofy's Mechanical Wizard"

 I dunno, people, I'm having vague thoughts about poetry after Auschwitz here.  Not just with this blog, either.  You know, I watch frivolous youtube videos about, you know, videogames and that, and I can't help sort of thinking "argh! What are you doing?!?"  Well, what am *I* doing?  Also, am I REALLY saying that one can't create art (or whatever my blathering counts as), given the circumstances?  Strauss wrote a number of operas during the third reich, including Capriccio in 1942, and he definitely was not a nazi.  I mean, living a completely joyless existence is kind of what they want for us (to say the least), so I'm gonna say fuck you to them, but man.

Am I going to preface every entry like this from now on?  Hopefully not, but man, I'm not a robot.  It just feels odd to be writing stuff in the here and now without some kind of acknowledgement of...this.

In comments to the last entry, Joe said that Moores' Mickey stories are generally superior to his Donald (also true of Romano Scarpa).  And I thought, have I read any of those?  Probably.  Not really sure.  But I certainly don't know them very well, so here is THIS.

As you may know, Moores did inks for a number of Bill-Walsh-era Gottfredson stories.  So we DEFINITELY know he's at least somewhat familiar with the master, in a way that you sometimes sort of question whether duck writers were with Barks.  So did any of that rub off on him?  Let's find out.

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"A Big Bust"

 Boy oh boy.  What do you do when your country is cranking up its theme song yet louder and louder?  Well, if you're me, you retreat into your happy place, which it turns out is Dick Moores stories.  That's a bit of a twist, for sure.  Interestingly, or not, this appeared in Donald Duck 33, along with "The Skiing/Clock Bandit" and "The Money Bird," meaning that I've now covered that entire issue!  What an achievement!  It's not just about completionism, however, because I think there really are some interesting things to be said about it.

I suppose they were probably just grocery shopping, but that wagon filled with indistinct things for no reason is still kind of funny.  Also: "the statues and paintings of all the great men."  You know, I hope my affection for Moores is not perceived as condescending, but this observation may not help my case: I find that charmingly naive.  Obviously Moores had zero intention to be at all political here, but people who aren't too self-reflective about these things JUST CAN'T HELP IT, so here we get his endorsement of great man--definitely always "man"--theory.  In the ol' Hall of Fame Museum.  I think before I go there I'll stop at the ATM machine to get some cash. 

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"The Skiing/Clock Bandit"

Happy New Year! Let's hope 2026 is less horrible! I feel like that's probably gonna require rolling a natural twenty, but it's worth a shot.

Inducks calls this "The Skiing Bandit," but they also claim that the Australian publication was titled "The Clock Bandit."  I can't verify this one way or the other, but either one is fine.  So anyway, here's a New Year story. Absolutely, that's what this is. Is there any evidence of this? Well, there's snow. And it was published in January. That's all the evidence you will get, and, I think, all you need. Some Dick Moores for y'all! Try to imagine ANY other context in which that phrase could get people excited. And yes, I know: you're not excited. That's why I'm writing this and you're not.

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"Sea Breeze Sailors"

 Here's a "fun" fact: this story has been reprinted twice in the US, more than any of the others we're covering.  Is that justified?  We will see, possibly.

Before we start, take a look at this frontispiece: 

Maybe the fact that these things excite me is a sign I've been doing this too long, but I can't help it; I find this super-interesting.  "A hilarious adventure with Donald and the nephews aboard Uncle Scrooge's yacht."  Now, I'm positive there must be other examples, but this is the first instance I've seen--or at least that I remember--of a Western comic book providing any kind of actual editorial comment regarding the stories.  Is this significant?  Is the story a hilarious adventure with Donald and the nephews aboard Uncle Scrooge's yacht?  Well, somebody's certainly SAYING  it is!  They couldn't print it if it weren't true.  So, you know.

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"The Flat-Footed Floogle"

 You definitely shouldn't get used to me churning out blog entires at this pace (who knows, maybe there'll be a six-month gap between this and the next one, though I hope not).  But I'm enjoying this, and here's another Dick Moores story that NEEDS ATTENTION.  To be clear, I'm not planning on writing about his entire oeuvre, nor am I lobbying for a Dick Moores Library.  Still, as weird as it sounds to say, this is true: I'm very likely the biggest living fan of his (I mean, of his duck work--he spent most of his career working on the comic strip Gasoline Alley, of which I know nothing).  How about that?  And yet, even I have to concede that a large percentage of his work is both bad and unwriteaboutable.  You're getting a very curated selection here.

(incidentally, the wikipedia page for Gasoline Alley informs us that it features "storylines reflecting traditional American values," and it just goes to show how toxic the right has made that phrase that it can't not sound ominous as hell.)

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"The Money Bird"

I don't know why I'm so into these old non-Barks Western stories!  Am I like an aging libertine whose palate is so jaded that he has to venture into the realms of the bizarre and possibly illegal to receive any sort of frisson of pleasure?  Maybe!  Was it a good idea for me to make that simile?  Definitely not!  But here we are!

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"Captain Hook and the Buried Treasure"

Am I REALLY suggesting that I needed an extra week or whatever to cover this dumb Peter Pan story? Does that seem particularly believable? Yeesh.  Whom do I think I'm fooling, anyway?

I must say, I had no idea it was just going to be a remake of "Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold" with Peter Pan characters. Not that that's surprising, but I would not call the result particularly edifying. I mean SHEESH, that Seven Dwarfs thing may be pretty bad, but at least it's an original story. Still, now I feel better about writing this entry, and the good news is, I don't even have to write it: just go back to the DDFPG (as all the cool people call it) entry and mentally substitute Peter Pan people for ducks, and bam. There you have it.

Yeah, okay, WHATEVER. Would that it were that easy.

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"Show Biz"

Been reading some old Western stories, so you have no choice but to endure me writing about them. Sorry; that's JUST how it is! Today's story was originally untitled, but according to inducks, it was dubbed "Show Biz" for its reprint in a later digest. Pretty anemic title, I feel, but it's the best we've got!

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"Dirty Work at the Crossroads"

Hey, let's look at an old non-Barks story from 1954 of which I have fond memories, shall we?  I will freely grant that Dick Moores' artwork is, er, not so great, but I think there's still quite a bit to recommend here.
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"Scrooge's Second Childhood"

A thing of note is the fact that post-Western US Disney comics saw a far greater variety of reprinted "classic" Western mouse stories than they did duck stories. Think about it: as far as mouse material goes, you not only had Gottfredson, but you also had lots and lots of Paul Murry, as well as more Bill Wright and Dick Moores than you might expect. Whereas when you look at the duck material, it was virtually all Barks, with a very few Tony Strobl stories thrown in, and even fewer from other artists. I think this reflects the fact that there's much more of a critical consensus about duck comics: everyone agrees that Barks is the best, and there's a lot of Barks to reprint, so that's that. Whereas when it comes to mouse material...well, things are much more fragmented. Pretty much everyone agrees that Gottfredson is number one,* but of course, Gottfredson wasn't writing comic-book stories, even if his earlier work was oft reprinted in that form. Since original stories came to replace the Gottfredson reprints, and since more kids were surely reading comic books than the comics page, there's a lot of nostalgic fondness for Murry (in my opinion, sporadically-merited at best, but that's an argument for another time), but Murry still didn't have the hegemony that Barks did in his realm, so even tertiary artists get their moments in the sun.
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Daisy Duck's Diary

"It's a duck comic!"

"No! It's a hate crime!"

"Duck comic!"

"Hate crime!"

"Duck comic!"

"Hey, guys, guys, calm down--you're both right! Daisy Duck's Diary is a duck comic AND a hate crime!"
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