"Light-Fingered Genie"

 So I'm not gonna lie to you: I was a little preoccupied this week, realized on Tuesday evening that I didn't have anything planned for the ol' blog, and so randomly reached into my digital collection.  And...dammit I don't know how to say this, but I came away with a Kay Wright story from 1972.  Ouch.  Look, I'm sorry that this happened, but I'll do my best to make it at least a little bit interesting.

Still: I've emphasized the bad in this sort of story quite a lot.  And look, is this a great story?  No.  Good?  No.  Fair?  Hmm...let's not exaggerate.  But I genuinely do think it has a certain something, and that maybe with a little extra fiddling (okay, a lot), it could've become something great.  I think our writer is Bob Gregory, and even though seventies Gregory is no one's idea of a great writer, it's possible that he still had a modest amount of residual mojo [UPDATE: on further examination, maybe not. It doesn't matter.).  And it is a little bit of a weird thing for me to be trying to find the good in a not-so-good story, while also acknowledging its not-so-goodness.  But here we go.

The title is a little weird--why doesn't it start with a "the?"  This way it sounds like a Homeric epithet: Grey-eyed Athena, wine-dark sea, light-fingered genie.  Okay.

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"The Whole Truth Club"

This week we're going to stare into the abyss. "Don't you do that quite a lot?" you ask. And my unambiguous answer is: no. I don't, actually. I may write about various Western stories of shaky quality, but believe me, most of those are Barks-quality masterpieces compared to the real detritus. It's not like I was even planning this; I just thought, Huey Dewey and Louie Junior Woodchucks (complete with weird lack of punctuation) was a weirdly long-running publication (1966-1984), and I realized I didn't think I'd ever actually read any of it aside from the Barks stuff, so...let's give it a look. I wasn't expecting great things, but I ALSO wasn't expecting it to get under my skin to the extent that it did. And unfortunately for him, the author can't hide behind anonymity, because this is very obviously Vic Lockman. I don't think he hated children, but I DO think he had a pretty dang low opinion of them, is all I'll say. Obviously, that's not all I'll say. Whom am I kidding?

This is from 1978, so not a fantastic time for Disney comics stateside anyway, but...you know, I'm going to stop this preliminary throat-clearing and just GET to it, k? We'll have more reference to this later.

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"Matchmaker"

It's time to write about what I can only describe as "some hella dumb shit." This entry is thanks to Debbie Anne, who posted a page from it on one of the Disney comics facebook groups. And now, you get to reap the benefit! Lucky you.

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"Bird-Bothered Hero"

In comments on Ducktales 3, Joe cited this 1969 story--by the dream team of Kay Wright and Vic Lockman--as a candidate for previous Worst Disney Comic Ever. Joe tends to be way more positive than I am about these things, so his "endorsement" really carried a lot of weight with me, and it was necessary to immediately figure out what was what.
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"The Comic Book Crooks"

(12/06/11: Um...like a huge idiot, I accidentally deleted this post. I had the text saved elsewhere, but not the images. So until I have time to track them down again, or possibly rescan them, all you'll see is "[image]." And alas, all y'all's trenchant comments are gone for good.

02/14/12: Images restored.  Happy Valentine's Day.)
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"A Day in a Duck's Life"

I may in the past have expressed indifference about Daan Jippes' Barks re-draws, but I recently read the new version of "A Day in a Duck's Life" (Barks' last DD story, I believe, from 1971) as recently published in Boom's WDC716, and, well...I read it side-by-side with the original, Kay Wright version (as reprinted in WDC632), and I can't deny it: the difference is pretty stunning. The story itself may be one of Barks' weakest efforts, but the new art helps it immensely, making it far more fun to read than it really has any right to be.
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