"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 Christmas that Almost Wasn't"

Okay okay, a day late, but now we're back on track. No need to panic. Before we start, for anyone who hasn't yet had the pleasure, let's just have this great image by Tony Fernández of Greta (Grebe-a?) Thunberg as a duck:

Given that she's Swedish, she probably has at least SOME familiarity with Disney comics, so I hope she sees it and appreciate the honor.

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"The Duckburg Ice Festival"

Today's story is "The Duckburg Ice Festival," which doesn't have anything explicitly to do with Christmas, but which is certainly more thematically appropriate than that Van Horn story. This is the first of two stories written by Janet Gilbert and drawn by Vicar. I definitely badly undervalued Vicar in the past, probably because his art has often been in the service of stories of questionable value, but he was damned good at what he did. I can't say that much about Gilbert; I've undoubtedly read others of her stories, but I can't say I have any kind of mental catalogue of all these sundry Egmont writers.  I had to create a "Janet Gilbert" tag just for this post.  However, inducks DOES have a picture of her with a fish on her head:

So that's fun.

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"Donald Duck Meets Princess Oona" and "Oona's Shopping Maul"

Of the many things the IDW foax deserve credit for, one of them is their determination to introduce hitherto-unknown-in-English recurring characters to an Anglophone audience: Gideon McDuck, Eurasia Toft, Charlie Doublejoke, Portis, Belle Duck, Reginella, Garvey Gull (okay, so I could live without ever having known of Garvey Gull--WHATEVER). Add to that list: Princess Oona the Caveduck, a character introduced by Egmont in 1995, who continues to appear semi-regularly to this day. We've already seen her first two stories published, and I believe more are on the way. I have heard intimations that certain individuals may not be huge fans of the character, but I would like to take this opportunity to place myself--based on these two, at least firmly on the pro-Oona side of the divide. Today, we'll be covering both her first and second appearances! Two stories in one means two times the fun! Maybe.  I refuse to take responsibility if two times the fun is not had.  But we'll do our best.

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"All Creatures Great and Small"

A slightly belated Happy New Year to all.  Here's a story by Dave Gerstein that he pointed to when I asked about New-Year-themed stories (which I had read before and which came back to me upon this reminder).  It's a good opportunity to look at something less predictable than another Barks "resolutions" story (in spite of THIS being a "resolutions" story too--I feel like that's pretty much the only salient aspect of the holiday that people can think of to use, which isn't surprising--there isn't actually all that much TO it, really, and its other main feature--ill-advised drunken hook-ups--probably wouldn't work too well in a Disney story).

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"The Secret of Atlantis"

Kind of somber for the first post of 2012, but I must note with sadness the passing, yesterday, of Victor Arriagada Ríos (Vicar), at the age of seventy-seven. In the past, I've joked that, in fact, Vicar drew every duck comic ever, and if you should ever note any counter-examples, they're just figments of your imagination. You know what I mean if you've paid attention to Disney comics from Disney's publishing tenure on: the man's work was absolutely everywhere; I'd be willing to bet a modest sum of money that, Barks aside, no artist was published as often in the post-Western era. On the Disney Comics Forum, I wondered aloud whether he was in fact the most prolific Disney artist ever; administrator cacou crunched the numbers and determined that no, in terms of total number of panels, he's "only" number six--though if you're talking about total number of stories, he's second only to Tony Strobl. An impressive legacy for sure.
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"Return of the Micro-Ducks"

When Erik asked me to write about "Micro-Ducks from Outer Space," I was glad both because I got to write about a fun story and because it primed me to do a follow-up post on this sequel from 1977, imaginatively entitled "Return of the Micro-Ducks" (inducks lists it as the full "Return of the Micro-Ducks from Outer Space," but since it was written by a Canadian in English, I think we can assume that the shorter version is the original title). I think people haven't heard of it because it appeared in an issue of the Walt Disney Giant line, one of those strange, marginal Gladstone II publications--also including Penny Pincher and perennial worst-title-ever contestant The Adventurous Uncle Scrooge McDuck--that seems to have no good reason to exist.
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"Had a Gobbler"

Okay, so I'm a tad late for Thanksgiving, but hey--everyone has Friday off, right? So we're still feeling the effects of the holiday. So it counts! For which I'm thankful!
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"Duck in Orbit"

It has been argued that the US market for Disney comics is hampered at least in part by the fact that there are virtually no comics actually produced in the US, and that, for whatever their virtues (which can be considerable), foreign creators don't exactly understand the characters in the same way that Americans do (or COULD, if there were actually a statistically significant number of American creators kicking around these days), and therefore they don't resonate as strongly with US audiences.
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"Date with a Munchkin"

I tell you, it's positively disgusting how open-minded I'm becoming these days with regard to duck comics. I have a very hard time imagining that I'll ever be interested in these dumb superheroes stories (if I show any signs of moving in that direction, it's VERY important that you put me out of my misery first), and I still don't care much for the excessively loosey-goosey art style favored by the late Romano Scarpa and his ilk (I'm pretty sure he has an ilk of some description), but other than that, I'm willing to at least try almost anything.
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