"The Siren's Whistle"

When you're anxiously waiting to see if there's going to be some sort of mild break on the race to the fascist bottom or not, you sometimes find yourself thinking thoughts like "I wonder what the top-rated Tony Strobl stories are on inducks?  Not counting the Barks ones."  These are the things I think about.  Now.  Seriously.  It's Tuesday afternoon as I write this. So I took a look, and the answer may surprise you: yes, to no one's surprise, "King Scrooge the First" is atop the list.  But actually, that's the ONLY Barks story in the top ten (I would've but thankfully didn't bet anything that "Pawns of the Loup Garou" would be second), and almost the only one in the top twenty ("Bottled Battlers" and "Officer for a Day" come in at ninteen and twenty).  Second is "Mathmagic Land," which--fair.  Purely in terms of artistic proficiency, I think you could make a very good case for that.

Third is...this.  A story I had never heard of, from...1972?  That seems like an unusual year for a Strobl classic, but hey, I would NOT complain!  Lay it on me!  Well, just below this one, we have "Safari to Komba Tomba."  And I have to say, spoilers, that one would be a WAY better candidate for Strobl's best than this one, which...well, as I've said before, stories that are oddly highly-ranked tend to be that way due to being published in the right time and right place more than anything else, and this is straightforwardly an example of that.  It's not a horrible story, but it's not especially good, either.  I certainly wouldn't put it in my top ten Strobl joints (there's something for another time).  It threatens to do a few interesting things and then doesn't.  If not for its inducks rating, I'd never be covering it, because I would almost certainly never have heard of it, and if I had, I wouldn't think anything of it.

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"The Old Castle's Secret"

 Bwee hee hee!  Hello boils and ghouls!  Today we have a scaaaary story that's sure to tingle your spine!  I mean, maybe.  As I've said before: the reason I hadn't written about this is because I don't know how much I have to SAY about it.  It's just a whole bunch of frenetic action, which is fun but maybe doesn't make for the best analysis.  I'm afraid this is going to be shorter than I feel like a story of this significance deserves.  OH WELL.

Oh, but before I begin, I should congratulate my Brazilian readers for rejecting Fascist jr. in your presidential race.  Nothin' spooky about that, and I hope it heralds good things in the US next week.

Well, as you know, here we have Scrooge's second appearance.  He could well have been relegated to the role of one-time oddity, but clearly Barks saw something in him (I mean, Barks is great, but that probably wasn't a hard call--"rich uncle" raises all kinds of story possibilities), so here we are.Read more »

"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.

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"The Money Champ"

So threeish years after "The Second-Richest Duck," it's time for "The Money Champ."  Please look forward to it.

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"The Second-Richest Duck"

 Ha!  You weren't expecting THIS!  Just admit it!  You're not fooling anyone!

Last week in comments, somebody asked me to write about Rosa's "Son of the Sun," so I decided to revisit it to see if I wanted to. And before I did that, I figured I should reread Barks' Glomgold stories (all of which plus Rosa's debut were reprinted by Gladstone in one handy comics album.  What a fun read).  And--you guessed it--I realized, man. Before anything else, I need to write about the Barks stories. I'll tell you why I hadn't: because I felt like I'd already said my piece about Glomgold, and saying anything else about his stories felt kinda beginner-level. So many observations that I could make feel like very basic stuff that I've said many times before in other contexts. But it may be mistaken to just assume that everyone is avidly following my every word, and besides, my feelings about Glomgold may (or may not!) have changed, and there's a lot to say that I haven't said about the stories themselves. So I guess it's FG Month at Duck Comics Revue. Or maybe I'll take a break at some point for something spooky. We'll see. But either way, please look forward to it.

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"The People Collector"

This appeared in in the next issue of WDC after the one with "Something to Quack About."  It's another Strobl/Gregory thing.  Take that for what you will.

This premise at least is actually pretty interesting.  So...how big do we think Duckburg IS, anyway?  I think we probably think it's pretty big.  I can think of a number of Italian stories where its hugeness is emphasized, and Barks generally portrayed it as something of a metropolis, though I don't think there's anything in his oeuvre that gives it a concrete population or anything.  Am I wrong about that?  Let me know in comments.Read more »

"History Tossed," "Immovable Miser," "Windfall of the Mind," "Forgotten Precaution"

Yup, time for this again.  What can I say?  I wasn't feeling very creative this week, and I always enjoy doing these.  And this week we have not just three but FOUR pages, for reasons of, I suppose, uncontrolled exuberance.

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"Something to Quack About"

 Sometimes, whatever interest a story may have is purely exogenous.  Such is the case here, as we have the first post-Barks ten-pager.  In WDC 312, it was "The Not-So-Ancient Mariner"--and in 313, BOOM, "Something to Quack About" (yes, there were also a number of Barksless issues of WDC before then--we're trying to simplify a little here).  How does this work out?  Well, let's GIVE 'em something to quack about, shall we?  If this were Lockman, I feel like that would be "Something to Wak About."

This is a Strobl/Gregory production, which might make you at least tentatively hopeful.  This was, more or less, before Gregory's fall into I-don't-know-what, and Strobl is always Strobl.  That house there may not quite be Barks, but hey, it still doesn't look too bad.  But if, like me, you're intensely curious about what their "collection of Duckburg artifacts" consists of, I am sorry to say you will find no answers here.  Note also that this is a "Donald and Daisy" story, as were "The Beauty Business" and "Mariner" and many subsequent--was Western trying to reach more girls?  I wish I knew more details.  Read more »

"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 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 Secret Safari"

 I kind of think these mid-fifties-early-sixties Strobl joints in Donald Duck may, pound for pound, be the best NBW stories out there.  Whaddaya think?  "Safari from Komba Tomba," "The Mysterious Crewless Ship," "The Charge at Dawn," "Rattled Railroader," "Adventure at Bomb Bird Island"--what is not to like?  Well, obviously, there are SOME things not to like.  But I think both Gregory and Fallberg put in good work, and in general, with Barks and these guys, it was probably about as good as Western was going to get.  So now, "The Secret Safari," from 1959.  Is it likewise a minor classic?  Let's find out, shall we?

The one thing I really appreciate is that the inducks image has the same stamp as this does, meaning the scans I have are the same as theirs.  Hey, is there a super-secret inducks login that only movers and shakers have access to where you can see all the images in full size?  If so, how 'bout you guys let me in on that?  Given my ceaseless toils in the Disney mines, it seems only fair.  I promise to never use my powers for evil.Read more »

"The Big Bin on Killmotor Hill"

 I was just casting about for a random Barks ten-pager to do and, oh look, I stumbled upon a pivotal story.  So, well, let's do it.  Why not?

Of course, the big thing about this story--and we see it right out of the gate--is: the Money Bin.  This story appeared just a little while before "Only a Poor Old Man," and though I certainly don't KNOW the chronology here, it certainly feels as though Barks knew he was going to be starting a new line for which he was working some things out in advance.  One notable thing about "Poor Old Man" is that we don't really get a good look at the outside of the Bin, so this is important in that regard--though it didn't tend to look quite so much like a giant safe in later stories as it does here.

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"The Phantom of Notre Duck"

 Here's this.  Perhaps you have heard of it.  It's a fairly atypical Barks story, so let's get to it.

Now, you might say, this is actually kind of typical for this era of Barks, innit?  The one that also gave us "Queen of the Wild Dog Pack," "The Loony Lunar Gold Rush," "Intergalactic Postman," et al.  And you're not wrong.  There's all kinds of goofy wordplay here, eg, of which "a swingin' swingin' door" is merely the tip of the iceburg.  And generally, it's certainly goofy enough.  But also...look, it's kind of weird that I'm writing this like this, as though I'm trying to keep things quiet until I can do my big reveal.  I doubt anyone reading this hasn't also read it.  But we'll get into stuff as it comes up, kay?  Seems fair.Read more »

"A Lesson of Luck" and "Fun Time"

I was inspired by Achille Talon's comment last week, talking about Donald and Daisy's relationship.  As we are all aware, depictions thereof are very frequently marred by tired old gender politics, but, as Achille says, "I like to think there's a real camaraderie and intimacy to the pair (indeed, perhaps one that they would realise is more platonic than romantic if not for for the force of mid-20th-century social conformism)."  Is this making things up out of whole cloth?  Maybe, but I want to believe it too.

So can we find some other stories that we might think are okay in this regard? I wondered.  And I thought back to a little story called "The Vat Man" that I covered a few years back.  It's a late seventies Bob Gregory story, so your expectations might not exactly have been sky-high, but it was kind of charming in its own way, and not depressingly regressive.  So I decided to return to that well, and here we have a few more Daisy and Donald Gregory stories that I find to be Not Too Bad.  I mean, obviously you can't expect TOO much from Gregory material of this era, but...well, let's check 'em out!

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"Stranger than Fiction"

 So I thought I oughta become more au fait with the current crop of US Disney comics, and I am!  And I'll write about some of them, fairly soon, probably (yeah, I'm sure THAT list of qualifiers instills one with a great deal of confidence).  But I decided to read the original story entitled..."Earth's Mightiest Duck."  And I've gotta tell you folks: I have read many good Disney comics and many bad ones and many in between.  And I've certainly started reading stories and just sorta stopped reading them due to lack of interest or general intertia (think long-ish Egmont digest stories, for the most part).  But I don't think I've ever had such a vehement experience of giving up on a comic because I hated the entire premise and aesthetic, it was almost making my physically ill, and it DEFINITELY wasn't going to ever be anything other than what it was.  So, uh, don't expect to see that here.  Sorry, Aaron.  I know I advisedly sorta-kinda liked your "Infinity Dime" story, but this is a bridge too far.  And to be clear, I'm not even saying you're a bad writer!  Just that our visions of Duckdom are fundamentally incompatible.  I'm all for more original American duck stories, but if we're just doing stuff like this...well, make mine vanilla.

So instead, thought I, what's a science-fiction-y story I can do that I LIKE, or at least don't hate with the fury of a thousand suns?  So I hit on THIS, from 1961.   Now, I'm perfectly aware that this is only really "science fiction" to the extent that almost ANY story featuring Gyro is, but I don't know how I planned to end this sentence.  This is from 1961, which no one would probably call the high point of Barks' career; it also produced my single least favorite story by the master, and I'm aware that that link doesn't work currently; apparently inducks is currently down due to some ransomware attack by some real pieces of shit, which makes me more angry than almost anything, but as you could determine if you tried, by looking at the url, it's "That's No Fable," which maybe I should write about some day, but I dunno; that would make for one dispiriting blog entry.

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"Buffo or Bust," "Uncle Scrooge Crawls for Cash," "Wrong Number"

Yeah, we're doing this again.  What can I say?  I enjoy it.  I was out of town on vacation this week, but I had these preprepared for just such an occasion, so...here we are.  

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"Dinner Date"

 Yeah, okay, now for some low-effort late seventies dross.  I mean...it's okay if I do this occasionally, right?  I'm intentionally not making it a habit so everyone doesn't grab torches and pitchforks and storm Stately Duck Comics Revue Manor, but I dunno.  Well, we're doing it, is the point.  Here's some more Daisy and Donald.

We start like this, with Daisy jealous of the other girls because her boyfriend isn't getting a reservation at Dorsia.  This is some Bob Gregory art, with all that that entails.  I do kind of like the designs of Daisy' coworkers.  It's interesting how there are two ducks and one human (not dognose), and yet they all kinda blend together.Read more »

"Rescue Enhancement," "Going to Pieces," "That Sinking Feeling"

Okay, this week we shall vamp about some Barks one-pagers. If you think the fact that our entire subject matter is three pages seems kinda scanty, note that I have written five-hundred-plus words about each, making this a regulation-length entry (wait, there are regulations?). Whether you think those words were worth writing...well, that remains to be seen. It's a fun thing for me to do, though, because what always happens is I look at the comics, think, boy, THIS doesn't seem very promising for saying anything much, and then I dive in and spin things out and realize, hey, yeah, actually, I can do this ("your duck bloggers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should").

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"The Waltz King"

All right, it's been kind of a hard week, so you get some Barks.  But to clarify: just because I do Barks doesn't automatically mean it was a hard week.  And I might do something OTHER than Barks on a hard week, too.  Most likely an NBW story.  So while the story I do IS causally related to my stress levels, it's not a perfect correlation and you can't really use it for predictive purposes.  I hope that's clear.

(Did I consider doing a patriotism-themed story this week?  Um...no.  We'll say no more of that.  This story WAS written/released in the summer, though, so enjoy that fact.)

From 1947, this is an early story than we've been looking at lately.  And I have oddly mixed feelings about it.  Because there are real, definite highlights; the plot is fairly adroit--and yet, I sorta-kinda don't like it that much.  Let us try to figure out why.

Few stories get to the point faster, I'll say that for it.  Waltz contest!  Do it!  Not quite sure why Daisy's in charge of the Sub-Teen-Age Debbies Club, but hey, there's a lot we don't know about her.Read more »

Duck Album #1

That's what I'm calling it, but be advised that there was no actual Duck Album line; they were all just released as Four Color Comics.

FIVE STORIES IN ONE!  God I spoil you people.  Does that equal five times the fun?  Well...let's hold off on that.  But what happened was, I was rummaging around for something to cover this week, and I stumbled upon THIS.  I've always been a fan of these Duck Albums, or at least the general concept, so I was pretty psyched to realize that A) this is the first of them; and B) I had somehow never read it before.  Is it GOOD?  Well, it's pretty standard Western.  Far from their worst, though probably closer to that than their best if I'm being honest.  They're not overly substantial, and none of them would be worth covering individually, but there are enough cumulative weirdnesses in here to be worth highlighting, hopefully.

Nice cover, too!  Inducks wants to credit all of these images except HDL, who get a big ?, to Barks.  Is that right?  Donald, Daisy, and Scrooge look Barksian; I'm not sure about Grandma and Gladstone.  Well, regardless, here we are.  And, as I've noted many times in that past, what I like about these albums is the general frame narrative: the idea that the Duck family is looking at these pictures and reminiscing.  So I was a bit taken aback by this existential crisis:

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"The McDuck Foundation"

(DID YOU KNOW? this is my first entry, alphabetically, that starts with "McDuck."  A thing like that.)

In our last entry, I was thinking a bit about the idea of Scrooge being secretly generous, which made me think I should revisit this Scarpa story which treats on the same concept (no! Spoilers! Did I spoil this entire entry in the first sentence?).  This is an early Scarpa story, from 1958, and it's even more of a narrative mess than usual.  As always with these stories, it's hard to know to what extent you want to harp on such shortcomings, and to what you just kind of gloss over them because they're not really the point of the story, which is more just goofing around and having fun.  Though I do think there are places where the putative "fun" is submerged in the goofing.  Well, we'll see.

At any rate, we must give credit where it is due, and in this instance, the story definitely hits the ground running with this phantasia of "generous Scrooge in Classical Rome."Read more »

"The Paper Route Panic"

 Okay!  A li'l NBW for you today.  I remember this one fairly fondly from when I was small, and someone else seems to as well, as "The Paper Route Panic" has the distinction of one of vanishingly few NBW stories to be reprinted in modern times, by Boom in 2010, in their Donald Duck Classics: Quack Up hardcover.

*Non-Barks Western.  Stick it in your head!

So we open with the big thing, which is: HDL's favorite musical act is a novelty cowboy singer!  Why the heck not?  You just wouldn't see something this idiosyncratic in most stories, I think.  That IS one advantage these NBW Western writers had: they didn't (I have to think) see themselves as really part of a "tradition" per se, so they went ahead and did stuff like this.

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Do you desire more writing on Disney comics?

Well, in that case, perhaps you should turn your eyes to The Mouse Maestro, if you haven't already.  They've got some really good articles on mouse comics, more or less in the same vein as this blog.  Would I have already known about this if I were less weirdly misanthropic about my fandom these days?  Maybe!  But there it is.  I'll add it to the blogroll when and if I figure out how; I swear, blogger's changed since I first set that up, and I can't quite figure it out.  Yeesh.

(And this is probably obvious, but no, this does not count as next week's entry.)

"Operation Galleon Grab"

Somewhat belatedly, I acquired a copy of the Disney Masters book of this title, and then I read this story.  Maybe sometimes it's interesting to have an entry about something that I haven't lived with for a long time and maybe don't have super-settled thoughts about.  Perhaps.  It's a rather shambolic story, as Italian stories so often are, so--enjoy it for what it is.  Our writer here, Osvaldo Pavese, isn't notable for much beyond prolificity, but!  This IS currently his top-rated story on inducks, so you can bring whatever excitement you think is warranted by that little fact to this blogpost.  

(Also, it's his Duck Comics Revue debut.  An amazing honor for any creator!)

We open like this, with this guy interrupting HDL's fun.  And I'll tell you why I like it so much: okay, we all know that "everyone is fooled by super-obvious disguises" is the rule in Disney comics.  Just how it is.  But even so, the fact that the absolute FIRST THING you will do when you pick this up is think "oh yeah, that's a Beagle Boy"--that's funny.  Really stretching the concept to its limits.

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"Much Ado About Quackly Hall"

 I'm really preoccupied by that after-the-fact title.  "It's because there's a Shakespeare play called 'Much Ado About Nothing,' only this story is about Quackly Hall," you might attempt to helpfully explain.  But I find that explanation to be A) self-evident; and B) not really an explanation.  We could do this with any story, I think.  "Much Ado About Cheltenham."   "Much Ado About Wispy Willy."  "Much Ado About Canoes."  Okay, that one's kind of good.

Anyway, Some more Barks this week; why not?  I know you'd probably like me to do some adventure stories, and I will one of these weeks, for sure, or two, but I dunno...maybe I just feel like these ten-pagers, reflecting as they do the regular ebb and flow of life in Duckburg, are ultimately more...revealing?  Maybe?  Does that make sense?

I again chose this one more or less randomly, although I have to admit, it IS from the same general period as these stories I've been writing about, so that may be in doubt.  Like that "canoes" story, I don't think it's massively distinguished as Barks stories go, but there are, perhaps a few things to say about.  We can give it a try, at any rate.

But if there's one thing that IS massively distinguished, it's the art.  LOOK at that mansion!  God, the gorgeous decay!  Like something from a Faulkner novel, only better, because Donald Duck is there.  I don't want this place refurbished; I want to just wallow in it.  Mmm!  Any other Western artist would probably have drawn it in such a way that I would have no substantial reaction at all.  And the writing ain't too bad either!

Surely someone somewhere has made a list of all the weird, abandoned edifices in Barks stories, like this and the Cathedral of Notre Duck and Pirate Inn?  The place really does feel lived in!  It's juuuuuuust ducky.  Haha!

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"The Dazzling Duck She-Venger"

 See?  I can do non-Western stories.  Just try me!  This, from 1973, seemed like a good story to do.  Right, so, just to make sure we're all on the same page: Guido Martina and Elisa Penna introduced Donald's superhero alter-ego Paperinik (Duck Avenger) in 1969 (I don't know who did what, and Martina seems to have helmed the character solo for quite a while, but I didn't want to forget about Penna).  I say "superhero" advisedly: one of the main things about the character is that, in his original appearances, he doesn't do anything heroic; he just uses his powers to indulge his petty grievances against his relatives.  That IS actually a pretty funny joke--but it's rather limited, and frankly Donald is such a jerk that they can be a little grueling to read, so it's no surprise that eventually he became more of a straightforward good guy (actually, it's possible that as of that third story, he was starting that transformation, as he IS a bit more sympathetic there--though that might just be a non-standard devitation; no later stories have been published in English, so I don't know).  I was never a big fan of these, but on rereading them in preparation for this entry, I realized that taken in moderation, I did find them fairly amusing, in an antisocial sort of way.  Probably best read while a bit drunk.

(This is from the second DA comic, and no, it's not clear why they're both hopping)

I think maybe part of the appeal of the character was that--as many or all of you will know--Martina always depicted Donald as downtrodden, especially by his raging dickhead of an uncle, so seeing him get some payback (he wins out in all of these first three stories, at any rate) might be cathartic.  Fair enough.

So before we get started, I'm going to tell you what I think, because I feel like it would be awkward to try to dance around it.  The question people ask about this story: "is it feminist?"  But I don't think that's the right question.  Don't get me wrong, it's definitely something we're going to talk about, but it's not the central point.  I think we fall into a trap with a story like this: we see some feminist or anti-feminist trappings, and therefore we prime ourselves to think of the story in those terms.  But those are big ol' red herrings.  Presumably Martina perceived that feminism was gaining traction and wanted to include some of its trappings in his story, but fundamentally, this is the same thing as those previous Paperinik stories.  As I wrote above, Donald as DA "just uses his powers to indulge his petty grievances against his relatives."  Well, here's the same thing, only with Daisy.  The story becomes A LOT more coherent when you consider it in those terms.  The very vague feminist trappings are just window dressing, and they don't play out or resolve in any coherent way.  

(I suppose in a more general way, we could see it as feminist purely in a "see? women can abuse their power and be obnoxious JUST as well as men!" way, which...well, true, but probably not what anyone was looking for.)

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"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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"Redbeard's Pirate Plunder"

Hey, it can't all be Barks.  But don't worry; we're still going to be fairly positive this week.  I wanted to cover this story because a little bit ago I did a Jack Bradbury ten-pager from 1950, and it was pretty bad (this one ain't too great either).  But I think it's unfair to judge his work entirely from that, because here's an adventure story by Bradbury from 1956, and what a difference six years make!  The marked improvement in every aspect of his craft is very noticeable, and I find it quite satisfying.  Imagine, working hard and getting better!  I'm proud of you, Jack.

(And yes, there's always the caveat that I can't know for sure if Bradbury actually wrote this, or indeed the aforementioned ten-pager.  I can note that the writing doesn't leap out at me as coming from any of the usual suspects, but I still can't say with absolute certainty.  But I really want to, because I like to see people get better, and you can't prove I'm wrong!  Unless you can, in which case, dammit.  Nonetheless.)

It does feel a little weird that a real ship plays a role here, BUT...

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"The Riddle of the Red Hat"

 Here's a story I should probably have done some time ago.  The reason I didn't was probably because it wasn't clear how much there was to say about it.  Let's face it: it's a Barks story about Mickey.  That right there is the only reason anyone's any more interested in it than ANY old random Mickey story by Dick Moores or whomever.  It is at least a little interesting in terms of Barks' career, just because it's a rather early adventure story (if you want to call it that--it's only eleven pages, but tonally, it's definitely not the equivalent of ten-pager), so you can see his development.  Well, somewhat.  The fact that he was self-consciously using characters he usually wouldn't make it a little hard to place within the context of his work.  Still, at the very least, an interesting footnote.

Also, it goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway: it is in no way Barks' fault that red hats nowadays are associated with American nazis.  I wish they weren't, though!

(Side note: I have this thing where I'm always vaguely surprised to remember that Barks' and Gottfredson's careers weren't exactly concurrent.  Not that he didn't write (or at least draw, thanks to Walsh coming on board) worthwhile stories later in his career, but his most celebrated work comes from the thirties and early forties.  By the fifties, while Barks was still going on all cylinders, most of his career, at least as a crafter of actual stories, was behind him.  This is an early story for Barks, but Gottfredson at the time was doing non-household-name stuff like "Billy the Mouse."  Perhaps this should lead into a longer discussion of inconsistent perceptions of time, but as it happens, all it gets is this parenthetical.)

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"Good Canoes and Bad Canoes"

 I must admit, I like that after-the-fact title.  It's pretty solid.

Sometimes it happens that I read a story and zero in on one specific thing I want to talk about, and that's the impetus for a whole entry.  Such is the case today.  In most ways, this is a pro forma Donald vs Gladstone story--perfectly readable, but not among Barks' very best (and yet, probably still better than any story that anyone else ever wrote for Western. Agree? Disagree? Sound off!)  But!  There IS one thing here that I think needs more publicity!  And maybe some other interesting things will happen; who can say?

Yeah, it's a fairly pro forma story of its type--perfectly okay, but not one of Barks' all-time greatest.  You will note how the contours of this rivalry vary according to the needs of individual stories.  Elsewhere, maybe Donald feels despair at the impossibility of ever defeating his cousin.  But HERE, he's feeling good about it!  That could be a harbinger of bad things, but who knows?  Stay tuned.

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"Strike Up the Band"

 So here's one that doesn't really have a good title: the inducks page calls it "The Price of Fame," which I suppose is accurate, but somewhat generic.  So instead, we're using the little alternate title they provide for reasons I don't really understand.

I wanted to do something Hungarian-themed, to congratulate our Magyar friends for getting rid of Orban, but I'm not sure there ARE any Hungarian-themed Disney comics.  I figure at some point SOMEONE must've made a dumb "Hungry" joke, possibly in tandem with  "Turkey," but what else is there?  What does the average American man, woman, or enby on the street know about Hungary?  Probably not that much, and I'm certainly not setting myself up as some sort of expert.  Do the common people know that that's where Béla Lugosi is from?  Do the common people even know Béla Lugosi?  I guess you could write a Disney vampire story, with ducks or mice, of the sort Gemstone used to publish in their Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck Digests.  I think paprika is fairly strongly Hungary-coded; it's certainly distinctive-looking, so you could have a slapstick story where it gets everywhere and turns everything red.  Sure.  Or how about a duck version of Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle?  Now we're cookin'!

Well you might ask: why am I babbling senselessly about Hungary in an entry that's not going to have anything to do with that?  Look, I don't know.  Maybe living like this makes me a little insane.  Also, iss a larf, innit?  For this week I just chose a silly story that I really love.  Does this indicate that this blog is going into all-positivity mode?  I...really couldn't say.  That's the excitement!  When you stop by, will you encounter a masterpiece...or something that really plumbs the depths?  It is a mystery!  Ooh!

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