"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 the 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 randomware 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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"Raffle Reversal"

Woof.  Tough week, eh?  It's great that civilization didn't end, but the fact that was apparently on the table, uh...well, that's just what we're stuck with for oh my god HOW long?  Ack.  Under the circumstances, I think more Barks is called for, so let's go with THIS.

We're seeing the contours of Gladstone's luck here, and from some of these stories with luck duels, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Duckburg had an entirely raffle-based economy.  Like Borges' "Lottery in Babylon?"  Sure; why not?  You'd think Gladstone would get himself banned from these things if he's driving off all the weird-looking dogfaces who'd otherwise be participating.

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"The Easter Parade"

 Well, I had something else planned for this week, but then Maciek mentioned Barks' Easter story, and I thought, yeah, oughta do that.  Probably in general, I ought to spend less time harrasing you with Western stories of varying quality.  I mean, I won't, but maybe I should.  Hard to say.  But what's happening today is: this.  I don't think it's a particularly consequential story, but it has some amusing stuff I can point out, so hey, why not?  Happy Easter to those who celebrate, and a pleasant Sunday to those who don't.

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"Billfold of Bills"

 Imagine you subscribe to Walt Disney's Comics and Stories in the 1940s, at the same time that Barks starts his run of ten-pagers.  Pretty sweet deal.  Obviously you don't know Barks' name, but you know that SOMEONE is writing these, and you're not naive enough to believe that all Disney comics are written by Walt himself (if only because they're so stylistically varied), so you know you're witnessing someone's artistic progression ("You" here is "you" as an adult, by the way.  From personal experience, I can say that kids are less discriminating).  So how JARRING must it have been when 1950 rolls around and, for reasons unknown to me, Barks takes a semi-hiatus from WDC, and most of the ten-pagers are written (or at least drawn; who knows who was writing them) by Jack Bradbury or Paul Murry.  And we can historicize all these stories and appreciate their good aspects as we find them, but at the time--I don't know.  I guess it's impossible to really conceptualize.  There have to have been a fair few discerning adult and even child readers, and they would have to recognize that the ducks in these Temu ten-pagers are NOT the same as the ones they were used to following.  What is HAPPENING?! I imagine them wondering, clutching their brows.  Well, time to take a look and see what they saw.  Not that I plan on covering ALL of those stories.  But this one in particular I'd say is at least worth a look.

(Holy shit, "Temu ten-pager," what an awesome turn of phrase; everyone must pay me homage, and also money.)

(And as for the name I've given this, it was printed titleless and, not surprisingly, never given one retroactively; I don't find any of the foreign-language titles that inspiring, so I'm officially declaring the three-word English description on the inducks page to be the title.  That's right, OFFICIALLY!  Quail before my might!  It kinda sounds like it was written by a non-native speaker, it doesn't make a lot of sense, and it's not actually related to the story in any discernible way. So, you know.  But at least it has a bit of character!)

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"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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"What If...? Minnie Became Captain Marvel"

 Okay okay, let's do this, by popular demand (?)--well, I probably DID at some point say I was going to do it, so here you go.  I haven't been following these Disney What If stories, but evidently they've been proliferating.  Woof.  If I'm required to write about all of them, I must've committed some pretty bad sins.  To be clear, I don't think I am.  I haven't even read those others; they sound just too insipid for words, at least given the series' track record.  So are you filled with excitement?  Let's do it.

So when I was first planning to write about this, I actually ended up reading the first dozen or so issues of the original Ms. Marvel (nee Carol Danvers), which kicked off in 1977, to prepare.  I enjoyed them, even if they did become pretty repetitive.  The character's abilities are fairly generic, in spite of her convoluted back story, but she IS notable as a specific feminist archetype.  This is exemplified  as exemplified by the use of "Ms," which was just becoming a big cultural thing in the seventies.  Gloria Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine in 1972, and we're off to the races.  She's an independent, self-reliant working girl making her way in a man's world, and she's in media, even.  What I'm saying is, she's basically Mary Tyler Moore.  J Jonah Jameson would have and no doubt at some point did derisively refer to here as a "women's libber."  So that is interesting and I like it.

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"The Terrible Thinking Cap Tussle"

 As long as I'm talking about Lockman, I've gotta mention this conceptually interesting one.  So we're familiar with Disney Studio Program probably?  It was a thing to create extra stories for foreign markets, because apparently Western's furious release rate was not sufficient to satisfy the ravening lust of overseas readers for Disney comics.  Most famously, the Hubbard/Kinney Fethry stories were DSP productions.  I dunno.  I'd like to see a comparison of how many American-made stories other countries were really publishing compared to the US.  Was it THAT many more?  I mean, granted, issues of Topolino were and are 150+ pages, published weekly, so...maybe I answered my own question.  Man, that's NUTS.  As much as I like Disney comics...I feel like that might be too many Disney comics for me.  Not gonna lie.  But it probably would've been the right number when I was small, which is, I suppose, the point.

At any rate!  This was a Studio story, published in 1962, under the title "Brainstorm Battle."  And it WAS published in English, in Australia (twice!), so it definitely had an extant English script that IDW could've used when they reprinted it in 2017.  At least...I assume so?  There's no way those Australian comics are "lost," is there?  Surely not.  Well, either they didn't have a script, or they thought the one they did have wasn't good enough, and so they got Joe Torcivia to write a new one.  Or possibly just heavily revise the existing one.  But either way, the result is something quite unusual.  I remember kinda wanting to write about this when it was published, but then...I didn't.  So fiddle dee dee.

(Yes, I've poked around a bit looking for scans of Australian Disney comics, but no luck so farand I'm not convinced they actually exist.  But hey, if you got 'em, hook me up.  I'll let you choose a story for me to write about.)

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"Rough Voyage to Azatlan!"

 So the thing is, I was starting to have almost a parasocial relationship with Vic Lockman.  Yeah, I'm hard on him a lot of the time, but reading a lot of his sixties stories, I was thinking, hey, wow, a lot of these are not bad--way to go, Vic!  It was just a kind of fun thing to explore.  I mean yes sure I knew he was a fundamentalist Christian, with the regressive view that go along with that, but hey, ain't that America?  I was still enjoy celebrating his successes.

Look, I know I said I didn't want to be overtly political here, but in this case I find politics kind of thrust upon me.  I recently discovered something about Lockman.  This isn't a big secret or anything; the only reason it's not more common knowledge is that nobody really cares about him.  But: he wasn't just a generic conservative Christian, as I thought, but almost certainly an actual factual member of the John Birch Society.  Read this hair-curlingly racist pro-Apartheid tract from 1985, originally published in a neo-nazi-adjacent newsletter--or actually, don't, that would be a better idea if you don't need to see to believe--but there it is.  If you know anything about the tenets of Bircherism, this will look extremely familiar, but if you think I'm overextrapolating in making the connection, also note that he wrote this 1972 comic (not available online, but if you know you know) promoting Gary Allen's None Dare Call It Conspiracy, a central Bircher text and the foundation for the beliefs of people like Alex Jones.  You're not promoting that shit if you're not a truly toxic human being. 

(I'm not gonna lie, I do really like this self-portrait of him as a spider from his website.  It makes him seem kind of adorable.)

Now, in a sense none of this matters; it's not like my posts have been glorifying Lockman personally, and you can still critically analyze the works of bad people.  In fact, it could be a good thing, inasmuch as I now have a new critical lens to view his work, theoretically complicating it in an interesting way.  But, as I said, I was really getting into him, so it's hard not to irrationally view this as a betrayal.  And, you know, there's no avoiding it: no matter what I want to do, his work's going to strikes me differently now.  If I'm being honest, I kinda half-wish I'd never learned this.  But I did, so what can you do?  I briefly thought, well, maybe I can just pretend I don't know it.  It's not like anyone's likely to look it up and bring it to my attention, and if they do I can just feign shock then.  But man, I just can't be that dishonest.  You've gotta take a person you're engaging with critically as they are.  So I suppose what I'll do right now is write about this Lockman story and see how the experience strikes me.

I was actually planning on writing about this story last week, immediately after that "Conquistador" business, but then I learned what I learned and it threw me for a loop, so I punted with some Barks while deciding what to do.  Because, true fact, this story actually surprised me.  It turned out to be way more of a roller coaster ride than I possibly could have expected.  So, here we go.

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"Spending Money"

Not a very inspiring title, is it? Of course, it has no official status; it's just what people call it.  Presumably someone from Another Rainbow(?) slapped that title on it, and here we are. Makes me wonder what WOULD make if "official." I suppose if it had the official imprimatur of The Walt Disney Company™, that would do it. They should have official contests to name Barks stories. We'd probably end up with something better than this, anyway.

...is that the trouble with being rich? IS it? I try not to bring politics into these entries too much--yes, I DO bring them in, because these stories are inherently political, but believe me, it could be MUCH worse. But damn, man. Personally, I think the worst thing about being rich--certainly being ULTRA-rich--is that it destroys your brain and you're not capable of interacting with the world in a normal way anymore. Yes, as I constantly point out, comparing Scrooge to a "real" (so-called) rich person is pointless, but this story DOES seem to be a better argument for it than most, given that his excess money DOES cause him to act in extremely dumb ways here.

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"The Ghost of the Conquistador"

I feel a little self-conscious about these entries, given, you know, everything.  I didn't cause it, of course, so I'm not really like Nero acocryphally fiddling while Rome burns, but I dunno; maybe I'm like one of the partygoers in "Masque of the Red Death," carousing during a plague.  But I dunno; if I can provide a small amount of escapist amusement in the grimmest of times, maybe I should.  And whether or not I "should," here I am.  Dammit.

Anyway, because I'm fair and balanced, I wanted to try to find a good, or good-er, Lockman story to counterbalance last week's.  So I hopped on inducks and checked his "top stories."  I was assuming, as one would, that they'd all be Barks-drawn, but to my befuddlement, no!  Only four out of the top ten are currently Barks!  This bears investigation, though I suspect it's just some fluke of certain stories being localized to foreign markets in the right place and the right time to make an impression on a lot of young people.  But it's cool!  Everything's cool!  So, currently, at number three on the list, we have THIS.  First, quick look at the cover, which is pretty funny:

The guy's face is meant to be cloaked in shadows, but the colorist evidently didn't get the message, and as a result, he looks like a lego guy.  Editors?  Pshaw!

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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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"Two-Way Luck"

 I have to get my biggest--and, really, only serious--critique of this story out of the way first, which is man, that title.  Totally generic-sounding and not providing even the vaguest hint of the story's content?  Blah!  Still, it feels ungrateful to complain too much.  I'm sure we all just think of it as "the giant emerald story" anyway--or how about "Green with Envy;" would that work?.  It's a back-up  (to "All at Sea"), the sort of thing that you expect to be a little more disposable than the main one, even coming from Barks.  But man, it isn't.  I mean okay maybe it's a little silly in some ways (a Disney comic?  Get the heck outta here, ya nut!), but the artistry is also highly apparent.  So.

I do, however, always get caught up on the "emerald contest" thing.  I mean, I don't think I did when I was small, but NOW I do.  So, in this world, can we assume that nobody really knows what the biggest jewels are, or who has them?  Because if we did, it doesn't seem like this contest would really mean much.  But Scrooge DOES appear to believe it's in some way established that his is the biggest in the world--an apprehension he could only be under if there were some kind of organization that makes these determinations.  And, I mean, he has to be cajoled into entering, and he wouldn't do it at all if his nephews weren't here, so you gotta figure there are a bunch of people with big emeralds not entering them, from ignorance or apathy, so what is being accomplished here?  Tell me!

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"Let Donald Do It"

This might be the first story I've written about with an imperative title.  Well...probably.  You could also read that title in the same sense as "let there be light"--a subjunctive usage.   Donald; the creator of the universe--who can tell the difference?  Regardless, its sole claim to fame, if you can call it that (spoiler: you can't) is that it was a backup story for Barks' "How Green Was My Lettuce."  

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