"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.

Well...here's the general tenor of the thing. Apparently the kid ate the Mogul's gross sandwich and then had to confess before the Mogul would deign to allow him a drink. Seems kind of savage, but in fairness (fairness?), the unacceptably hideous art makes it difficult to tell what actual emotional reaction the Mogul's meant to be having. Look, I'm hoping that Kay Wright was a perfectly lovely human being. That is a thing I want to be true. But dang it, his art's still For Shit. It's just hard to deny.

The JW Guidebook, or "manual" as we apparently now call it (you can't expect Lockman to remember basic facts about characters he's written about for twenty-plus years) now seems to be taking on the status of a religious text. It feels like Lockman has only a very vague idea of what the deal even is with these characters. Anyway, wait for it...

...yeah. This page is what provoked me into writing about this story, because just LOOK at this fucking shit. Pardon me for stating the obvious, but these are NOT HDL. Obviously there isn't one single right way to depict any Disney character, but "Woodchucks singing a stupid baby song about telling the truth" is definitely a WRONG way.

I mean, just to get a baseline measurement, remember that time HDL had to take their Junior Woodchucks magnetic navigation test and Donald tried to sabotage them with a giant magnet but they prevailed with that classic Woodchuck grit? Yeah. You think THESE dipshits could do that? Or, alternatively, you think THOSE guys would've started a stupid fucking "always tell the truth" club?

Also, this is a side thing, but going back to Lockman's fundamental lack of understanding of the characters: since when do they start little auxiliary "clubs" under the Junior Woodchucks' aegis? Surely they'd just vie to get a merit badge for telling the truth, if indeed they even offered such a lame-ass badge? This sucks.

Junior Woodchucks struggle sessions: another great innovation by Vic Lockman!

So here's the thing: obviously, there was never a time when ALL Western comics were great or good, but honestly, if you were a kid and you plunked down your dime for an issue of Donald Duck in the 1950s, there might be some pretty lame stories in there, but you'd almost certainly be getting your money's worth. If you paid a quarter for the Show Boat special, it'd likewise be good value for money.

But this? It's not remotely worth the thirty-five cents you paid, and it wouldn't be worth the equivalent of that today (1.80, the inflation calculator tells me). It's worth less than the extremely cheap paper it was printed on, and it bespeaks to me a REAL contempt for their audience on the part of Whitman's editors, if such existed. I suppose, even though they'd limp on for an excruciating six years, that at this point the writing was sort of on the wall and they were more or less stripping out the copper wiring, but they really should've died sooner, by rights.

It's an interesting question (unrelated to the panel above; that's just there to break up the text, really): how much longer would they have been able to persist had they maintained their average [non-Barks, of course] fifties level of quality? It's possible that the culture had just changed so much that it wouldn't have made much difference, but it would've been nice to see some degree of effort.

I don't want to spend too much time on this, but there is one really spectacular part we have to get to, so stay tuned for that. The idea is that Scrooge is mad at them for accidentally hearing his safe combination (yes, safe. The money bin somehow seems to be an alien concept to Lockman. I simply cannot even begin to conceptualize how he viewed the characters, but it certainly wasn't clearly). And they're going to give him a rather common 'rare' coin to make up for it. Okay.

Oh no, what a horrific moral dilemma. I am dying here.

Oh no! I swear if that groaning nephew doesn't cause you to experience hate...well, it's probably because you're a well-adjusted human being who doesn't get excessively het up over dumb comics from forty-eight years ago.  Must be nice.  But either way, that is just AWFUL.

Also, you probably have at least some sense where this is going, no?

This is the part of the story that REALLY killed me. Moral philosophy from Vic Lockman. This is what I mean about his low opinion of his readers. I'm pretty sure that your child has sufficient moral intuitition to understand that you lie to the nazis about the Jews hiding in your attic. If they don't, I hate to break it to you, but they may be Immanuel Kant. Who the fuck is this FOR? you may ask. Well, I do have an idea about this.

Right, so Lockman was an evangelical Christian. This we know. And I want to preface this by making it clear that I'm not suggesting that all or most Christians say things like this, but there IS a popular argument that goes "if you don't have Biblical guidance, how do you know that murder is bad? Why aren't you not constantly killing people and stuff, huh? Answer me THAT?!?" Actually, I doubt that's limited to Christians either. You probably get something similar from the dumber members of all kinds of religions; it's just what we're focused on here.

My response would be "and yet, against all odds, I'm not a serial killer. Maybe meditate on that for a bit?" But other people, naturally enough, take them at face value and say "dude, you're REALLY telling me you'd be out killing people if your book didn't tell you not to? That's fucked up." And, you know, fair. It IS what they're saying in so many words. But in the their defense, it's clearly not true. If they were self-reflective enough to think about it for a minute, they'd realize that they have moral intuitions outside their religion. Probably a lot of them DO realize that and just tamp it down because it's not satisfying for them. But I think a lot of it just boils down to "I'M against murder, and also eating certain kind of bugs, and I'M a Christian, therefore post hoc ergo propter hoc or possibly the other way around." No need to think about it too hard.

Anyway, from all I could gather, Lockman would very likely have been the kind of Christian to roll that one out, so you can imagine that maybe he would've made the leap to thinking that children wouldn't have the moral intuition to (as I said before) lie to ICE agents about the whereabouts of their non-white neighbors. Hardly an excuse, but at least an explanation.

Of course, if that's true, then the JW Guidebook really IS the equivalent of a religious text. Some might call that blasphemous, but personally, it's one of the few things here I'm okay with, I suppose.

(Let's not even get into characterizing the Beagles as "evil."  He's Lockman; what can you do?)

If the entire story were different, this might be an okay gag to close on. That's as close to praise as I can get for this story.

"But wait," you say. "Maybe THIS story isn't good, but there must've been two or three others in this book, so maybe THEY make up for it." To which I say: fair enough. Let's do a lightning round here.

First up, Easy Peaseley, whom we knew.  Putting the plot in the title here, like "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came." This is about a guy who's good at stuff, but...

...then he meets THESE temptresses, and they throw him into a tizzy. Let's not even touch Lockman's portrayal of distaff characters, here. Woof.

Haha, the one thing he's not good at. This isn't, like, ideologically offensive, but it's kind of just there. I wouldn't want to write a whole entry on it, because what can you even say? It's all very gormless.

Next: "The Runaway Bridge," and I feel like this is the kind of story Lockman SHOULD have been doing. It plays to his strengths, such as they are. Not that this is a deathless work of genius or anything, but Gyro with weird inventions is kind of neat, and kind of his thing.

I won't give this a great score, but it's an absolute oasis of quality compared to everyone else here, so...la?

And finally: it's not ALL Lockman! Here's a story drawn and (presumably) written by Bob Gregory. Gregory was head-and-shoulders above Lockman in general, but here in Western's decrepitude, the two are more or less the same. You can blame the creators all you want, and you probably should, but it also seems clear that the company had created a culture that encouraged this kind of thing.

Look: the story here is that they want a picture of a moose. That's about it.

One of them takes a woefully inadequate picture and is duly chastised...

...a gorgeous example of wildlife photography...

And this terrifying moment of suspense, which is funnier than anything else in the issue and really, almost funnier than anything in ANY issue.  Just LOOK at that nephew! I WANT to think that Gregory was doing this intentionally, but I'm fairly sure he was just completely checked out.

(Why is "us" emphasized instead of the more natural "at?"  Ours is not to wonder why.)

Conclusion: yes, this issue as a whole is marginally less bad than the marquee story. Maybe if I wanted to be generous, I'd say it was worth, oh, seven cents in 1978 money, just for the Gyro story. What a softie I am.  And in the end, we're left with just one burning question:

Coincidentally, both this blog AND Disney checkers feature your popular friends Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge and all the others.