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:

Let me just take the opportunity to say: ack.  Hey, I get it: we want these kids for audience-identification purposes.  It's like Grandma's telling the stories directly to you!  But I think we can also see an instance of Western getting something really right: after this, they switched over to an all-duck format and never looked back.  Kids don't want to imagine they're kids!  They're kids in real life!  What fun is that?  They want to imagine that they're DUCKS, dangit!

The whole book tries to continue this thing about Grandma talking to children, but we never see said children in the stories.  Not sure why not.  In addition to the stories, Moore is credited with those framing images as well, so he demonstrably could have.  Not that I want to, but it still feels a little odd.  As we can see, the eagle is the equivalent of one of those egg-dropping birds in Donkey Kong Jr.  Look out, Donald!

Look, the writer here (I couldn't even begin to speculate) wanted to have a story where Donald tries to get an eagle egg, so the museum wants an eagle egg.  That's it!  That's okay, though.  Early Barks stories were written with flimsier premises.  Well, AS flimsy.  Okay, a little less flimsy.  But THE POINT is, it's fine.  As is Bob Moore's art, though his ducks do frequently seem a bit off-model.  And his backgrounds may be less than gorgeous.  Pretty typical stuff in all, though.

Okay, so far so typical, although I do enjoy Donald's poses there.  Does it look like he kind of rolled over between the third and fourth panels to be more comfortable?  I suppose Moore did it that way because it would've been sort of odd to see him saying that while lying on his back, but either way...

Too much of a gentleman to strike a lady eagle.  Okay.  I like how HDL are responding to this in a sort of jokily knowing way, based on some unspoken premise that I do not understand.  That image of Donald in the middle right: there's something about the way his sleepy look there synergizes with the "heh, heh!" that I find really funny in a way I can't articulate.

We regret to inform you that we stole your offspring For Science.  Man, I just have to think there's a less dickish way of going about this.  Also, look how bored his plan appears to make him.  Understandably so, admittedly.

And I don't know WHAT to say about that pose.  He certainly appears to be feeling no pain.

Right, so here's the funniest and maybe only notable thing about this story: its bizarre notions about how incubation works.  I don't think I need to clarify how this makes no sense, but I especially like them using psychology to...make the egg think it's too cold to hatch, I guess?  Yeah, that seems normal.  And those devilish poses the nephews have going on at the bottom right there...what an odd situation this is.

Just some good old-fashioned out-of-context panelling for you.

Anyway, that's about all there is to this story.  Donald does not get an egg, as why should he.  Instead, he just destroy's Grandma's China Darning Egg, and "China Darning Egg" is NOT a phrase that gets many google hits, I will tell you that much.

So, like, was this whole story just backwards-engineered to end with this hilarious "goose egg" joke?  If so--well, ya sure did do that.

Next: Daisy.  All the others have art credited to Moore, but inducks says Frank McSavage drew this one.  And McSavage is definitely a name I know, but I'm having trouble figuring out from where; this seems to be his first appearance on this blog.  His art DOES look naggingly familiar, though.

And this story, it turns out, is all about Duck class struggle.  Why not?  But the central problem is, Daisy just seems quite dumb in this story.  The problem with that snooty Denise Van Duck is that she's a Duck Kennedy, with attendant generational wealth.  Whereas Daisy is...not.  I don't think we've had occasion previously to explicitly contemplate Daisy's socioeconomic status, but she seems solidly middle-class--a bit more stable than Donald (or maybe not--her employment situation is as vague and nebulous as his), presumably, but in the same ballpark (although she doesn't have dependent minors, so that'll make a difference).  But THE POINT IS, obviously she can't compete with this rich woman, class-signifier-wise.  It's weird that she imagines otherwise, and it's just as weird that Van Duck seems to agree.  The whole thing is weird, weird, weird, and clearly written without any particular sense of how people from different classes might interact.

I do like Van Duck's weird character design, though.

TWICE as pedigreed as hers!  That is one pedigreed-ass dog.  This story (or, really, this whole book) is childish in the sense of "feels like it was written by a child."  And don't think I'm not there for it.

Obviously, if you have a LARGE with a pedigree, that's better than a SMALL one.  I can't believe I have to explain this to you people.  Why does Ross, the largest friend, not simply eat the other five?

Anyway, that tomfoolery's about all we got here.  There's a little with Daisy trying to figure out how to train the dog.

And there's this place where she tries to use psychological warfare to convince it that she's a murderous motherfucker, which I enjoy very much.  Much as Donald and the kids tried to trick an egg into not hatching by making it think it was cold outside.  Boy I tell ya.

I mean, this whole thing's so goofy that I think it's perfectly reasonable for it to end with Daisy convincing Van Duck that riding dogs is à la mode, all of a sudden.  Why not?  It's no less silly than anything!  Whoohoo!

Next, Scrooge.  That lovable old tightwad!  Though I'm not sure how many of these writers understood why he's lovable.  Well, that's neither here nor there for our purposes.  Note that while Scrooge does slip on a banana peel in this story, it's not a major plot point or anything.  It seems randomly chosen.

Gosh.  Every silver dollar ever minted.  Well, I guess everyone needs a hobby.  But you see that and you sort of wonder, if you're able to collect however many billions of those there are...why don't you just collect ALL currency?  So it all belongs to you.  Why faff around?  Worth noting that this story DOES substantially predate Barks' 1916 quarter story, so, uh, points for originality, I guess.  Also worth noting that this would surely be HELLA illegal.  I mean, it's so weird that it's hard for me to know exactly what laws are being violated, but hoarding the ENTIRE run of a coin?  If it's just for one year, it's bad enough, but EVERY year?  Dang, man.

Also, I have to note, re both this and the Barks story: no, you don't have them all (minus one).  I know I'm pointlessly nitpicking a story that doesn't demand it, but I think it's at least worth pointing out that sundry of the relevant coins are going to be buried beneath sofa cushions and in storm drains.  I'm thinking of a potential sequel to the Barks: Scrooge just has the one quarter left, which is too rare for him to sell, but periodically other people find overlooked coins lying about, creating sudden, violent economic upheavals.  That's more a premise than a plot, but it seems kind of fun, maybe.

Gotta do it!  I sometimes try to google-translate the Asian characters you sometimes see in Disney comics, but I come up empty.  I think they are, in theory, real characters, though.  Who knows where writers got them.

We shoulda known!  All calling Scrooge up like this is some kind of hostage situation.

You know, getting rid of all the quarters from a specific year IS going to make the last one valuable, if not quite as much so as Barks would have it, but boy, every silver dollar, period, is REALLY going to be worth a lot.  Then again, maybe a bit less because the dollars DO still exist, and someone (HDL, canonically, but I suspect he's going to relent and write Donald back in), so maybe that would limit it.

Also, I feel like Gladstone shouldn't be bargaining like this.  He should be serenely confident that he'll get what he wants when he wants it.  This feels a bit too much like work.

Well, at least you exploded a random guy's head!  In all seriousness, Scrooge frequently behaves childishly even in Barks, but not, generally, in this way.  I think.

Or set up a fuckin' tripwire!  Why not!  That's a normal thing for a master of the universe to be doing.  And here we once again run into a little confusion as to what "luck" even means.  This seems more like malevolence, to me.  Or maybe "malevolence" is too strong.  Moderately violent idiocy?

Yeah, I wouldn't call "throwing a coin across a river" a test of luck in any sense.  I mean, unless, say, a random bird (non-anthropomorphic division) picks it up and deposits it on the other bank, which IS what would happen normally, or something similar, but...I dunno!  It's fun when not really understanding Scrooge and not really understanding Gladstone come together.

And, uh, that's that.  No, seriously, these are the last panels.  You'd think there'd be at least a LITTLE falling action, but nope, my collection is now complete, story over.  Very edifying, for sure.

Also, we see a number of "heh, heh"'s here.  I'm not sure if multiple authors used that--someone starting and then someone else glomming on--but good chance it's Del Connell, I'd say.

Now, HDL.  I'm afraid I don't have a lot to say about this one.

Well, the enraged elephant may be at least worth highlighting.  That goes pretty hard.

And, really, the main notable (well, notable-ish) thing about this story is how absolutely traumatized Huey here looks at his elephant-related mishap.  And yes, I know that would be Louie if we were trying to make it hew to current standards.  And can I just take the opportunity to say that I think standardizing the colors is a really bad idea?  In old stories, the joke--even if it's often not acknowledged--is that which color goes with which nephew in a given story is essentially random.  And I like that; I think that forcing things to fit into a specific framework just needlessly constrains the world and the characters.  Same issue I have with Rosa's whole deal.

As for the actual substance of the story, such as it is: this kangaroo is being ostracized by the other kangaroos for being unable to hop.  So HDL try to help him.  I guess I kind of like those expressions on their faces; they may not be good, exactly, but they're something you can latch onto.  Look at the heavy-lidded nephew on the upper right there, you clearly isn't meant to look ostentatiously jaded but does.  Wowie.

Anyway, here's the punchline to that.  Um.

And finally!  Yes!  Grandma herself!  Wholly unclear why she would find a picture of herself in the rain so mortifying that she's want to cover it up, but...she does.  This is another story I don't have a lot to say about.

With small changes--maybe replace Gus with Clara--this could easily be a Daisy story, especially with that "you always manage to have such unusual parties," which seems extremely Daisy-coded (and yes, I know she's talking to a guest named "Clara" on the phone, but we'll see them all later, and none of them are Ms. Cluck, unless the artist is just misremembering what she looks like, which seems likely).

Okay, obviously the cow is a giveaway that it's Grandma, but really the only one: she appears to be living in a normal suburban house that for some reason has a cow-barn in back rather than her usual environs.

I mean, I like the images of the cow running amok, I guess.  Sure, why not?

And I'm sure we can all enjoy this hilarious perspective fail, as tiny Gus is at the mercy of an absolutely fucking enormous bovine.

Anyway.  It turns out her guests are these Henery-Hawk-looking characters.  I mean, I'm also having a bit of a hard time imagining who would show up at the Busy-Bee Sewing Club, but I dunno, man.

I don't know.  This is probably me being WAY too generous, but I kind of like the ending of this nothing story.  There's an appeal to it.  Not sure how much sewing is going on at this alleged sewing club, though.

Anyway, that's about that.  But don't worry; as you can see, the framing narrative is not forgotten (were you worrying about that?).  Ready for the photo?  CAN YOU HANDLE this level of hilarity?

Donald photobombing the proceedings.  As much as I hate to be amused by thinks that also amused those children, I have to admit...I'm kind of amused.  I think this picture is funny and good (but shouldn't Gladstone be present?).  

Anyawy, don't think I have any pithy closing words, but there you have it!