"The Money Champ"

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

Somehow, I never noticed til right now that it's actually "Uncle Scrooge AND the Money Champ."  That's kinda weird, innit?  It's just Uncle Scrooge IN the Second-Richest Duck," but here "The Money Champ" is posited as a different person.  I mean, clearly it means nothing; just a brain fart on some editor's part.  But still.

Anyway, we see what we don't see often, and actually, I'd question whether we've seen it EVER elsewhere: this idea that all the peeps are idolizing Scrooge for his awesome richness.  And it's one of those things that you just accept for the purposes of the story, and I do, more or less, but also, WOW do I ever not idolize anyone for having money.  I guess I do like the guy telling some random sailor about it.

At any rate, though more than anything I feel like it's an objective correlative for Scrooge's mood, and throughout the story we'll see Duckburgians acting as almost a Greek chorus to his trials.

Unlike "The Second-Richest Duck," this one wastes NO TIME in introducing Glomgold.  This idea of slapping someone with a glove as a challenge is definitely something I was introduced to by this story.

A rare example of continuity in Barks, is what this is.  I absolutely don't believe that Scrooge wouldn't immediately remember him; the challenge last time was an existential threat to his self-identity.  I don't think you'd forget that.  Rather, I'd think you'd spend years obsessively following the ins and outs of Glomgold's fortune, even if that would get tedious from a storytelling standpoint.

See, I really enjoy this kind of thing.  Their argument momentarily forgotten, Scrooge and Glomgold both with this shellshocked expression over having been fined five gold mines.  This is what I was talking about last time!  Scrooge and Glomgold as frenemies, bonding over their mutual richness and its vicissitudes, is something I want to see.

This looks like kind of a fancier version of their argument in Flintheart's bin in the previous story.  Don't you wish you had a ski slope made out of nickels?

It's also like the previous story in that we have these kind of ridiculous ways of measuring wealth that allow for the necessary level of physicality.  In both stories, you just don't think about whether it makes sense, but I do think it's harder in this one, because goddamn, man--in the name of proving you're the richest, you are both going to lose A LOT of money by liquifying all your assets.  I feel like at the very least, this fact maybe should've been lampshaded a bit, because it's just this nagging thing that I can't stop thinking about as I read the story.

I know I've commented many times on the Disney comics thing where extremely obvious disguises always fool people, but here we have an example of an extremely obvious alias doing the same.  You couldn't be bothered to come up with something less obvious, Flinty?  Well, seemingly you didn't need to, so I guess you win this round.

In the past I'm not sure I ever registered the fact that this contest took place at the old airport.  It's not that vital a detail, but it's nice that Barks stuck it in there--you know a lot of writers would just have made it take place in a formless void (but not specifically Ginnungagap.  That would be a hell of a thing).

So, about those piles of money: they are MASSIVELY too small.  According to the internet, a pile of a trillion silver dollars would extend well into outer space, and of course, this is not just a trillion; it's a bunch of bigger, made-up numbers.  Dunno what point I'm making.  Just nitpicking, I guess, thought it WOULD be interesting it there were a story that treated this theme in a more realistic way (you can do a "realistic" story about piling money beyond the exosphere, right?).

Also GODDAMN the people of Duckburg are fickle.  Satire!  I kind of wonder what Top Hat Guy there makes of all of this.

What can I say about "you'll have to furnish your own salt?"  Probably not much.  Though I do find the emotional rhythm interesting, going from rage to this kind of bemusement.  To Donald's delight, of course!

I don't know if Scrooge should be getting suspicious of people who are "too kind" to their money, but it might be just another example of him displacing his own idiosyncracies onto Glomgold, as we saw in the last story.  Also: Dewey does, Huey does, Louie does.  There's absolutely no reason to phrase it like that except for fun, so Barks did it anyway, and it's great.  Also also: "none of your ideas have [made sense] for a long time."  I like to think that that doesn't just apply to this story; that it's a more general commentary on Scrooge's MO.  I mean, from Donald's perspective, it's kinda true.  Imaging wanting a pile of money more than an ice cream soda!

There's not much of this stuff in the airport underground, but I like it and wish it were a more prominent part of the story.  But man, there's just something that bums me out about "I just stopped being so trusting" there.  Maybe it's just the world we have to live in these days, but I mean...yeah, okay, under the circumstances it's clearly good advice, but what it says about us as a species...ah Bartleby!  Ah humanity!

Meanwhile, Duckburg's common clay of the new west are as changeable as ever.  How long have they been standing there, do you think?  How long is this whole process taking?  That panel, above, with HDL looking at the money piles appears to be taking place at night (though that might be a coloring thing), and indeed, doing this in a single day doesn't seem realistic.  I guess the people of are just congregating and staying for...I don't know, eight hours a day?  Twelve?  That's devotion, of a sort.

Gotta love Flinty's pile being CHUF'd like that, but it seems unlikely to me that that spear would actually reach far enough to CHUF the pile.  Look at Scrooge in that bottom panel: the spear is not getting a huge amount of penetration.  Also, where did he get a spear?

Fortunately, now the crowd's whimsicality works in Scrooge's favor, so we feel comfortable using culture war signifiers ("big-town") against him.  I suppose the fact that they're doing that here relates to what we were recently talking about re Duckburg's size.  In this story, it must be pretty small, if they're that excited about A Rich Guy living there.

Okay, "tomorrow."  So this seems to be taking place over at least three days.  Srsly, "the biggest event in Duckburg's history?"  If that's not a sad indictment of the town, I don't know what is.  Also, NOW the audience is all "oh, I hope Scrooge wins?"  You people are fucking impossible.  If this were the real world, they'd all be swing voters.  Not people to be relied upon in any circumstance.

So this is just a cosplaying white guy.  I enjoy that.  He talks about having been among these Jivaro head hunters, blah blah, but while I do have to admit that his potions do what they're meant to do, he seems to me more akin to those seventies comic book ads about random weeaboos who will sell you their hidden mystical martial arts secrets that let you murder a guy by punching them and stopping their heart.  I don't take him that seriously, is all I'm saying.

Yeah, okay, granted, clearly Scrooge has a better claim here to the moral high ground than he did in "The Second-Richest Duck."  I dunno.  I feel like he might be a little TOO righteous here.  Like, I doubt this is actually the case, but you can imagine some editor thinking that that last Glomgold story was a little TOO morally ambiguous, and ordering him to make things a little clearer for the impressionable youth.

And now that I've started thinking that way, I can't help it, even if it's a completely fake narrative that I just made up: THE MAN wanted to be sure we'd know how bad Flintheart is, so that's why we get this anti-FG propaganda!  Grrr!

...I mean, not completely.  I still kind of like it.  I just sorta-kinda wish that if this character arc was brought up, it was resolved, or at least further addressed, in some way.  Oh well!

I'm kind of associating the Jivaro juice with the magic ice that consumes the world in Cat's Cradle.  Although I guess if this worked that way it would...just make everything in the world small?  Possibly I haven't thought this through.

Also, those dudes holding the jug are ALSO white guys.  They're just goofs that the first dude recruited for this amusing little cosplay experiment.

I do enjoy this business with Glomgold going on a rampage and shrinking everything in sight.  It certainly has a joie de vivre.  I'm not sure whether shrinking something renders it legally void, but this is Duckburg.  The law works differently there.

I like the truck shrinking.  I find Donald's line about his TV being repossessed kind of weirdly hacky.  And as for HDL, they know judo, which is something we should keep in mind.

Hi.  Yes.  I understand that this is all fun and games, but have we forgotten that there are a bunch of people watching this, including The Mayor and The Governor?  What in the world must they be thinking here?  We're really just blasting away at our rival with this enormous damn cannon?  Even if this all worked out according to plan for Glomgold, I feel like...it still wouldn't work out.  I wonder what the bulldozer guy helping him out is thinking.  "Am I actually going to get paid for this?

SHRINNNNNNNK!  Do you have a particular way you hear that sound effect in your head?  Anyway, that's that done.  I know that green vortex thing is supposed to just represent the cannon getting small, but it also seems to represent Glomgold's hopes and dreams. :(

...and I love how it's immediately undercut by this, which would be great even if it weren't just to set up the return of the hat-eating thing.

I feel like we already got the point; we didn't necessarily need Scrooge to clarify that Glomgold lost because Crime Doesn't Pay.  I'd be fascinated, though, to know what would have happened has their pyramids, in fact, been declared identical.  

And we still have the dang audience cheering there!  So would they be cheering Glomgold if he'd successfully cannon'd Scrooge's money?  They are a mystery.  As is that "I still have to go to jail" line.  That, if anything, feels like it's there by editorial fiat.  If he has to go to jail for, I guess, menacing Scrooge's money, winning wouldn't change that, if you want to call it "winning!"  What are we doing here?

But then, at the last moment, Barks again undercuts Scrooge's victory with this bit of silliness.  Even if Scrooge IS supposed to be a fairly unambigous good guy here, Barks really doesn't seem to want to make us really feel that.  This story is less different from "The Second-Richest Duck" than I remembered it being, really.