“Fire Works” (Or, 'Adventures in Wiki-Making')

The life of a Wikimaster is a strange thing. 

You see, I was in the process of creating pages on the $crooge McDuck Wiki relating to the obscure Duck relatives depicted in Johannes A. Grote's non-canonical 1999 version of the Duck family tree. And one of these was Daisy Duck's great-aunt Griseldis Jungerpel — a name one could very charitably translate as Griseldis O'Drake, as Jungerpel is the maiden name of Scrooge's mother in Grote's family tree, and… I daresay I've already lost most you, haven't I. 

But the point is, Griseldis was no fever dream of old Johannes; she was, instead, mentioned in the 1959 German localization of Carl Barks's Big-Top Bedlam as the original owner of what the original English script merely calls a ‘heirloom brooch’. I could not, in good conscience, create a Wiki page about Griseldis when we still didn't have one about Big-Top Bedlam, so I went to work on that, and, to do so, pulled up Four Color Comics #300 to reread the Barks tale in its original form. 

And most vintage American comics (Four Color included) include two one-pager inside-cover gags to avoid wasting space. These are usually-untitled bits of inconsequential slapstick, and so it was, knowing I wouldn't ever get the motivation to create their Wiki pages for their own sake, that I forced myself to also create them now while I was it it because of Barks. 

Yet as I prepared to write a hundred descriptive words or so on this particularly Paul Murry one-pager, it struck me that, huh, I have things to say about this. 

Not all of them good. 

So, the first thing to notice about what I have, for Wiki purposes, dubbed Fire Works, because those are the two words of INDUCKS' rather laconic English-language summary of it, and the misspelling sort of looks like a pun if you squint:

it's got no idea how to tell a joke. 

Pacing-wise, to begin with — well, Barks could do these one-pagers in half the panel-count, and really, is there any use whatsoever to that second-to-last panel of Donald thinking ‘I smell a rat’, when we already had the one directly before it? And more broadly, what sense does it even make for him to 'smell a rat', as though it's not already perfectly clear to everyone involved what has happened? How is “the large object which looks like a Roman Candle and blew up like a Roman Candle was……a Roman Candle!” a punchline? 

Right, now for a panel-by-panel dissection. 

The art's pretty solid, I must say, and this set-up of Donald in his comfy armchair reading a book reminds me a bit of Shellfish Motives, which is a good thing to be reminded of. But already all sorts of questions arise. Donald's schedule is a riddle fo the ages to begin with, but… he reads? Regularly enough that he can make these kinds of critical statements? 

This is an… abrupt way to inform us that a fuse has blown out. 

Also, since Donald is asking for a candle so that he can see to put in a new fuse, what was the point of that strange opening about him reading? One assumes that if a fuse blew out, he'd try to repair it whether or not he was doing something specifically light-based when it happened. But our writer (whoever that was) obviously free-associated that comedies about power outages and the lights going out work best if someone was reading when it happens, regardless of whether it connects to anything else. 

I did say the art was okay, but how weird is Huey here, really? Look at his hand! It looks like it belongs to the Creature of the Quack Lagoon more than anything else. 

Also, that is some quick thinking on the boys' part, right there. Unless we are meant to assume that they caused the lights to go out specifically so they could engineer these pranks?

Also also, what about this situation (save the panel-count) demands that the nephew ‘hurry up’? 

This paritcular pair of panels makes it interestingly obvious that Murry's art is here based on Al Taliaferro more than anything else, the nephew especially. These prank-happy nephews who have never heard of such a thing as "safety and restraint" do seem like the hellions who plagued Donald back in 1937 — this gag, absent the other oddities I'm currently blathering about, would have fit right at home in the original 1938 cartoon Donald's Nephews, actually. 

This, at least, is a visually impressive sequence, just radiating energy. You might think it somewhat doubtful that the force of it would be sufficient to carry Donald into the air like that, but remember that per Barks, the Ducks weigh around 10 pounds. 

(On the other hand, if Donald is such a lightweight, how is the impact of his hitting the ground strong enough to shake his… framed picture of a sunset…?… in the second panel of this sequence? Argh.)

But it just carries the point home that whoever wrote this acted as though they were storyboarding a cartoon. Speaking of which—

—that panel on the left also looks like a piece of a storyboard. The character drumming their fingers nervously in the aftermath of the chaos as their anger mounts is a mainstay of vintage cartoons. More importantly, what sense does it make for the thought bubble to read “hmm”? Surely the point of a thought bubble is to articulate thought processes which a character wouldn't actually voice. But “Hmmm” is precisely what the character would voice here. Gah. 

Oh, d'you know what else is weird? The 'candle' has gone out now, so why is there still light?

And finally:

yet again, more questions are raised than answered. Such as: why did Huey and Dewey randomly leave their caps lying there by the crate? Why did they leave the crate lying there? What are these tiny red pebbles lying between the cap and the crate? And anyway why do they have such a crate lying there? They can't have had the time to buy it in time for their practical joke, unless they sabotaged the fuses just for the purpose and had been planning this for a while, which, for such a lame (and dangerous!) joke, is a fairly poor use of their time, I should think. 

Well, that's the end of it. This was basically an exercise in writing as many things as I could about an ultimately disposable, fairly unobjectionable little thing. It's puzzlingly odd, but was never meant to be questioned; this isn't Bird-Bothered Hero material not only because the art is much nicer, but also because unlike that legendary trainwreck actually should have tried by all rights, and didn't. Fire Works, plot-wise, doesn't try, but oftentimes not even Barks tried in his one-pagers, though the Duck Master at his worst still tends to be a lot more understandable than this. 

Scattered Thoughts and Post-Scripta:

• Why are the only color here shades of red, I wonder? I get that it reduced costs not to have too many colors, but why red specifically? 

• For those wondering why my blog went cold, I was busy with another project, which I would love you to check out. But expect some more updates in the near future here. I'm back!

“The Woes of a Shopping Supervillain”

So is this the “much better Disney comic than My Second Million” that I mentioned in that review? Eh… maybe. To be honest, when I wrote that promise into the post, I had made a resolve to review some good Disney comic, just to wash the foul taste off my mouth; I didn't have any particular story in mind. This will do. (The title is mine, and more of a placeholder than anything else. I know it's not that good, okay? Still, it, too, will do. …I have to think up a lot of these not-too-awful titles when I create pages for untitled stories on the $crooge McDuck Wiki, so let's all hope I'm not too terrible at it as I feel like I am.)

This is, more than anything else, a reaction to GeoX's year-and-a-half-years-old review of Romano Scarpa's The Blot's Double Mystery, where he contrasted Scarpa's “dignified” treatment of Merril De Marris and Floyd Gottfredson's hooded mastermind with the supposedly slapdash, devil-may-care attitude of American comics in the same period. To this end, he called up this one-pager. 

Now, that one-pager is, yes, freaking awful for a Phantom Blot story. The Blot is supposed to be a sinister criminal mastermind with inscrutable motives. None of that comes across above; the joke would be fine with most any other Disney comic villain (though it would work best, in my opinion, if it was Pete trying to imitate Mickey), but A), the Blot is not some insecure shmuck who'd have to prove ot himself that he can whirl a lasso as well as a random cowboy just because he came across said cowboy in the street; B), the Blot is scarily competent at everything he does, and it goes against everything that makes him memorable for him to be done in by his own clumsiness. 

But I think GeoX cherry-picked his example very egregiously. First, it's kind of sneaky to pick an inside-cover one-pager, since even Carl Barks's Scrooge inside-cover-one-pagers often do things with everyone's favorite feathered plutocrat that don't quite gel with his usual characterization. But even setting that aside… sure, few of the vintage American PB comics were masterpieces, but they were usually much better than this. 

Therefore I call to the stand another more-or-less-randomly-selected PB one-pager (this is from Issue 6 of his solo comic series from the 1960's). 

First things first, it's funny; certainly funnier than the earlier story, because the moment you bring a lasso into a slapstick one-pager, you kinda know what's gonna happen, whereas here—testing pens? Huh? The page really can keep you guessing. So the punchline works more smoothly. 

And it also demonstrates a much better grasp of the Blot and his personal mythos: the conceit of the gag is in fact to wonder precisely how it is that the Blot produces those splotches of ink that form his calling card, since getting a pen to blot in real life on purpose isn't all that easy. Though I imagine it might be somewhat funny, in an absurd way, to someone who only knows that the Phantom Blot's nickname is “the Blot”, it really draws most of its comic effect from knowledge of the Blot's calling card, which isn't restated here. Therefore, hurrah for continuity! 

Furthermore, while the Blot's peculiar manners are essential to the comedy, this doesn't come at the cost of making him bumbling and incompetent, as in the previous one-pager — though it'd be a stretch to call his presence here “threatening”. After all, his demand seems incomprehensible to the salesperson above, but it's not actually stupid or insane from the reader's point of view, since we know precisely why the Blot would need such a thing. So, hurrah again, this time for not making your criminal mastermind an idiot!

Add to this some lovely art from Paul Murry (I.N.D.U.C.K.S. sadly does not know who wrote the thing), and you have proof positive that even in comedic one-pagers, the Americans of yore absolutely could get the Blot right and maintain his dignity. I'll grant you that Darkenblot or The Big Fall, this is not. But that doesn't mean it's not a lot of fun to read. 

Post-Scriptum: 

• Reading this, I come to realize how good a pastiche Joe Torcivia's childhood-fancomic-turned-background-gag, where the Blot, robbing a museum, ended up lingering too long in front of an exhibit of Victorian Ink Blots and getting nabbed by Chief O'Hara as a result, and which he imagined as another inside-cover one-pager for The Phantom Blot, would have been. It was already a pretty neat gag in itself, but further kudos still, Joe!

• Did you notice the saleswoman is a human? Albeit a four-fingered one. You rarely see those in Mouse Disney comic, unless they're a “crossover character” like Madam Mim or Grimhilde. 

• Why yes, the above coloring of the (originally black-and-white) one-pager is by me. Never say I am not devoted to giving the readers of this blog a thorough, lush artistic experience.