“Fun? What's That?”

Carl Barks! The Good Duck Artist! I like him. Not as stratospherically as some people — I admire his influence on Disney comics at large, and I don't deny that he's a good writer and good artist, but he's not my favorite Disney author in either capacity. Still! A master of his craft he was, and having particularly liked a random story of his when I reread it yesterday, I thought to myself, Aristide, the world must know. Or at least I thought something vaguely in that direction. 

This is Fun? What's That?, from 1959, one of 'em short-form Scrooge/Gyro team-ups. Scrooge/Gyro isn't a very common ‘pairing’, but here and elsewhere it works rather well; showing that this is Barks and not some less ‘involved’ writer, Fun? What's That? is particularly concerned with drawing parallels between Scrooge & Gyro, implicitly justifying putting them in a story together. 

The concept of the story, as a seasoned reader could arguably deduce from the title alone, is that Scrooge and Gyro half-heartedly attempt to “have fun” the way normal people do, forbidden from inventing/doing money-related things. This is as the case may be prompted by an amusing misunderstanding at Dr Quacker's (Dr Quacker is a dognose, not an anthropomorphic duck, which feels a bit odd when he's got ‘Quack’ in his name; could Barks really have chosen a 'Quack' name purely based on the slang meaning, without taking a step back to consider that this was a duck story?), where he accidentally hears the Little Helper's buzzing instead of Gyro's heartbeat, and concludes that poor Gyro has ‘Puckeritis of the Pipeline’. He proceeds to send him off to the countryside, considering it his only chance. (I wonder, did the writer of the DuckTales Classic episode Scrooge's Last Adventure have this story in mind?)

Scrooge, who in a brilliant cheapness gag had been waiting for someone with the same symptoms as him (in this case, Gyro) to come along and pay for a consultation so he doesn't have to, tags along. Various sequences ensue (beach, bowling alley, and finally camping trip), during which Gyro and Scrooge can barely stop themselves from inventing things and counting things, respectively. The characterization of Scrooge as borderline-OCD like this is a bit odd, but kinda charming. 

(By the way, did you notice that Yogi Wisenik here — ah, Barks and the naming of incidental characters — is a human? The female fortune tellers in You Can't Guess and The Dainty Daredevil are also humans, which suggests that for some reason, the publisher's ban on human characters didn't extend to soothsayers. Huh. Wonder why.)

Barks appears to be treating the story as a Gyro one where Scrooge happens to tag along as a sidekick, and Barks Gyro story means background gags with the Little Helper. Those are always charming and endearing; you can see an example of the usual fare in the ‘yogi’ panel above. But it's more than background gags here: the Helper ends up playing a rather big role in the camping sequence. For example, Scrooge puts him to rather undignified use cooking sourdough biscuits (incidentally letting us readers know that the Helper's bulb-head produces signifcant heat; every day, something new!):

(I love, love, love this sequence more than I can articulate, with Scrooge's casual, cheerful abuse of the Helper, and the Helper's private grumbling, which I'll note is not enough to overwhelm his sense of duty about Being Helpful: note that despite the ‘Gripe, Gripe’-ing, he makes no attempts to extract himself from the dough.)

There's also his displaying the ability to flash brighter than usual at will, an ability he uses to chase all sorts of creatures out of the cave where Scrooge and Gyro are spending the night, and though I'm not convinced either by the idea that half these creatures would be sleeping together in the same cave, or the idea that bright lights would be enough to scare some of these off, it too is very charming.

He displays the same ability again after being, I kid you not, swallowed by a goddamn bear, and it goes from charming to surrealistically awesome. 

I'm not usually that much of a fan of whenever Barks drags bears into his stories — the way he draws them is always slightly unappealing to me — and somehow, that bear on the right, above, still looks more like an overweight wolf to me than a bear — but this sequence is nevertheless extremely funny to me. Don't know about you lot. 

Anyway, of course, they eventually decide “screw this, we're going back to work” (this makes more sense for Scrooge than it does for Gyro, who is still, by the story's logic, under the impression that he's suffering from a potentially-fatal heart disease; but oh well). All in good fun. 

So all in all, the story is predictable in concept and 'plot', from start to finish; but the execution, owing to Barks's talent, makes it into an extremely entertaining read, with a choice part for the Little Helper (always a plus) and an interesting, if not super-complex, venture into Scrooge and Gyro's psychologies. I fully recommend it. 

Post-Scriptum:

• This is the panel where Scrooge and Gyro decide to go back to work. Focus on Gyro's line — is this all secretly a prequel to Picnic? Well… not quite, obviously. But you gotta figure that Gyro's attempts to improve camping will go significantly like his attempts to improve picnics in that other great Barks story.