“An Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck”

Don Rosa was not the last to attempt a grand, epic biography of Scrooge McDuck, as we have seen. Well, the fact is less well-known, but neither was he the first. As Rosa himself admits, he drew considerable inspiration from a 1974 book called An Informal Biogrpahy of Scrooge McDuck, the work of one Jack L. Chalker who would go on to become a pretty successful science-fiction writer a few years down the line. I've finally obtained it for myself, and it is well worth the read, if only because it's very nicely written. 

It's quite a lovely cover, this. It obviously plays with the fact that for copyright reason — as a preface within the book itself bemoans — no actual images of Scrooge could be used to illustrate the book. In truth, I think the book was only authorized to see print because Chalker could legally claim that it was only a critical work, not a work of fiction. 

Which I must stress is a blatant lie. 

Taking its every cue from Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts' ‘Great Game’, wherein they pretend to be historians researching Holmes as a historical figure, the Informal Biography is written with the conceit that it is an in-universe biography, the work of a historian trying to document Mr McDuck based on the "secondary sources" that are the works of his official chronicler Mr Barks. 

This is delightful, not only because it spices things up, but also because it allows the book to be fallible — if you think one of Chalker's ideas about Scrooge's life is nonsense, then that's no reason to throw out the book, it just means you have identified one of the instances in which Chalker-the-character obviously didn't look hard enough for the real answers. (I'm thinking, for a particularly conspicuous example, of the extremely curious blunder that is Chalker's assumption that Huey, Dewey and Louie are the sons of Donald's brother.)

The debts this (and, consequently, the L&T) owes to Sherlock Holmes exegesis is staggering — the tone in which the narrator treats the subject of the 'biography' is precisely the same cautious, falsely-detached respect — and Chalker owns it. The chapter about Goldie literally opens with a statement that “to Scrooge, she was always The Woman”, and just from that, as controversial as DuckTales 2017's decision to write Scrooge and Goldie's relationship as a modernized version of Sherlock & Irene (well, the pop vision thereof) might be, you can see just where they get it from. 

It goes further, actually. Towards the end of Part 1, we find the following passage, riffing off Only a Poor Old Man's statement that Scrooge once made money training cormorants: 

From Australia, Scrooge made his way north, into Indochina and China itself, where he became involved in the pearl trade. While there he discovered a special affinity for birds, and trained thousands of cormorants after learning their language. His most illustrious customer was a certain aged Oriental doctor who was often seen with cormorants in the years after—they became sort of a trademark. Later on he discovered that the doctor used cormorants trained by Scrooge for nefarious purposes, and was instrumental in the solution of the Adventure of the Trained Cormorants which, because of its unsatisfactory solution — the doctor escaped — and the illustrious reputations of all three men involved, still awaits elaboration in The Whole Art of Detection. 

In other words, Chalker is outright declaring that his Scrooge exists in the same universe as Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, and specifically as the Great Game-rooted pastiche collection The Whole Art of Detection. And further, he is very very strongly implying that Scrooge McDuck and Sherlock Holmes once teamed up to fight Doctor Fu Manchu. 

…now, my good friend Joe Torcivia (among others) is notorious for slipping titles to nonexistent "bonus chapters" of the Life and Times of $crooge McDuck in his Disney scripts, and more power to him, but you can't beat that as unseen past Scrooge adventures go. You just can't. 

So anyway, having acknowledged where this book came from, there remains to analyze what it went to. Because it is not merely the precursor to Rosa's L&T, but rather its template. One doesn't want to diminish Don Rosa's own scholarly work, and I'm sure he made sure to pore over all those Barks references once again on his own power before he worked out his own version of Scrooge's biography, but… the fact is that the Chalker version of events lines up astonishingly well with the Rosa rendition. There are, of course, a few differences here and there (in The Empire-Builder from Calisota, Scrooge uses his damnably slow car to reach Duckburg; in the Informal Biography, he buys it shortly after settling in Duckburg), but for every minor difference there are identical leaps of logic that one cannot call coincidences. 

This, by the way, accounts for the suspicious similarities between the L&T and the DuckTales episode Once Upon a Dime, which were big enough that Rosa's protests of never having watched it failed to convince. The DT writers were borrowing from the same source, is all. The biggest smoking gun between Rosa and DT (the identical conflation of Scrooge's own Mississippi days with the 1870 steamboat race between his Uncle Pothole and Porker Hogg) is actually a Chalker invention. 

There are, of course, also some marked differences. Chalker is reluctant to make stuff up, when it isn't ludicrous three-way literary crossovers, and so Scrooge's parents and sisters are nonentities. Borrowing from the classic Sherlock Holmes vision of a restrictive canon rather than expansive one, he also limits his sources to stories written and drawn by Barks, featuring Scrooge, and printed in Uncle Scrooge — that is to say that Scrooge backups in other books are null-and-void even if they're by Barks. Only somewhat less strange is his exclusion of the early Big Threes of Barks's Scrooge, Christmas on Bear Mountain, Voodoo Hoodoo and The Old Castle's Secret, which he holds to be 'obviously apocryphal' due to Scrooge's characterization. 

This? Nah. Never happened. Totally irrelevant

to the Carl Barks canon. Don't be ridiculous.

And, much like with Rosa, Chalker has his little exceptions and quid pro quos. Like Rosa, he lets in the Vic Lockman-written The Invisible Intruder — and his stammered justifications for this 'crime' are, I think, trying too hard: it's a Carl Barks-drawn story where we see Scrooge earn his #1 Dime, of sodding course you're not going to overlook it when writing a biography of Scrooge. 

Way weirder than this very forgivable sidestep is the fact that, and for the life of me I cannot figure this out, this random Tony Strobl four-pager from 1964 (one which introduces a non-Goldie love interest for Scrooge, no less) makes the cut. I mean, I, myself, am delighted, because my personal Duck canon is a gigantic jungle that includes things like the DuckTales plush commercial from 1986 and the unlicensed Eastern European comic-strip where Mickey rivaled with Popeye for the affections of Betty Boop. In rhyme. …But in Chalker's draconian Canon, it's a bit jarring, is all. 

So at any rate, this means that all the stuff about Castle McDuck isn't in Chalker — for Chalker, it's the intact Castle in Old Castle's Secret that is the aberration, and the ruins seen in Hound of the Whiskervilles that is the real thing; whereas for Rosa it's the reverse — and neither, of course, is the Bombie the Zombie plotline. 

Amusingly, Chalker is on the other hand less quick to dismiss Scrooge's offhand mentions of improbable deals he made in the past: "that time he sold wind to Dutch windmills" is absolutely included in the Informal Biography's timeline of Scrooge's life. It almost saddens me that his claim that he learned to speak Bengali "when he was selling maps to Marco Polo" stretches Chalker's willing suspension of disbelief just a bit too far, I'd have loved to see him try to work that out. (It's not as though you couldn't imagine Scrooge getting embroiled with H. G. Wells's Time Machine, could you, Mr Sherlock Holmes vs Fu Manchu?)

The real big difference between the Scrooge and Don Rosa versions of Scrooge's life, however, is not in those details, but rather in the fact that Scrooge is already a millionaire when he arrives in the Klondike. Faced with the facts that Scrooge dug for diamonds in the Transvaal, and an offhand mention of his owning a diamond mine there in the present day, Chalker concludes that Scrooge successfully struck it rich there and then, and only continued living the sourdough life for a few years more because adventure is just in his blood. 

Which… granted, it seems anticlimatic and weird and Wrong that Scrooge would make his money anywhere but in the Klondike (and Chalker tries to preserve some dignitiy for Scrooge's Dawson City days by declaring that this was where he became a billionaire), but on the other hand, one of the most questionable aspects of Don Rosa's L&T has always been the almost Donald levels of bad luck Scrooge is required to endure so that he can simultaneously not come across as incompetent for missing his ride to wealth several times over, and still not get rich in any of his adventures before the big one in White Agony Creek.

And after all, Scrooge is still traveling the world and adventuring in the 'present day', even though he's a billionaire many times over. No reason many of his "past" adventures couldn't have been in the same spirit, I suppose. 

After wrapping up its biography of Past Scrooge, the book interestingly tries to hack together a working timeline of Barks's present-day Duckburg, most strikingly with the Beagle Boys. It mixes and matches and reorders freely, notably coming up with the amusing idea that the Beagle Boys' very first confrontation with Scrooge was Seven Cities of Cibola, a notion which is obviously wrong but also strangely fascinating. This section includes chapters on Scrooge, on his more morally dubious actions, and on the "big three" of his rogues gallery — the Beagle Boys, Magica De Spell and Flintheart Glomgold, in that order — followed by a rundown of other villains. Interestingly, Snake McViper (the Cattle King incarnation of the Pig-Faced Villain) is construed to be a member of the McViper clan from Mystery of the Ghost Town Railroad, even though those McVipers were dognoses, instead of being more reasonably rationalized as an alias of good old Argus McSwine. 

This is also the book from which Don Rosa plucked his idea that Scrooge, Donald and HDL remained so alert and unchanged throughout Barks's stories (which must surely span several years) due to having taken a sip of the Fountain of Youth in That's No Fable!. Chalker, who, unlike Don Rosa, doesn't compress the Ducks' timeline into just the 1950's and accepts that Barks's stories took place over the 25-year period in which he wrote them, goes farther with his notion than Rosa ever dared to, and posits that in most of their appearances, Huey, Dewey and Louie are no longer children at all, but simply adults in unaging childlike bodies, accounting for their unusually mature attitude. It's a vaguely blasphemous notion, but as a nutjob fan theory I think I kinda love it. 

So… that's the Informal Biography. Vaguely infuriating in all sorts of ways (not least its tiresome annotations system), but it is the immediate missing link between Arthur Conan Doyle and Don Rosa, and the importance of that cannot be underestimated. Plus, it's a fun read. As fun as the L&ToSMD? Probably not (except for that bit about Dr Fu Manchu, which, but holy hell I want to read that). But fun. 

Post-Scriptum

• As you can see from the cover above, the title is An Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck. Why every second-hand dealer on the Internet refers to it as just Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck, I cannot tell you. 

“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. 

“Storkules in Duckburg”

Well, whadayaknow? Our next review still has to do with Hercules! Kind of.

This latest episode of DuckTales 2017 isn't the best, but definitely ends up on the better side of the series' decidedly hit-and-miss episodes. Also, I'm not qualified enough to be sure (having never seen the film myself), but I think Ghostbusters enthusiasts may particularly enjoy it. The structure seems very similar.

This episode is primarily about Bobby Moynihan's Louie Duck, which I like. My ranking of the DT17 kids is probably {{Webby > Louie > Huey > Dewey}} — in a show where Scrooge's adventurousness is upped both to ape Don Rosa and to avoid accusations of excessive pro-capitalism, Louie is the one who is most often allowed to be amusingly greedy and miserly. Not that he's just Young-Scrooge, of course — he's much more of a spender and bon viveur than his great-uncle. But the point is, I like Louie. And this episode provided a good character arc for him, as he learns the realities of what being a businessman means, concretely. 

But, of course, Chris Diamantopoulos's Storkules (introduced last season in The Spear of Selene) is the other focus of the episode. He's amusing, although beyond Diamantopoulos's skillful scenery-chewing, and the repetitive gags you can squeeze out of his hero-worship of Donald, I'm not entirely sure what he brings to show that Launchpad didn't. Don't get me wrong, this repeat appearance was fun (I do believe I liked him better here than I did in Spear), but I'm undecided on the ending's implication that Storkules is going to become a semi-regular in Duckburg like Gyro or Fenton. 

It is amusing to see the gag of the Ancient Greek characters relating info through ornate jars carry on from Spear, however. I wonder if the whole thing is a direct allusion to the manner of the narration of Disney's Hercules, or if it's more-or-less-coincidental. 

And he third big thing in the episode (and I know it's all beginning to sound like a lot, but if there's one thing to say for Storkules in Duckburg, it's that it's well-written; all of this comes together very nicely) are, of course, the Harpies. Their designs seem to be a mix between Romano Scarpa's Harpies, Carl Barks's Larkies, and the DuckTales Classic redesign of the latter. 

Far from the verbose oddball-gourmets of Barks, and despite their wearing jewelry, they are here reimagined as nonsentient monsters who single-mindedly try to steal what their victims love most. It's not a bad concept for a DuckTales monster, and I'll give props to the writers for making them agents of the Gods' wrath like they were in the original myths, as opposed to independent agents… but I have two problems with this. 

The first is that, come on, you can't introduce most-prized-possession-seeking monsters into Duckburg (nay, in McDuck Manor!!) and not have them go after the Lucky Dime. The second is that, well, the chatty comic Larkies are iconic and for good reason, and this feels like another Gyro Gearloose situation — the new version's neat, but has diddly-squat to do with the equally-neat original and spoils an opportunity to see them in animation. 

Still, I did like them on their own terms, as I said; and if it had to happen to one particular Barks monster, best it be them than, say, Smorgasbord, since we did see relatively accurate Barksian Harpies in the 1987 series. 

In terms of easter-eggs and mythology-gags (on which DuckTales 2017 has always heavily rely to garner the goodwill/forgiveness of comic-fans), the sharp-eyed may notice, among the portraits in Donald's houseboat, a variation on Barks's famous Tiny-Boat Composition that we have seen iterated over and over and over with a variety of characters and backgrounds, though I'll be darned if I have any idea what it's called;

…one of Storkules's crates bears the words “Donald Fan Art” (marking what is probably the first in-universe use of the word 'fan art' in Ducklore, though I could be wrong); Cape Suzette is mentioned (though I don't know if that still counts as an easter-egg at this point); and, most importantly, the entire climax has the Harpies lift Donald's Houseboat into the air, in a repeat of what they did with the Argo in Barks's Golden Fleecing. I'm a big fan of this, being a big fan of flying boats in general. (You can blame my younger self's repeated viewings of Peter Pan and Return to Neverland.)

Another thing I'd like to note, though it's highly subjective, is that DuckTales 2017's world (call it the 2017 Continuum, Earth-17, whatever) is finally beginning to feel organic. The episode features the returns of Funso's Fun-Zone, Dewey Dew-Night, the aforementioned Cape Suzette, driving that can only be attributed to an unseen Launchpad, cameos by Miss Quackfaster, Glomgold and Officer Cabrera… and where in The Shadow War such things felt like "special winks to the audience" (hey, remember this? and this? and that thing?), here it all mostly all felt natural. Perhaps it's just time, or perhaps the screenwriters are getting better at screenwritin'; probably a little bit of both. Their treatment of Donald is certainly improving, at least, pointing towards the skill-honing hypothesis. 

Beyond that, this episode has all of DuckTales 2017's usual strengths: lively character animation, as seen in the particularly-memorable screenshot above; great voice acting all-around; witty banter. The score continues to be reliable, even if I didn't pick out any particular heights, unlike in the previous episode, The Ballad of Duke Baloney, which had one of the best soundtracks in the series yet (rivaled only, I think, by that of The Shadow War). 

Unless you find the DuckTales 2017 nephews obnoxious (in which case you'd better wait for the Scrooge-centric Christmas episode we've been promised… looks like it'll be a hoot!), I'm definitely recommending this episode. 

Mandatory Post-Scriptum:

…Does Webby look cute in her "1950's family man" outfit, or what?