“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!

“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. 

“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. 

“My Second Million” And Its Translation

I love Disney Comics, and I love period dramas, and I love ventures into the pre-1947 life of $crooge McDuck — indeed, my only beef with Don Rosa's masterful Life and Times series has always been Rosa's conscious decision to not only limit himself to Barks, but to try and write a 'definitive' biography with precious few holes for other authors' tales to fill. Thus it stands to reason that I would love All of $crooge McDuck's Millions, the miniseries which New IDW have elected to start off their run of Uncle $crooge with. 

But no. 

It's terrible. 

The series itself — it's a little on the bland side already. I'd previously read a few chapters of it, though not this one, either in French or in their online ComiXology format. But a little blandness is nothing some snappy, euphonious dialogue can't solve. That had, ever since they began, been the philosophy of American translations of Disney comics; and while I don't condone some of the heavier changes performed by these 'freeform' translators in the past, there's no doubt who I'd pick between them and dialogue that sounds like it's been written by a goddamn robot. 

And oh, does the IDW version of All of $crooge McDuck's Millions (renamed Uncle Scrooge: My First Millions in this printing, in perhaps one of its wisest decisions; mark that noting something title's is slightly less terrible than it could have been is probably the faintest praise anyone's ever damned anything with) ever read like it was written by a goddamn robot. Let me demonstrate. 

So I'll make a cursory note that Paolo Mottura's art is what it always is, namely that the background and shadowwork are extremely impressive at times, the characters' on-modelness is sometimes less so, and overall it's pretty solid. This isn't its most impressive example or anything, but it's soearing leagues above Fausto Vitaliano's frankly insipid plot, and more to the point grafting this terrible English dialogue on it feels rather like surgically giving a pig's tail to the Marsupilami. 

But so then, the dialogue. To begin with, Scrooge's line is fine, I guess, but ‘hard’ vs. ‘thrilling’ is hardly the most effective dichotomy. Might I suggest, for example, ‘tough’ instead of ‘hard’? Mostly however, it is Donald's line which fails horribly. “The second part of the soap opera is now beginning”? Who's saying this, Donald Duck, or David Attenborough? Try to imagine Clarence Nash saying this in his Donald voice. Just you try it. The line even fails on its own terms — “soap opera” is an amusing turn of phrase that cannot ever, ever, ever sound refined; sticking it in the same sentence as a by-the-book construction such as “is now beginning” simply will not do. 

The awful thing, of course, being that this line could be very funny. Comparing Scrooge's tales to a soap opera from within a serialized format of storytelling is delightfully metafictional. But you can't even think of all that, because your eyes hurt from how badly that thought is translated into words. 

And the stilted, robotical, unsayable-by-real-humans dialogue does not

ever

ever

goddamn

STOP. 

I've heard people defending the so-called ‘Fresh And New’ translation style by proposing that the higher-ups of IDW (or, indeed, Disney itself) may have ordered the simplification of translations to better appeal to younger audiences. To this I say, firstly, humbug, children haven't been the core audience for Scrooge McDuck in the united states in forever; secondly, if you dare bring up DuckTales 2017, I'll counter that even within this show's fandom, the kids are primarily interested in the triplets and Webby, whereas the Scrooge fans are on the older side; thirdly, I will kindly remind you that children love wordplay very much and stilted Grammarbot.exec speech less so. 

And fourthly, the Fresh And New translations even fail at being educational. Oftentimes they'll use English phrases wrong or just make them up. For example…

…ten second's Googling, if nothing else, will inform you that a telegraphic message is called a telegram. The telegraph is the machine you use to send it. See, this is the kind of detail you really don't want to get wrong if your aim is to have simple, grammatically-unfailing dialogue to aid and educate youngsters. 

And…

…TWO IN A ROW? HAVE YOU NO SHAME? HAVE YOU NO CONCEPT OF MERCY?! 

What we have here, in both panels, are attempts at witty dialogue. Or, rather, they are the charred husk of what was once witty dialogue in Vitaliano's original, mangled beyond repair by the Fresh And New treatment. “I smell the smell of [smth]” is not something anyone has ever said or ever will say, thank heavens. And it's painfully clear “Nothing can stop progress or my wealth!” used to be a wacky spin on the “You can't stop progress!” proberb in Italian that lost any fizz or pizzazz when the Fresh And New translator failed to consider that, A), the saying is less readily recognizable if you swap out 'you' for 'nothing', and B), “wealth” is not some sort of progress you can “stop”. 

For reference, here's how I (an unpaid amateur) would have done it. 

I think anyone with a taste for funny comics will agree it's already bounds ahead of the printed version. And I'm not even saying this is that good for localization — that first one is a little unwieldy, I kind of wanted to do something in the second one with the visual of Scrooge's ever-rising curve, and, of course, the lettering is all over the place. Yet in all humility I feel pretty confident in stating that by most metrics, it's already bounds ahead of the printed version. 

These two here are clients to whom Scrooge is giving a refund. First, “that's not enough!” and “that's right” are as boilerplate as you get. But also: unless Alistair here is a police officer, the line “I should put you in jail!” is nonsensical (it should at least be: “I should have you put in jail”). And unless he is a good friend of Scrooge (he isn't), you just can't let him call Scrooge Scrooge in the way he called him Paperone in Italian. That's as bad as those children's books where people like the Beagle Boys or even total strangers would refer to him as “Uncle Scrooge”!

And on, and on, and on. Mistake after blunder after blandness after nonsense, right up until the last panel…

…where even all of Mottura's shadowwork can do nothing to obscure the sheer fact that casual use of the word “businessduck” goes against everything we know of how anthropomorphic species work in the Scrooge McDuck universe. Fercrissake, one of the most famous and influential Scrooge stories ever is called Only a Poor Old Man, and you think terms like businessduck are a thing? What did the translator use for reference, My Little Pony? 

…

…so yeah. My Second Million, IDW edition. It's terrible. I've been trying to articulate just how lowly I think of it, and I think I have it now: if for some reason I ever want to reread the story, it's the ComiXology version I'll pick up. It would still be a travesty if a publisher tried printing it in a regular book, but it's still better than this version. Let me repeat that, for it bears repeating: this is a situation where the cheap ComiXology translation is significantly superior to the printed IDW version! THIS SHOULD NOT BE A THING THAT HAPPENS! Here's the first panel in the ComiXology version. Compare the IDW one I showcased above. The dialogue ain't Oscar Wilde, but good lord is it better here than it was there. 

And for our traditional Post-Scriptum, something else that irritates me about the so-called ‘Fresh And New’ translations, and which the ComiXology versions didn't get wrong: I didn't mention it earlier because it can't be the translator's fault per se, but what the sugar-bowl is up with the new font? For whatever reason, to go along with the change of staff, it was decided to use a completely different, and (if I had to choose) significantly uglier, font, than the one Disney comics had been using for decades. Compare the two version of the opening splah panel.

“Mirror Mirror”

Mirror Mirror is a DuckTales fanfiction written by a fan going by “soulful-sin” (fanfiction writers usually have just the silliest name; this isn't a special case). More precisely, its appeal lies in that it is a crossover of sorts between the classic Duck universe and DuckTales 2017. 

(An unrelatd, but also very entertaining, fanmade take 

on the ‘Webby meets Webby’ premise.)

The basic plot is that the 1987 version of Webby Vanderquack is dared by the triplets to touch a creepy old mirror Scrooge has in his archives. Naturally, the mirror turns out to be a cursed artifact, which transports her to alternate dimension — a strange world where the boys have different personalities, where it's already the 21st century, and where she is herself a strong, independent adventurer rather than the meek little girl who has to stow away if she wants to go on any adventures at all with Scrooge and the boys. The mirror then gets shattered, trapping Webby in the DT17 universe, and Scrooge has to make a deal with Magica De Spell to repair it. 

The story certainly has a lot going for it. 

For one thing, all the characters, from both series, are written perfectly in-character (it's impossible not to hear Louie-17 as Bobby Moynihan or Scrooge-87 as Alan Young), and the crossover unfolds very nicely. The story manages to make you care about classic-Webby even with the other, universally-considered-more-interesting Webby running around at the same time. Both worlds are, in general, rendered very faithfully — with the irritating, borderline-inexplicable exception that Duckburg is persistently misspelled as “Duckberg”. 

Soulful-sin also tentatively takes a stab at a possible return of Lena De Spell, which may not be the most imaginative, but allows for emotional stuff between her and Webby. (For good or ill, the story has a lot of ‘emotional stuff’. No romance per se, though the author stated their love of the Webby/Lena pairing elsewhere, but just general angst.)

There are, I think, two blunders in this story's conceit, beyond the fact that the writing, while solid, is not quite of professional quality. The first is a surprising absence of the humor so essential to both DuckTales series' appeal. The second is that, forced to acknowledge DT17's Della plotline, Soulful-sin felt compelled to clarify Della's fate in the prime timeline as well, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with… anything. Not only is Family Ties ignored (which is odd, considering its very clear parallels with the DT17 story), but the Mirror Mirror version implies that Scrooge was indeed adventuring with Della around the time of the triplets' birth, a blatant DT17 contamination that in no way fits the classic timeline. 

Still, the DuckTales fanfiction community isn't exactly of Harry Potter level in scale, and we should take what we can get. Mirror Mirror is definitely on the upper end of Duck fanfiction as it exists for now, and if you've ever wondered what the two worlds crashing into each other might look like, and don't mind a healthy helping of sappy angst, it's a pleasant enough read.

Ye Olde Post-Scriptum

Three other weird decisions by Soulful-sin that I fail to understand: 17-Magica swears a lot (though it's never taken down word for word; we're just told 'she cursed', 'she said a string of very bad words Mrs Beakley certainly wouldn't approve of', etc.). Classic-Scrooge is orders of magnitude less wealthy than 17-Scrooge……er, why? And finally, there are repeated reference to this post-Shadow War story taking place in 2017, as opposed to the canonical 2018. No idea why. Since there was a Christmas episode halfway through the season, one would presume it was obvious that the year's changed, but apparently not to Soulfun-sin. 

“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? 

“The Most Dangerous Game Night”

(Note how skillfully I deny this title its aggravating faux-clever punctuation. I may like it overall, but DuckTales 2017 has many flaws, and the usually-terrible titles are one of them. There's been very few decent ones so far.)

So being a Duck fan, I have dutifully followed Disney's attempt at doing to the Disney Comics Unvierse what all the big boys with their superhero comics are doing to theirs — e.g., make a reboot that brings in the fans of the original but liberally changes characters and tone to draw in a fresh audience. 

DT17 is strange and occasionally-irritating, but it's very well-made, often funny, sometimes moving, and it's clear from Francisco Angones's blog that the people involve care. Unlike brave, unfortunate GeoX over at Duck Cartoons Revue, I don't have to force myself to watch new episodes. 

Case in point, the Season 2 opened that dropped in yesterday, The Most Dangerous Game Night.

This was… a weird episode to begin a new season with. For one thing, it's your standard 25-minutes fare, whereas the Season 1 pilot, the abysmally-titled Woo-oo!, was double-length. This is unfortunate, as the DuckTales 2017 writers tend to do much better with double-length episodes than regular ones — Woo-oo! and The Shadow War, to me, were probably among the best (if not the best) of Season 1, simply because the plots didn't feel quite as rushed as they usually do. 

Moreover, it hardly sets up anything at all. It has some character development for Louie, true, but that comes to a natural (and well-enacted) conclusion by the episode's close. Aside from the ill-defined monsters-of-the-week that are the Gyropuddlians, a tribe of microscopic cavemen living in McDuck Manor, the episode features only the established cast. Complete, it must be said, with Donald Duck, which bodes well for this season (as Donald was much too often absentee in the previous one). 

Speaking of the whole cast, refreshingly, the episode remembered to include Duckworth. This show's version of Duckworth, as you may recall, is a ghost, and in this episode they're drawing more on the consequences of the "ghost butler" idea than they are doing anything with Duckworth's general character… but to be fair, his brief, ghost-gags-based appearance was funny. As is his relationship with Mrs Beakley, continued from their brief interaction in his first episode. 

As for Gyro, it is necessary, if you want to get anything out of him at all, to accept that he is not Gyro in this show, but rather his evil twin-brother from another dimension. Seriously, dye his hair pink and you'd pretty much get a slightly-more-subdued Mad Ducktor.

Mad Ducktor being Gyro's very own, delightfully-insane Mr Hyde

from a series of Italian Duck Avenger adventures. Look him up. And let's hope

the (sigh) Fresh And Modern folks, somewhere in the inscrutable

recesses of their heretic skulls, find the inspiration to bring him 

to American shores while doing him justice. 

In this episode, his determination to become the God-King of the Gyropuddlians using his Micro-Phone/shrinkray is a particularly stark contrast to Gyro's attitude, never anything but kindly, towards the Microducks when he crossed their path in the DuckTales Classic episode where they appeared. But as far as this "megalomaniac mad-scientist barely held in check" character goes, the writers and actor wring a lot of humor out of him, here and elsewhere. 

Modulo the villainous tendencies, this episode even dispenses with Gyro's cool, 'snooty' Season 1 and brings back some of the joyful exuberance of his comic self. This iteration of DT17 Gyro may not be the Gyro we usually know, but it's not hard to imagine him starring in Think-Box Bollix or Hobblin' Goblins. 

…Oh, I figure I should probably say something about that opening scene. 

The Indiana Jones ripoff as Scrooge & Co. retrieve the Idol of Cibola is obviously a nod to the fact that the similar sequence in Barks's Seven Cities of Cibola inspired the opening scene of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. So this adaption of the Cibola tale (albeit brief) that redesigns things to look more like their Indiana Jones counterparts is bringing things amusingly full-circle. 

Thing is, the novelty of this was largely lost on me, as it was, I think, on most other Disney comic fans. That Barks's treasure-hunt stories directly inspired Spielberg & Lucas for Indiana Jones is, I suppose, kind of cool to those who first hear it, but it is "entry-level trivia" for Disney comics afficionados, of about the same level as "Barks kept drawing scripts for Disney comics even after he retired" or "the Phantom Blot's face is meant to look like Walt Disney's……… probably?". 

Still, I suppose it will have looked clever and witty to new viewers brought to Duckdom by DuckTales 2017 and who are only now starting to catch up on their classics and the associated lore. This is a joke for which I just wasn't the intended audience.

As for the "woah — wait-what? — aaaaah!" joke that goes with it, it is, in itself, well-executed, and it furthers Louie's character arc in the episode, but… people, showing amusing self-awareness about the medium like this would work better if every single adventure story you've done so far wasn't already full of that sort of ironic self-awareness. For God's sake, on his very first adventure in Episode 1 of Season 1, Dewey was already acting casual about a "basic death-trap". 

…and that's a wrap on my review of The Most Dangerous Game Night. I'll be back soon with more. 

“The Case of the Sinister Robot”

And our mystery Disney comic is The Case of the Sinister Robot!

Told ya you wouldn't guess.

Also known as W MM 113-02 to the alien tome of eldritch lore that is the INDUCKS database, The Case of the Sinister Robot is a 1967 story from Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse #113, reprinted in #202 of the same. History has forgotten the name of its writer, as it often does when that writer wasn't someone people care about (like Carl Barks) or someone too blinkin' weird to ever be confused with anyone else (like Vic Lockman). 

The story is extremely obscure, as are most 1960's Mickey Mouse stories, especially those not drawn by Paul Murry, which is extremely unfair; nothing against Murry, individually, but Strobl here does just as good in his own style. I stumbled upon it (get used to that phrase, I “stumbled upon” most of the stuff I'm going to be reviewing here) quite recently and found it quite delightful. It's very 1960's, very goofy, but also a compelling sci-fi story in its own right. 

The best way I can describe it is, its plot is a house of cards standing on a table of clichés, but heck, are the cards pretty. 

The introduction sets up a nice and looney mystery as Mouseton is wracked by all mechanical devices going nuts. 

This culminates in gravity itself failing, and Mickey, Goofy and Chief O'Hara wading to the Mayor's office like astronauts in space. (Most puzzling is the Chief's line that he thought Mickey might know what's going on — Mickey solves the crazy occurrences, but he's rarely behind them…) 

The Mayor himself is not characterized very strongly — but then, he never is — the most you can say about the Mayor of Mouseton as a character is that he was a pink elephant for some reason in a couple of 1980's stories. Duckburg's Pig-Mayor, he is not. But while the Mayor himself is just a random mustached dognose, we do get a very amusing picture of the scientists and authorities he has gathered to solve the problem, where both the unknown writer's dialogue, and Strobl's art, really shine. 

Who would dare to look at that panel and call Strobl a "mediocre cartoonist" (which seems to be everyone's unspoken opinion of him, if they have one at all)? Props, also, to the coloring department. Not always the most competent lot at the time, and they do inexplicably dye Chief O'Hara's hair brown here, but the choice of colors for the costumes of the scientist flows very well, and the reddish-brown mustache for Mustache Guy in the middle is perfect. 

I mentioned Unknown Writer earlier, and again, what a shame it is that we don't know who that guy was. This story's premise is amusing enough, but it's the execution that makes it shine: "machines going backwards" could be played by-the-book with no particular punch, but the fast pacing allows it to really hit its mark. I did not expect to laugh out loud at an American, 1960's Mickey Mouse comic book, but Unknown Writer proved me wrong. 

And at the same time, he develops a good mystery. It begins with not-Doctor-Syclocks here, mysteriously unaffected by the anti-gravity ray, who manages to shake off Mickey and the police…

…features the input of Shamrock Bones (a character who was funnier in theory than in practice, I often find, but here he doesn't overstay his welcome)…

(I dig the orange-and-green colors cheme for his checkered suit. Much more memorable than the usual Sherlock-Holme-brown. Also, notice: "peformed" instead of "performed". It's a credit to Disney comics that this is the only time I ever saw a blatant typo in a Disney speech balloon.)

…and leads our heroes to the Mouseton City Dump, where the sci-fi portion of the story begins in earnest as a mysterious energy being absorbs surrounding junk and builds itself a robot body out of it. 

(…) 

The glowing-ball-of-energy form is cool, and never really explained; as for Kettlehead the Robot itself, it looks very distinctive, as do all the other robots in the story. 

After another rather cool bit where the entrance to the villain's typically 1960's, stainless-steel underground lair is inside a wrecked old car, Mickey and Goofy begin to look for the mad scientist behind the whole scheme, and finds that there isn't one. Instead, our antagonist is a robot himself, bearing the delightfully nonsensical name of “X - Y + 2”. Wounded in his honor after he was retired due to his computational system being faulty, X-Minus has turned his genius to the task of repurposing all human technology, driving all of mankind to madness. He then plans to take over. 

X-Minus is not actually the most interestingly-designed robot in the lair — it's telling that the cover for the story features his minion “0 = 4X”, and not himself — but he's very well-characterised. He's both clearly an insane robot, and a character rather than a mere bogeyman. 

(You have to admire how 0 = 4X is entirely about to disintegrate them, then Mickey says "you can't! that's murder!", and the robots just… opine and desist from any murderous intent. It's funny for how unexpected it is, and on top of that, it actually makes sense if you stop and ponder it. After all, we all know the Three Laws of Robotics ought to prevent our antagonistic androids from actually planning to destroy anyone — and we know that X-Minus is broken — so I propose that it seemed like a right plan to him because it genuinely did not register for him that disintegrating people was murder until Mickey pointed it out; at which point he remembered his programming and thought of something else.) 

I won't spoil it here, but the reveal of the Mysterious Not-Doctor-Syclocks from earlier is also very clever and creative, and something I don't think I've ever seen done with another fictional robot, so points for that. The final fate of X-Minus is also not bad, though the denouement in general feels a bit rushed. 

Oh, one also has to love X-Minus's "last words" before he's powered down:

(Said every ‘Doctor Who’ villain ever. Or they should)

And there you have it. 

The Case of the Sinister Robot seriously has all the qualities of the classic Gottfredson, Scarpa or Casty formula for a Mickey story: wacky goings-on - compelling mystery - interesting sci-fi concept behind it - snappy humor. Seriously, find a used copy or something, and give the thing a read. 

I don't care what preconceptions you may have about a 1967, Tony Strobl-drawn Mickey Mouse story. Read it. I promise you won't regret it.