“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!

“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. 

“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.