“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. 

“Eighth Doctor Adventures” - Part 1

In vaguely anachronistic order, I have begun reading BBC Books's Eighth Doctor Adventures from the second half of the 1990's, the medium by which Paul McGann's take as the title part in Doctor Who was to be developed after his planned TV season went bust. (I say "was to be" because there is heated rivalry between those who consider the Doctor Who Magazine comic-strips, the BBC Books Eighth Doctor Adventures, or the Big Finish audioplay Eighth Doctor Adventures the official continuation of the Eighth Doctor's story, being that the three accounts are often as irreconciliable as those things get in Doctor Who.)

The Eight Doctor Adventures have a complicated reputation, but for the moment I don't find them nearly as bad as people say they are. So:

Terrance Dicks's The Eight Doctors is often described as "bad fanfiction". I wouldn't say "bad" — but it's very, very obvious that it is "fanfiction" when compared to the real novels that were to come, the ones with an actual narrative structure, the one with an actual story that isn't just a reflection/"greatest hits compilation" of preexisting episodes. You know what, though? I like fanfiction quite a bit. 

What The Eight Doctors does most of all is try to be a sequel to The TV Movie, The Trial of a Time Lord and The Five Doctors simultaneously, and take that opportunity to smooth over continuity issues in those two stories. The way this enterprise is disguised as a story is extremely clunky, yes, but not enough credit is given to the fact that it's a pretty good attempt to make sense of those two stories. I did not believe it was possible to simplify the Valeyard as much as this does. 

The characterization is somewhat weaker. The past Doctors are done well enough, with the potential exception of the Seventh, who is sadly in his terminally unfunny Virgin New Adventures incarnation and whose story doesn't really lead anywhere. But… for one thing, it's a truism that no one really knew what to do with Rassilon until the new series recast him as a straight-up villain in The End of Time; he was dangling on the fence between good and evil, not in an interesting sense of moral ambiguity some much as in "the writers themselves aren't sure if he's a villain or not, and therefore try to sound as noncommital as possible". Add to that the even greater confusion on whether he's dead or a god or a ghost or an artificial intelligence or what in Gallifrey's "present-day", and it's no surrpsie that his Deus Ex Machinesque appearance here is nothing if not confusing. 

And the Eighth Doctor? A blank slate, very self-consciously. Dicks wipes his memory at the beginning of the story, to make sure he doesn't actually have to do any characterization on him. This is a patently stupid move — you can't have the main character of your new book series as a nonentity in the first book — and if you're going to do it anyway, you definitely shouldn't do it by having him lose his memory again after The TV Movie was already all about an amnesiac Doctor. That's just lazy. 

New companion Samantha Jones is not bad, at least. Some people think she's annoying, but not me. 

Now there's a novel. Perhaps my favorite of the Who novels I've read so far, Vampire Science actually succeeds in being a sequel (a good sequel) to The TV Movie, even sharing its San Francisco setting. It has all the good parts of that film (chiefly the slightly gothic atmosphere and the Eighth Doctor's character; also a campy-yet-scary villain, though not the same one) and none of the bad parts or occasional clumsiness. Sam is better than ever, the Doctor is fantastic… and it's also a heckuva good vampire story. The worldbuilding and characterization of the story's vampires is excellent; tasteful unique without at all trying to be a radical reimagining. 

The "head vampiress", Johanna Harris is a complex and immensely likable presence throughout the story, and the way her plotline plays out is full of twists and turns and unique ideas and defied expectations. After five seasons of Steven Moffat, it's also nice to have a sympatheitc villainess who isn't either koo-koo or trying to shag the Doctor (not that I hate all, or even most, of the various characters of that description; Missy's a fantastic version of the Master, and played to perfection; but it does get tiresome). 

Author Jonathan Blum also took the opportunity to canonize his earlier, unlicensed fanfilm Time Rift by having his character from there, Brigadier Kramer, appear in it. I can but applaud this, for Time Rift, terrible picture quality aside, is a very good piece of television, which it is not hard at all to imagine as a real 1980's episode of the series. This despite my apathy to Kramer as a character, who is little more than “the Brigadier, but American and a woman”. 

Genocide is another very good novel, very much apiece with Vampire Science (if you like one, I can't see why you wouldn't like the other). The characters are once again quite good overall, though the cast is more uneven; we get another fantastic villainess, in a completely different register from Johanna (variety, Mr Moffat, variety), but her human henchman is very one-note, and I couldn't help but conflate him with the much-despised Krasko in my mind, which… isn't a good thing. The worldbuilding is marvelous, though. Truly marvelous. 

It is strangely prescient of things to come (¨cough cough¨ Time War ¨cough cough¨) in the sort of moral dilemmas with which it presents the Eighth Doctor, but somewhat bungles up the delivery thereof. It looks good on paper, but then the detail is added (for urgency) that the timeline will crumble and the universe cease to exist unless the Doctor acts, and thus there's only one real option left, and no moral quandary. Oh well, points for trying. 

I like the way this story does australopithecines as characters, also. I feel like this is largely how talking to australophithecines would go. 

War of the Daleks gets a lot of hate as another, even more egregious case of "hacky fanfiction" than The Eight Doctors. Not altogether deservedly. Yes, the story exists in part to retcon a bunch of previous ones, chiefly the destruction of Skaro in Remembrance of the Daleks, but, with apologies to all the people who love said event and wish it hadn't been so unceremoniously undone, bugger that. I love Skaro as a setting, and cheered when it became apparent the new televised series had picked up Peel's decision to bring it back. Is the way in which it was brought back a bit clunky? Yeah, but it was always going to be clunky, and Peel at least wrings some decent character moments for the Doctor and Davros out of this. 

Yes, did I mention the characters? The first half of War's plot is kind of nonsensical (the Thals' motivations are meandering and daft), but things pick up immensely once we land on the resurrected Skaro and a triplefold battle of wits gets underway between the Eighth Doctor, Davros and the Dalek Emperor. The Dalek Emperor (a hugely magnetic presence in his two only real screen appearances, one of which was yet to come when War was released) has never been better than here; far from just an archetype, he is a fully-realized character, as deep and complex as non-redeemed Daleks get. 

All in all, it's not perfect, and its retcons are more or less as clumsy as everyone says they are… but that excepted, this isn't a bad book at all. If you like stories about Daleks as characters with agencies, rather than mindless monsters (and sweet Rassilon I do), this is the one for you. 

Paul Magrs's The Scarlet Empress isn't actually as revolutionary and postmodern as it's made out to be. The setting and atmosphere of the planet Hyspero is no different than what the televised story would revisit in The Rings of Akhaten, for one thing. What it is is a slightly absurdist version of Arabian Nights In Space, and that's always fun, innit? 

The big attraction of The Scarlet Empress is of course the proper introduction into Doctor Who (the careful phrasing is firstly because she actually began as a solo character elsewhere, and secondly because she had even actually already encountered the Doctor, albeit in a long-forgotten short story) of Iris Wildthyme, the Doctor's timey-wimey old bat of a fellow Gallifreyan. A Time Lady who exists as a shameless, dingy parody of the Doctor, Iris draws her appeal from how very self-conscious she is of the aforementioned fact; she's not quite fourth-wall-aware in this story (she is elsewhere), but her relationship with the Doctor is precisely that of an affectionate parody personified meeting the original. The Doctor is vaguely irritated by her existence, and something keeps nagging at him that's not 'right' about her; she, for her part, keeps criticizing his various flaws, and shamelessly steals and corrupts his trademark features, but she also loves him deeply without daring to say so out loud. It's all very clever. 

The plot is kind of meandering, but that's to be expected in an Arabian Nights-esque stories. There are a few other choice meta-moments in the story (such as a merciless satire of "canonicity" as a concept: a Lewis Carrol-esque visit to an alien library whose bigoted librarian insists it contains all the knowledge about th euniverse, which must be read in chronological order or not at all, and who cannot bear to think about "unreal things" without a dozen reminders and qualifiers that they are "imaginary stories"), too, which do get a chuckle.