The Great Steamboat Race

"The Great Steamboat Race," published in Uncle Scrooge #11 (Sept-Nov. 1955), is in my opinion one of Carl Barks' best stories. Which is saying a lot, since this is Carl Barks we're talking about.

What makes it great is how smoothly the various elements of the story--primarily the excitement of the race and the visual gags--all mesh together so perfectly. "The Great Steamboat Race" is a study in proper story construction for comic books.



The tale jumps off quickly with and argument between Scrooge McDuck and a guy (or rather an anthropomorphic pig) named "Horseshoe" Hogg. It seems that in 1870, their respective uncles had a steamboat race, with an ornate Southern mansion as the prize. But the boats both sank and the race was never finished. Hogg wants to do so, while Scrooge thinks its a waste of time and money.


Donald and the nephews sell Scrooge on the idea of being a Southern gentleman, so he finally agrees to the race. The idea is that the contestants will raise and repair the original steamboats (which have been sitting on the bottom of the Mississippi for 85 years), then finish the race from that point.

Hogg takes an extra-fast plane to the Mississippi and gets a jump on Scrooge. Also, Scrooge is reluctant to spend money on modern equipment to raise his steamboat.

What follows is a perfect mesh of adventure storytelling and comedy. The race is truly exciting, with the nephews coming up with a clever plan to quickly raise and repair Scrooge's steamboat on a strict budget. Scrooge's penny-pinching causes a setback at one point, but the old miser also shows he can also think on his feet when necessary.

At the same time, the gags--most of them centered around the moldy boat giving Scrooge sneezing fits--are truly funny. What tips the story over the edge into sheer brilliance is how the sneezing gags tie so seamlessly into the main plot. Scrooge's sneezes play a key role in winning the race. It also allows the story to come to a satisfying end with yet one more sneeze-based gag.

There's not a single wasted panel or a single moment that's doesn't tie into the primary plot. It's as if Barks took art, story and humor and performed a delicate operation to attach everything together so perfectly that you can't even see where the stitches are.

How to Get Rid of a Giant Octopus

The above cover image is Four Color #159 (August 1947) and it's a little bit on the scary side, isn't it?

That's because the story it's highlighting ("Donald Duck and the Ghost of the Grotto") has some very scary elements to it. But it also has both the humor and the sense of pure adventure that Carl Barks infused into the best of his stories, with the scary parts highlighting and adding to the adventure.

In fact, if you were teaching story construction to aspiring comic book writers/artists, I believe "Ghost of the Grotto" would need to be on your required reading list. It is a perfect story.

In the recent Fantagraphics volume that reprints this story, Barksian scholar Rich Kreiner tells us the story was inspired by a National Geographic article about finding and raising the wreck of a 17th Century English warship. From there, Barks mapped out a story involving not only a wrecked ship, but also a mysterious man in ancient armor; a centuries long mystery involving kidnapped children; a giant octopus and a maze of caverns running under a nigh-inaccessible reef.

It begins with Donald Duck and the nephews attempting to make a go out of collecting kelp in the waters around the West Indies. With the kelp beds going dry, Donald comes up with the idea of beaching his boat on Skull-Eye Reef, collecting the mounds of kelp that have built up inside the reef, then allow the high tide to carry the boat free.

But this soon uncovers an old shipwreck that was hidden under the kelp. An attempt to explore the wreck is cut short by the ill-tempered octopus that lives inside.



But a more serious problem arises when Dewey disappears--apparently the latest of a centuries-long series of kidnappings that happen once every fifty
years. Attempts to find Dewey in the caverns under the reef lead to a series of encounters with the mysterious man in armor.

All this sounds pretty grim, doesn't it? But it's not grim--despite the very real sense of danger that Barks builds up during the story. Because his detailed and eye-catching art is combined with often slapstick humor, keeping the tale from becoming unpleasantly disturbing. Even when lives are in danger, the humor continues to flow freely, complimenting the sense of adventure without ever contradicting it. From start to finish, "Ghost in the Grotto" flows along smoothly, both thematically and in terms of sound story construction, generating real suspense along with truly funny moments. The panels in which Donald and the nephews use spicy meat to get rid of the octopus is perhaps one of the most satisfying laugh-out-loud moments in the history of comics.

To quote Rich Kreiner: "The script is a closely choreographed ballet of aim and opposition, timed to the cycle of tides."

In the end, Dewey is rescued and the mystery is solved. And we--the readers--jump back to the first page to read it one more time--because it's just that good a story.

The Old Castle's Secret

Scrooge McDuck first appeared in a 1947 story titled "Christmas on Bear Mountain," written and drawn by the great Carl Barks. And I've just realized--now that I think about it--that I'm not sure if Barks had plans to bring Uncle Scrooge back for more appearances at that time, or if it just turned out that way.

Because whether Barks had realized it or not, he had created someone who would evolve into the greatest comic book character of all time. It would take awhile for Scrooge to fully develop his unique personality, but he'd get there eventually.

If nothing else, Scrooge proved to be an effective plot device to thrust Donald and the nephews into adventures. Scrooge's second appearance was in Four Color #189 (June 1948) in "The Old Castle's Secret," in which the rich water fowl does indeed get the boys into trouble.

To be fair, he does go along with them and share in the trouble. It seems Scrooge is on the verge of bankruptcy. (Barks hadn't come up with the concept of the Money Bin yet.) But there's hope. There's a treasure hidden in his ancestral castle in Scotland. Scrooge plans on bringing the boys to help him out as he scans the walls with an X-ray machine to find the treasure.

Of course, they'll all have to take care to avoid or fend off the ghost that haunts the castle.

This leads to the sort of delightful adventure that is representative of Carl Barks' storytelling genius. While Donald and Scrooge take turns panicking over apparently supernatural shenanigans, the three nephews keep their heads. When the Ducks are trapped on a balcony, it's the nephews who come up with a clever escape plan. When the boys are trapped outside the castle, they deduce the location of a secret tunnel that gets them back in. When they encounter the ghost--who is alternately either completely invisible or shows the shadow a skeleton against the wall, they... well, mostly they run. But eventually they gain the upper hand, catch the "ghost" and find the treasure.



Barks does here what he did in other Donald and/or Uncle Scrooge tales: He combines visual gags and slapstick humor with a strong "realistic" plot. This time around, he combines elements of a detective story with those of a horror story. This is combined with his clean and appealing visual artistry to turn "The Old Castle's Secret" into something very unique.

Scrooge McDuck hasn't yet developed the personality traits that would soon turn him into a comic book character whose pure awesomeness makes Batman cry and Wolverine beg for mercy. This time around, he allows the nephews to carry the bulk of the action. But it won't be long before he becomes awesome in his own right and--in the meantime--we'll still have enormous fun hanging out with him.

Jungles, Ducks and Stamp Collecting

There is a horrible gap in my blog. Early on, I did post about Scrooge McDuck. That post, by the way, is cited as a footnote in the Hungarian-language Wikipedia entry on Uncle Scrooge. HA! I'm big in Hungary! How many of you can say that?

But I don't think I've written about Carl Barks' Duck stories since then. I did review a Don Rosa Scrooge story a few years back, but nothing else about Carl Barks.

I've covered over a hundred Jack Kirby stories. I've covered several Sgt. Rock stories drawn by Russ Heath. But I've given the last of the three greatest comic book artists ever short shrift. That shall not stand.

Barks was a wonderful writer as well as artist. His Duck stories (whether involving Scrooge or Donald) were completely different from superhero stories, of course. In fact, it's my understanding that Barks wasn't a fan of the superhero genre.

But all the same, I think that Barks as a writer accomplished something very similar to what writers such as Edmond Hamilton or Otto Binder did in the superhero genre. He took the inherent logic of a world containing talking animals and slapstick humor, then used that logic to craft truly exciting adventure stories. Just as the writers working for Mort Weisinger took the various elements of Superman's universe and crafted internal logical stories out of that.

What brings Barks' stories to the top of the heap in terms of quality was a combination of his skills as writer and as artist. His art is so much fun you often can't stop looking at it. Barks used his visuals to tell a well-constructed adventure story without ever sacrificing humor. He showed honest emotion---sometimes exuberantly and sometimes with amazing subtlety.

His writing complemented this--humor combined with great characters and strong plots. It was an amazing balancing act--telling stories that meshed slapstick humor and funny animals with a sense of real danger and adventure. These elements always blended together perfectly, full of cleverness, wit and heart.

"Donald Duck and the Gilded Man" (Four Color #422--Sept/Oct 1952) is a great example of this. Donald has gotten into stamp collecting, hoping to make enough money to pay for a trip to British Guiana in hopes of finding a rare stamp worth $50,000.

A summery of the story would make it sound like it meanders without a clear purpose. The action goes from Duckburg to South America and back to Duckburg, as Donald and the nephews trail a letter with the rare stamp on its envelope into an uncharted jungle, have a run-in with a lost tribe and a supposedly mythical giant, then chase the letter as it is forwarded through the U.S. mail to one address after another. The story bookends with encounters with Donald's impossibly lucky cousin Gladstone Gander.

But it doesn't meander at all. It follows the logic of Donald's universe and everything that happens makes sense in that context. Gladstone's involvement at the beginning of the tale leads to Donald getting the money he needs to go to South America. The search for the stamp logically leads Donald and the nephews deep into the jungle. Their capture by the Gilded Man forces them to use their wits and whatever items they have at hand to escape. When something fortuitous happens to help them along, it doesn't seem contrived, but rather seems to be another perfectly logical part of the story.

Like just about every story Carl Barks wrote, it is stuffed with so much pure fun that it leaves you with an almost uncontrollable urge to tell other people about it.

They're not real--but, by golly, they should be: Part 1: The Two Scrooges

EBENEZER SCROOGE

We are indeed our brother's keepers. We really are responsible for each other--obligated to use whatever resources God gives us to help others.

No work of fiction makes this point more effectively than Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," first published in 1843. It's a story that's been told and re-told countless times--it may very well hold the record for the greatest number of movie and TV adaptations (both live action and animated). It seems as if every sit-com ever aired has done a "Christmas Carol" parody at some point.


You'd think by now we'd all be sick of it--that the plot would now come across as so corny that it would lose any dramatic effectiveness it once had.


But that's not the case at all. The story is as effective today as it was 165 years ago. This is largely because of Dickens' straightforward and witty prose and plot development. His skill with his characters is also responsible--Scrooge especially could have come across as mere caricature, but we have no trouble accepting him as a real person. After all this time, his journey from a prison of greed and selfishness to true redemption is still charged with honest emotion.


SCROOGE MCDUCK

I've posted stuff about Ebenezer's namesake before, but Scrooge McDuck is such a cool guy, it's a good idea to pay him an occasional return visit.





The great artist/writer Carl Barks created Scrooge for a Donald Duck story in Four Color Comics #178 (1947). In his initial appearance, Scrooge was pretty much a caricature of a stingy old man--existing largely as a plot devise to thrust Donald, Huey, Dewey and Louie into an adventure.

But the character hit a chord with readers and Scrooge returned for more stories, eventually getting his own comic book in 1952. His character grew more complex, though his basic character traits always remained intact. He was still stingy to the point of absurdity and he was often still consumed by greed. In fact, he keeps the bulk of his fortune in a giant money bin--in which he often goes for a swim.

But we also learn that Scrooge earned every last cent of his fortune by "being smarter than the smarties and tougher than the toughies." He's an adventurer and his fortune means as much (0r perhaps more) to him because of the memories it holds for him than for it's monetary value. Here's a dollar bill that's part of the money made prospecting in the Yukon. This quarter was a portion of his salary when he navigated a riverboat down the Mississippi.

Perhaps most importantly, we learn that Scrooge (though he is often loath to admit it) really does care deeply for his friends and family. It's this balance of stinginess with both humanity and a love of adventure that makes Scrooge so memorable.

Most Scrooge stories also featured Donald and the three young nephews. Often, the plots would involve foiling yet another attempt by the Beagle Boys to loot the money bin. In other stories, Scrooge would take off to some remote part of the world in search of a hidden treasure. Great art, solid plots and clever dialogue abound throughout the best of these tales.

Many talented writers and artists have contributed to the ever-growing Scrooge mythos. But those stories by Carl Barks, pouring humor & adventure & real emotion into every story he produced, are still the best of the lot. What could have been a one-joke character has grown into one of the most entertaining and enduring characters in fiction.


Gemstone Publishing recently put out a trade paperback titled Uncle Scrooge: A Little Something Special, reprinting some excellent Scrooge stories by various artists. There's a great qoute from the introduction by David Gerstein:


"Were Scrooge suddenly, one day, to exist in our real-life world, few of us can say we'd like to work for him; but almost all of us would find it inspiring to meet with him. Even though, should the meeting take place, it would likely end with our being unceremoniously thrown out of his money bin through a trapdoor."

Ebenezer Scrooge & Scrooge McDuck: They're not real, but by golly they should be.

SCROOGE MCDUCK

In 1947, artist/writer Carl Barks created Uncle Scrooge McDuck in story called "Christmas on Bear Mountain." The wealthy but incredibly stingy Uncle Scrooge served as the plot device to set up an adventure for Donald Duck along with Huey, Dewey and Louie. But Scrooge struck a chord with readers. Barks took the character and ran with it, creating some of the most imaginative and entertaining comic stories from the late Forties and throughout the Fifties.


It took a few tries to refine Scrooge's character. An early story, "The Magic Glass," told us that Scrooge's wealth comes from owning a magic hourglass. Though this is a wonderful story (involving an adventure in the Sahara Desert to retrieve the hourglass after it is stolen), Barks soon set this idea aside. Scrooge, it eventually developed, had earned every single penny now sitting in his impregnable Money Bin through hard work. He'd been "tougher than the toughies and smarter than the smarties." And though now getting on in years, he was still tough and smart.


In story after story, he protected his wealth from thieves such as the Beagle Boys or took Donald and the nephews on wild adventures in search of hdden treasures.

"Back to the Klondike" (Four Color Comics #456, 1953) is one of the best Scrooge stories, highlighting all the important aspects of Scrooge's personality withn the context of yet another entertaining adventure.

As the story opens, Scrooge is having serious memory problems, even forgetting who Donald is. A doctor prescribes memory pills, which work so well that Scrooge remembers a cache of gold he'd buried in the Klondike years ago when he first struck it rich as a prospector. So Scrooge, Donald and the nephews are off to the Klondike to recover the gold. Over the course of the story, we meet Glittering Goldie, a former saloon owner with whom Scrooge developed a love/hate relationship during the gold-rush days. There's a series of gags based on Scrooge's refusal to take his memory pills (hey, they cost a whole ten cents each---they're too valuable to swallow) and a set of mini-adventures involving a grizzly bear and a swarm of mosquitoes.





We get a flashback to Scrooge's days as a young prospector (and a nifty sequence in which we get to see him whip a dozen or so guys in a barfight). We get examples of Scrooge's greed and penny-pinching, but also an ending that shows he has a heart of gold hidden under his tough exterior. What's really good about this story (and about the bulk of Barks' work on Scrooge and Donald Duck) is the bizarre thematic balance struck by these stories. On the one hand, these are "funny animal" stories, with talking ducks and dogs involving one sight gag after another.

On the other hand, Barks' art was, well, realistic and the sense of real adventure he maintained was always palpable. The stories are both funny and exciting. The characterizations are both comedic and (on occassion) genuinely emotional. "Back to the Klondike," recently reprinted in a trade paperback and so easily available, is one of the best examples of this. In an industry that has given us the work of so many talented artists and writers, Carl Barks holds a comfortable spot amongst the best of the best. He, like Scrooge, was tougher than the toughies and smarter than the smarties.

SIDENOTE: The trade paperback "The Life and Times of Uncle Scrooge," by Dan Rosa, is a series of 12 issues dealing with key moments in Scrooge's life, from when he earned his first dime as a shoe shine boy in Scotland to his first adventure side-by-side with Donald and the boys. Rosa took hints dropped by Barks in various orginal Scrooge stories to fill out the old skinflint's biography. Rosa is a worthy successor to Barks, with the same talent for balancing humor and adventure. This is one of the best trades ever and should be considered required reading.