Being a Genius Despite a Lack of Resources

Gyro Gearloose, created by Carl Barks in 1952, was a wonderful addition to the Duck Universe. A genius inventor, his many gadgets could be used to further the plot, provide a solution to a problem, or go awry and cause a problem that needed to be solved.

Usually, Gyro had access to his workshop and his tools, allowing him to design pretty much anything that Scrooge or Donald might need. But a really fun story from Four Color #1184 (June 1961) deprives Gyro of all his usual resources, which in turn allowed Carl Barks to highlight just how inventive Gyro can be.

"Brain-Strain" starts with a shipwreck, caused because Donald didn't think things through and build his new boat using thumb tacks to hold it together. In the confusion of abandoning ship, Donald floats off in a raft while Gyro is floating helplessly with the paddle.

So Gyro has to deal with a desperate situation without any resources to speak of. Well, actually he has that paddle, doesn't he? He uses this to enhance his swimming ability and he soon reaches a small island.

Donald has made it to the same island. He's still in "just wasn't thinking" mode and soon lets the raft float away while burning the paddle as firewood. So now the two are trapped on the island without any resources at all. 

Except Gyro is able to find resources even on that barren landscape. I suppose it shows how much of a Trekkie I am in that the above scene, in which Gyro gathers up the stuff he needs to make gunpowder, makes me think about the Star Trek episode "The Arena," in which Captain Kirk did the same thing.

You know, a version of Star Trek in which Gryo serves as the Enterprise's science officer rather than Spock would be... illogical, but a lot of fun. 

Gyro's first effort to signal passing airplanes with a gunpowder explosion can't be seen through the flocks of birds that hover over the island. So, with Donald's reluctant (and hypnotised) help, he gathers up enough feathers to fill the cone of the small extinct volcano that tops the island. Setting this off with gunpowder causes a rain of feathers, which does catch the attention of a passing airplane. A rescue boat soon arrives.

The story brilliantly highlights just how brilliant Gyro Gearloose is, as well as showing off Barks' usual skill in smoothly combining slapstick comedy with a real sense of adventure. But Gyro's genius does fail him for the story's final gag. Tired of Donald "just not thinking," he makes the grouchy duck a thinking cap. But his results in Donald soon running a competing invention business!

Next week, we'll visit with Terry and the Pirates during Terry and Pat's first encounter with the Dragon Lady.

Cover Cavalcade

Really nice Walt Kelly cover from 1948.

Cover Cavalcade

A terrific Carl Barks cover from 1958.

Pirate vs.... Duck?

The Disney Comic Book Universe is a weird place--a reality in which characters from different points in history and geography simultaneously exist in the same time and place.

For instance, there's a story where Uncle Scrooge visits Snow White and the drawfs simply by taking a walk in the woods. Never mind that these characters shouldn't exist on the same continent or in the same century. Chip and Dale teamed up with Dumbo--which itself is reasonable--but then had an encounter with the giant from Mickey and the Beanstalk. Jiminy Cricket once thumbed a ride from Pluto while trying to find Pinnocchio.

I'm not complaining about this weirdness. In fact, I think its wonderful. Many fictional universes need a firm continuity for their stories to be properly told. But the Disney Universe is a silly, loose-knit and amorphous place, allowing for continuity to step aside so that we can have really cool team-ups.

Which brings us to Donald Duck #119 (May 1968) and the story "Voyage to Azatlan." (Written by Vic Lockman and drawn by Tony Strobl.) Donald is at the library--trying to come up with a way of impressing his nephews--when he encounters his sea-faring cousin Moby Duck.

Moby is researching the Aztecs, which seems like an odd thing for a salty whale-hunter to be doing. But Moby is on the trail of a treasure--he's found out that the Aztecs used to live on an  island called Azatlan before moving to Mexico. He thinks there still might be gold cached on the island.

So its off to Azatlan, with Donald tagging along. To find the old Aztec settlement, they have to reach the island's central lake. Moby comes up with the idea of using his harpoon gun to fire dynamite-equipped lines ahead of his ship, blasting out a waterway that he can then sail through to the lake.

I'm not entirely sure why they didn't just walk across the island, but then, I'm not a salty, sea-faring duck with years of experience at this sort of thing, so what do I know?

Anyway, they get to the lake and soon find the gold. They also find some Aztecs whose ancesters moved back to the island to excape the Spanish.

I really enjoy the fact that both Moby and Donald immediately realize that they can't simply take the gold. It doesn't belong to them and neither are thieves. If this had been a Scrooge story, he would have gotten angry and/or struggled with his conscious for a moment before doing (as he always does) the right thing by refusing to steal. But our protagonists here aren't Scrooge and, though disappointed, their casual acceptance of the situation feels true to their characters.

Moby jumps to Plan B and offers trade goods to the Aztecs. It turns out that the locals really, really like the taste of hardtack, so a food-for-gold deal is quickly struck.

But when the ducks return to the sea, they find Captain Hook waiting for him.

I realize I was just saying that the Disney Universe has room to ignore logic in order to bring characters together, but... well, I can't help it. I've got to come up with a "logical" explanation for this even if no such explanation is needed.

According to Peter Pan (the orginal novel), Hook was a cousin of Blackbeard. So he once sailed under the black flag in the real world (which in this case is populated by anthropomorphic animals as well as humans). Then he somehow finds his way to Neverland. If we assume that adults don't age in Neverland (just as children never grow up), then he could have lived there battling Peter for centuries. In the Disney version of the story, we don't actually see him eaten by the crocodile (as he is in the novel), so we can presume he escaped and then eventually found his way back into the real world in time to encounter Moby and Donald.

There you go. It all makes sense now. Right?

Anyway, never tie a sea-faring duck to his own harpoon gun. Especially when that harpoon gun is STILL loaded with dynamite.  It's not just a harpoon gun--it's a Chekov's gun!

There's one more plot twist to go, though. When Donald gets home, he discovers that the "gold" was actually goat butter. So Donald isn't wealthy. But that's okay. Hardtack dipped in melted butter tastes great and Donald has finally impresses his nephews.

"Voyage to Aztalan" is fun to read and fun to look at. I often praise comics on this blog for having strong plots AND cohesive continuities, but there are time when a silly plot and a silly continuity does the job just as well.

Next week, we'll look at a comic book in which DC Comics gave us an absolutely epic pulp hero team-up.

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.