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.

Cover Cavalcade

Who doesn't love steamboats?

Ducks, gunfighters and ships in strange places

What do Bat Masterson and Scrooge McDuck have in common?


Well, both of them stumbled across the wrecks of old Spanish ships in the desert of the American southwest, well away from any water.


For Scrooge, it happened in the story “The Seven Cities of Cibola,” published in Uncle Scrooge #7 (1954). Scrooge, Donald and the nephews are looking for the titular lost cities, which were reputed to be filled with gold.


Along the way, they run across the ship, which had been sailing along the Colorado River in 1539 before being displaced into the desert by an earthquake. Artist/writer Carl Barks does his usual perfect job of making the sequence visually striking.

Bat Masterson, on the other hand, ran across a wrecked Spanish ship in the desert in THIS EPISODE (broadcast July 15, 1959)

of the classic television series starring Gene Barry. Gee whiz, there’s an awful lot of wrecked Spanish ships littering the American desert.


One can’t help but wonder if someone on the Bat Masterson writing or production staff was a fan of Disney comics and perhaps lifted the “ship in the desert” idea for the TV show. Or perhaps both stories were simply drawing on the same Old West tall tales.


Whether that’s the case or not, it’s tempting to assume that they might be the same ship, thus allowing us to place Uncle Scrooge and Gene Barry’s fictionalized version of Masterson in the same universe.


But, sadly, the two ships don’t quite match up. The ship Masterson finds contains treasure—a chest of jewels and gold nuggets. Whereas the ship Scrooge and the nephews find doesn’t contain any treasure—though it does provide them with an important clue to find the lost cities.


I guess fiction writers owe quite a debt to the Spanish conquistadors. Greed; war; betrayal; courage and cowardice; quests for lost cities of gold (which never existed in real life, but often turn out to be quite “real” in various fictional universes)—all this has provided storytellers with an unending supply of fodder for entertaining adventure yarns.

Guardians of the Lost Library

Much as I love superhero comics, I gotta say (as I’ve said in previous entries) that the single best comic book character of all time is still Uncle Scrooge.

His adventures are still printed every month in Uncle Scrooge comics. In fact, a fairly recent issue (U.S. #383) featured a story that was so incredibly enjoyable in both writing and art work that I read it three times in a row without putting it down.

“Guardians of the Lost Library,” written and drawn by Don Rosa, was first published in 1994, but I missed seeing it the first time around. (I heard about it, though. It has quite a reputation as a high quality story.) Now it’s finally been reprinted and it turns out to be even better than its reputation.

It’s got a great premise. Uncle Scrooge is determined to track down the lost Library of Alexandria, figuring the knowledge contained there is worth a fortune. Accompanied by Huey, Dewey and Louie, he sets off on a quest to find it.

First stop, of course, is Alexandria. The boys use their Junior Woodchuck Guidebook to look up obscure facts about ancient history and translate old inscription. Soon the hidden remains of the library are located.

But the three million papyrus scrolls contained therein have long since turned to dust. That’s okay, though, since the boys find clues that the information in them had been transferred to more durable parchment scrolls by the Byzantiums.

So the quest goes on, with Scrooge and the kids following up clues that take them to various locations around the world, tracking the information originally contained in the Great Library, discovering it was being continually reprinted from one format to another (parchment to hand-printed books to Gutenberg-press books) over the centuries. It’s all leads up to an absolutely wonderful twist at the end.

Gee whiz, I love this story. Yes, it’s a “talking animal” story with a lot of humor and some terrific visual gags, but it’s also an adventure story featuring protagonists who think their way from one point to the next. There’s a lot of real-life history thrown in as well, giving the whole tale added verisimilitude. (We learn, for instance, that Sir Francis Drake was a duck. Who knew?)

I love Spider Man and Superman and Batman and Green Lantern, but by golly not one of them can hold a candle to Uncle Scrooge. Best comic book character ever. “Guardians of the Lost Library” offers us yet additional proof of this.

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.

Best Team-up Ever

In 1944, the Lone Ranger radio show did a total of 16 episodes (scattered throughout their schedule during the first half of that year) in which the Ranger teamed up with or fought against various real-life figures. Most of them were personalities linked with the Old West, such as Buffalo Bill or John Wesley Hardin, but their was one particular team-up that was both really cool and really unusual. That was when the Lone Ranger ended up fighting aside future president Teddy Roosevelt.


The two episodes featuring T.R. were broadcast in May of 1944. The first of these involved T.R. coming out west in 1881 to run a ranch he owns. Rustlers are planning on running off with the stock and part of their plan involves giving this "Eastern dude" such a scare when he gets off the train that he'll immediately run home.

Roosevelt doesn't scare easy, though. Eventually, with the help of the Ranger and Tonto, he manages to round up the bad guys.

Aside from being a well-told story (which was typical of the best of old-time radio), I think the episode does a reasonably good job of portraying Roosevelt as he really was. Besides, the idea of he and the Lone Ranger working together is just plain cool.

The second episode was even better. A few years later, Butch Cassidy and the Hole-in-the-Wall gang steal some horses from Roosevelt's ranch while escaping after a train robbery. The Ranger is already on their trail. Roosevelt and his house guest--artist Frederick Remington--join him as they track Butch and his gang through a raging blizzard.

The best part of this episode was probably at the climax, when the Ranger comes up with a way to use a Remington painting to trick the crooks into surrendering.


One interesting side note--Harry Longabaugh is identified as a member of Butch's gang, but he's never referred to as the Sundance Kid. I suppose that particular nickname wasn't well-known until the Newman-Redford movie came out years later. And, boy, Butch is this episode is a lot more murderous than Paul Newman ever was.

These episodes remind me of another great Roosevelt team-up: from Don Rosa's classic comic book miniseries "The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck," in which we follow a young Scrooge from the time he was a poor shoe-shine boy until he makes his fortune and becomes the world's richest duck.

It turns out that while Scrooge was punching cattle in 1882, he met up with Roosevelt. (The first of several meetings, we later learn.) Scrooge was tracking rustlers and Teddy comes along for the ride.

It's a great story--Rosa emulates the great Carl Barks in his ability to use wonderful art and characterizations to tell a story that works as both a comedy and an adventure. This one ends with a wild chase through a canyon maze involving Scrooge, the cattle, the bad guys and a buffalo wearing a dinosaur skull.

Teddy Roosevelt was--in my opinion--a great man and a great president. It's not surprising that he'd make a great partner for two of the best fictional characters ever created.

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.