Classic EBI #22: Waddling Towards Gethsemane
EVERYTHING BUT IMAGINARY 8/6/03 -- WADDLING TOWARDS GETHSEMANE
Waddling towards Gethsemane
Carl Barks was a genius.
Let’s agree on that right off the bat. If you can’t pick up a Barks Uncle Scrooge story and see the research, the attention to detail and the sheer imagination the man poured onto every page, then there’s no point even continuing this conversation. Barks had talent to match Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko in their primes, but because he spent his career drawing ducks, even most comic book fans don’t give him the credit he deserved. He created Uncle Scrooge and most of the supporting characters in the world of Duckburg, and made Donald Duck a relatable protagonist for the first time ever.
To make matters worse, a few years ago Gladstone Comics (the company that held the Disney comics license for several years) ceased publication, in effect cutting off the only outlet in America for these fantastic stories. Sure, the Disney comics were still being produced for the European market -- in most cases, they outsell most superheroes over there-- but some of the best all-ages comic books ever made were completely unobtainable in America.
Thank you, Gemstone.
This summer, Gemstone Comics stepped up. A division of Diamond, Gemstone picked up Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories and Uncle Scrooge where Gladstone left off. They’ll add Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse and Friends next month, and they’re also planning a monthly Donald Duck Adventures digest-sized paperback, which I haven’t seen yet but hope will be similar in quality to the “Traveler” paperbacks CrossGen comics produces. We comic fans often complain that there aren’t any books suitable for kids anymore -- well that complaint is effectively quashed, friends.
Several of these titles reprint Barks classics, as well as “new” tales that he wrote and layed out, but never finished. Make no mistake, these aren’t just “funny animal” comics. Oh they’re funny, don’t get me wrong, but they’re also full of globe-trotting adventures, quests to the depths of the bottom of the ocean, treasure hunts across blazing stretches of desert, adventures across time and space and heroes waddling towards Gethsemane! A Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge story is like Indiana Joneswith spats and feathers.
Some of these stories are even educational -- oh sure, there’s plenty of pseudo-science and pop history, but there’s also a lot of cultural, geographical and historical fact in these comics. I heard that Barks once redrew an entire sequence because he wanted to make sure the patterns of the stars in the night sky were accurate for that spot on the globe at that time of year.
Remember the old “Ducktales” TV show? Half of those episodes -- the good ones -- were ripped directly from comic stories by Carl Barks, and I don’t know if he ever even get got into the credits.
Of course, great as he is, reprinting Barks won’t keep four monthly titles going, so Gemstone also prints a lot of new stories, some good, some less so. We’ll talk about the good today. They include the works of modern-day cartoonists like William Van Horn, who is quite talented, and Don Rosa, who is so good he’s practically Barks reincarnated. Rosa takes the foundation that Barks created in his own “Ducktales” and tells his own beautifully-rendered stories. Back in the Gladstone days, he even did a 12-issue epic, “The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck,” which he pieced together from the parts of Scrooge’s history that Barks had revealed over the decades.
(If anyone from Gemstone is reading this, I will personally trade you Comixtreme’s own Brandon Schatz for a “Life and Times” trade paperback collection.)
Rosa’s newest work, which began in Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #635, is a serial in which Donald Duck is reunited with his two old compadres from the “Three Caballeros” cartoon, marking the first time Rosa has really diverged from the Barks canon. When the resulting story is as good as “The Three Caballeros Ride Again,” though, I think Unca Carl would have approved.
If there’s any problem with the new Gemstone line, it’s the format. Both Uncle Scrooge and Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories are squarebound, 64-page, $6.95 monsters each month, just as they were towards the end of the Gladstone days. These are titles that are clearly intended for the collector -- and that’s just fine if you’re a collector. I’m willing to shell out seven bucks for new Don Rosa and classic Carl Barks.
But a kid won’t be.
Both Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse and Friends will be in a more standard comic magazine format, but they’ll carry a $2.95 price tag. Most kids who have that kind of walking-around money will already have decided they’re too old for Donald Duck comics, if they’re reading comics at all. They’ll probably be like me, turning away from these stories in favor of superheroes because they were just too cool for a bunch of ducks. Fortunately, in college I realized how good these comics really are and how stupid it was of me to stop reading them because, let’s face it, I was never that cool in the first place.
But little kids... the ones just learning how to read, the ones who aren’t old enough to be ashamed because they like cartoons -- if we get Disney comics into the hands of those kids, not only will they be reading some of the best comic books ever produced, but a good number of them will graduate to other titles as well.
I’d really like to see the price point on the magazine titles drop, but I doubt that’ll happen. Barring that, I’d like to see “newstand” versions of the squarebound titles -- a magazine-style 64-page comic with maybe a $3.95 price tag... it’s more than the other titles, sure, but you’re also getting more for your buck, and a sharp kid will notice that.
These are all just ideas I’m throwing around because I really love these comics, and I think most kids out there will love them too. So pick up some for the kids in your life -- show ‘em how good comic books can be.
And tell those guys at Gemstone to send me a cut, because my goal in life is to have enough cash available to fill up a bin, burrow through it like a gopher, and throw it up in the air and let it hit me on the head.
FAVORITE OF THE WEEK: July 30, 2003
Time for a new feature here at “Everything But Imaginary,” Favorite of the Week, which is exactly what it sounds like. I’ll save a little room at the end of the column each week to dish on whatever was my favorite single issue of any comic book to come out the week before. Keep in mind this is 100 percent biased towards my preferences of writer, artist and character, not to mention that any comics I did not personally read are not eligible, but since there’s no prize, what does it matter anyway?
Flash #200 narrowly took the top honors for me last week. Geoff Johns and Scott Kolins have been building towards this, the conclusion of the “Blitz” storyline, for nearly two years now, and it came together wonderfully. The explanation of Zoom’s powers was clever and original and the ending took me totally by surprise, and yet still made perfect sense, which is what you want a twist ending to do. I’m sorry to see Kolins leave this title, but I’m really glad Johns is sticking around.
Blake M. Petit is the author of a novel, Other People’s Heroes, the upcoming stage play, The 3-D Radio Show, and a regular column in the St. Charles Herald-Guide. He keeps waiting for one of his siblings to have children so he can be referred to as “Unca Blake.” E-mail him at Blakept@cox.net.