Cartoons (Part 1)

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man what a great opening two eps, love
how much it feels like Gravity Falls
it feels like so many of my favorite twitter cartoon artists have fingerprints on this

it’s a shame it’ll be a while before next one. what’s a good place to start with the comics?

after watching about half the episodes so far of OK K.O., I feel fairly confident in saying the show is not just bearable but something worth actually liking. It strikes a nice midpoint between the vapid, hyperactive world-bluffing of Mighty Magiswords and the deep character sentiment of Steven Universe.

Something still seems slightly off, however. Maybe it’s the odd casual use of musical underscoring.

god fucking dammit

why

There’s no super organized answer to that, but (this will be long):

Basically, the Duck universe as we know it is the creation of Carl Barks, in the comics he wrote and illustrated over 20 years for three Dell Comics books:

  • Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories,
  • Donald Duck, and
  • Uncle Scrooge.

The two major post-Barks Duck authors, Don Rosa and William Van Horn, came aboard in the late 1980s. Both of these guys built on and in many ways refined and codified Barks’ vision. We’ll get back to them in a minute.

Barks in turn built on a foundation provided by early comic strip writer/artist Al Taliaferro, who created or co-created Daisy, HD&L, and Grandma Duck. Barks was a frequent collaborator, and in the beginning more or less took the reins from Taliaferro.

Taliaferro mostly did short-form domestic comedy, and that became the bulk of Barks’ early work and, later, a continual balance with the more epic storytelling that soon developed in his Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics. It’s in the domestic comedies where Donald and the nephews’ book personalities were honed, and more personal foils like Gladstone Gander rose to prominence. This is where Duckburg came about, as a setting for family hijinks, and this is where the mythology starts.

With WDC&S and Duckburg as sort of the safe home base, Barks started to send Donald and the nephews off on long, world-spanning adventures. Each of these stories would need a whole, extra long comic, so that’s where Donald Duck comes about. These are the stories to which 2017 DT sort of metatextually refers a few times. It’s here, in stories like “The Old Castle’s Secret,” that characters like Scrooge and Gyro Gearloose, and that whole extended gang of villains and supporting characters emerged and coalesced into their now-recognizable forms.

Scrooge is the major breakout character, of course. Once he started to coalesce, he quickly took over Donald’s book. That clearly was unsustainable, so after a while Scrooge was funneled into his own book – which is why the characters and world of Uncle Scrooge comics are pretty fully-firmed from the first issue. This comic ran for something like 15 years before Barks retired. The publishers couldn’t carry on long after that, and we entered a long wilderness era.

Honestly if you start with Uncle Scrooge #1, featuring “Only a Poor Old Man”, that’s as good an intro as you’ll get. It’s kind of a statement of intent for the character and the book, and one of the most famous of all Disney comics.

The original DuckTales is largely based (with a few concessions) on the Uncle Scrooge range. Many episodes, especially early ones, are close adaptations of individual or composite Barks stories. “Only a Poor Old Man”, for example gets a close look-in with Fenton/Gizmoduck’s introduction in “Super DuckTales”.

Now. Here’s where discussion of the 2017 series gets interesting. Around the time that Disney was planning DuckTales, a small company called Gladstone began to reprint old Barks and Floyd Gottfredson (basically the Barks of Mickey Mouse; I’d love to see his stuff get a similar treatment to DuckTales) comics. They treated the stories with care, and with a certain academic rigor. For the first time ever (I think), the original writers and artists received credit. Each issue tended to have scholarly articles and essays about the comics. It was a real trip. Before long, the new range started to attract writers and artists that were as fond of Barks and Gottfredson as the editors clearly were. Of these, the two biggies are Rosa and Van Horn.

Van Horn is cool. He continued on with the domestic comedies and brought an even more whimsical and odd tone to proceedings. Though he follows Barks continuity, he kind of goes off into his own direction with it and eventually even incorporates some DuckTales characters (e.g., Launchpad), because why not. Eventually Barks wrote one last Donald Duck eventure before he died, which he chose Van Horn to illustrate for him.

Don Rosa is the serious and meticulous one, and the one that people tend to point to these days. He picked up the pieces and the standard of the Uncle Scrooge (and occasional Donald Duck) epics, and became basically Duck Man II. His first story, “The Son of the Sun”, is also a good starting place. It’s a fan tribute to Barks’ work, in the gestalt. I think it was written as the ultimate Barks story that never was. Although Rosa quickly developed his own style, this sets the tone for everything else he’d do.

His most defining work is The Life & Times of Scrooge McDuck, which… I mean. It’s something else. He combed through everything Barks had ever written, including unpublished scraps of paper that Barks jotted down for his own reference, for mentions of names and dates and events outside of the comics’ events themselves. Rosa made it all into a timeline, and – well, at first he set about trying to resolve every discrepancy, of which there are many. Then he decided to go for it, and told the entire timeline of Scrooge’s life – based on Barks’ own previously disorganized references – from a young boy to when we first met him in “A Christmas for Shacktown.” It’s an extraordinary work, and occasionally rather grim.


This thing has won award after award, and I often see it cited as basically the go-to culmination of Duck comics. Like their Dark Knight Returns or something. But like Miller’s book, it builds off of a certain expectation of familiarity in its audience. You can read the whole thing as a story, but it means a heck of a lot more if you’ve been through all of the random adventures and you understand what it’s trying to put into perspective.

So, none of this had yet happened when the original DuckTales was in production. All they had to go on was Carl Barks, and his internally very disorganized bibliography. So they picked and chose, and made up the rest.

While DuckTales introduced Barks’ characters to a mass audience for the first time, there was something going on not unlike the TMNT situation. You may recall how there was sort of an existential crisis in the late '80s, early '90s about the Turtles. The original Mirage books are dark and violent and serious, but the 1987 cartoon is so goofy. The Mirage books seemed to kinda react to the presence of the cartoon by going darker and more serious. By the time the cartoon ended, the comic was something else entirely – a discrepancy that later adaptations have gone nuts trying to square. (For my money the 2003 cartoon nails it best.)

Similarly, there was a certain snootiness toward DuckTales from the comics fandom. And lucky them, whereas Van Horn just did whatever amused him, Don Rosa took Barks super super seriously. He wanted to get it right, and nail down the Duck canon in a way it had never been done before. And by George, he put in some elbow grease. By the time DuckTales ended, its “deficiencies” compared to the source comics were laid bare and the Barks canon had been turned into a sort of a solid block of inarguable literature.

Fast forward 30 years, and we’ve got a generation raised on DuckTales who then set out to read the Barks/Rosa comics. And boy, does the 2017 series reflect the change in fandom. It’s kind of like the new Doctor Who in that sense as well. Yeah, it builds on the original – but it also builds in a wealth of supplementary and contextualizing material that didn’t exist when the original was on TV. All of the stuff about the nephews’ lineage? Would never have happened without Don Rosa. I mean, look at this shit:

Likewise, by adding Donald back into the mix where he belongs, the 2017 series brings in the other two arms of Barks material: the Donald Duck adventures (as alluded to) and the WDC&S domestic stuff that plays out continually, yet had no place in the 1987 series.

It’s just… so much good stuff, so well-handled, it makes me giddy.

ANYWAY. My suggestion:

But you could spend a lifetime on this stuff. I pretty much did. Get through all of that, and I can list off a dozen highlights.

P.S.: I hear that Goldie is a major character in this series!!!

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A quote from Rosa:

What Dell licensed from the Disney corporation was the name Donald Duck. [At that time,] Donald was […] actually like an actor. He was a different character in each cartoon. A comic book has to be based on an actual character with a history. So Carl Barks took the name Donald Duck and created a… well, a character, that didn’t even look exactly like the Disney Donald Duck. […] But, he created an entire history around this duck; a family, Uncle $crooge, Duckburg, Gladstone Gander, etc. These were all creations of Carl Barks. This is the universe that all the other duck writers and artists based their stories on.

A fun little easter egg: early on, you see Donald’s cartoon outfit sticking out of a dishwasher. Then catching on fire. He’s not gonna wear that here; not going to be Cartoon Donald. Later, he gets a sailor suit very closely akin to his book outfit.

This clearly is a statement.

Seriously, Comic Donald is the best character ever. He’s so constantly freaked-out, and yet so brave for all of that.


This whole sequence from “Return to Trala-La” always touches me.

I mean, this poor fucker.

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now just imagine: what would sora’s journey be like with comic Donald Duck

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I will not

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that is a lot more insightful than the post I put off making all day after watching the episode. In context, the scene perfectly fits a tried and true sub-formula of the show/character: Gumball becomes preoccupied with a newly presented concept, then reacts in various inappropriate ways such as disproportionate countering, attempts to use it for his own gain, taking things way too far, etc

As stated, it’s not particularly well-framed, and seems to kind of veer off-road right afterwards, in the final third of the episode. But that concluding segment could actually be taken as pretty apt allegory for certain related behaviors on social media, especially forums and Tumblr: someone goes desperately searching for incriminating material to spread around/crow about as a way of justifying their dislike for somebody else, only to reveal their own dysfunctions and toxicity. Complete with literal ass-showing.

On a more pleasant note, I imagine this has already been posted in another thread, but I just saw this on the actual TV channel last night:

Kind of overwhelming! Does anyone know if it has been airing at certain times of day?

that video is amazing, it looks like some of the people in the crowd are close to religious ecstasy

oh maybe god it’s so overwhelming. i love that song but idk how i feel about the video leaning so heavily on the show’s fans

I have to get back to duck comics, too. Most of what I’ve read is Euro material with a few Don Rosa stories here and there. Are there actually any prominent writers in anglo-land besides Barks and Rosa? Since besides those two, it seems no one gives a shit about anyone else in Europe (excluding Euro writers ofc).

All this duck talk is making me remember Quack Pack cartoon. That show tried to diversify the nephews more like huey being an A Type go getter, Dewey the book smarts and Louie being the chill guy with a big heart but still being fairly rounded characters not strictly driven by those traits… The show is probably disposable in this conversation but it was amusing seeing Donald having to deal with modern family life akin to Goof Troop (like dealing with an inept neighborhood watch etc) but with more 90’s era cartoon episode plots. But back to nuDucktales, it’s kinda cute to see some of those traits there but shuffled a bit more like Dewey trying to hotwire the boat showing technical aptitude(later humorously subverting expectations by just smacking a door knob with a sack of marbles instead of enacting some cartoonishly clever plan) but also trying to be the headstrong adventurer instead of defacto “leader” Huey. It was kinda cute seeing Huey be a bit of a nerd with sub ride bingo cards and having commemorative t-shirts.

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there’s one really weird episode of quack pack where a wacky formula donald turns younger and the implication is that a a teenager he was 1940s animated donald

also all the humans around were pretty weird

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look, I only know two things about Donald:

  1. He is the result of an “unholy union”
  2. He murdered Goofy
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Yeah, there’s Van Horn; between Rosa and he, they pretty well covered Barks’ legacy for about 20 years.

Daan Jippes is good. His work began as uncanny Barks homage, but eventually he started on his own path.

Lots of the Egmont artists are… uninspired. I can do without reading another Vicar story, for example. The Italian stuff tends to be over-the-top – all extreme takes and bendy models.

I don’t know if anyone has stepped into the void since Rosa retired.

And he wouldn’t help the fucking hen make her bread.

Help the hen, Donald. Help the little red hen.

I really enjoyed nu-DuckTales, and it prompted me to watch a lot of OG DuckTales in its absence. I definitely watched it a lot when i was a young kid, and i definitely mostly only remember the Treasure of the Lamp movie which i watched a hundred times and adored.

Almost every line said by Huey, Dewey and Louie in the original series is inexplicably hilarious to me on account of their identical smol duck child voices.

i forgot how good the whole soundtrack is and also that it was scored by the guy who did the Star Trek TNG soundtrack, Ron Jones

the new show is really good but the theme song loses something without the big brass instruments. my favorite part was the 30-second cameo by Roxanne from A Goofy Movie

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For anyone curious, Rosa considers “Duck” the most generic of generic names, like Smith or Jones, underlying Donald’s everyman quality.

This also explains why he’s dating a Daisy Duck, no relation.

But, Daisy is related to HD&L. Their surname also is Duck, you will notice, though Donald is their maternal uncle. So their mom is Donald’s twin Della, and their dad has never been mentioned – but their paternal aunt? Daisy. There’s another sister who’s mother to April, May, and June, making them HD&L’s cousins.

I guess Daisy is Don’s second sister-in-law or something. Incidentally related by marriage of two vanished relations. It might be a little odd for the kids, an unrelated aunt and uncle dating, but we’re nowhere close to Arrested Development here.

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