Creation, Translation, and Adaptation in Donald Duck Comics: The Dream of Three Lifetimes 9783030736354, 9783030736361

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Tables
Chapter 1: “A Duck’s Eye View of Europe”: How to Read Donald Duck
References
Chapter 2: “The Empire-Builder from Calisota”: Donald Duck and the Rise of Disney
McCay, Bray, and Early Animated Propaganda
Building The House of Mouse
The Duck Appears
References
Chapter 3: “Donald Gets Drafted”: Donald Duck at War and as Propaganda
Animation as Propaganda
Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros
The Darker Side of Propaganda
Merchandising, Merchandising
References
Chapter 4: “The Buckaroo of the Badlands”: Carl Barks Remembering the Frontier
Carl Barks as a Creator
The Philosophy of Carl Barks
Carl Barks and Frontier Theory
Carl Barks and the Sheriff of Bullet Valley
Scrooge McDuck as the Frontiersman
Carl Barks Goes Back North to the Frontier
Carl Barks at the End of an Era
Finding Carl Barks
References
Chapter 5: “The Good Duck Translator”: Erika Fuchs and the Exporting of Donald Duck
Cultural Exchange and the Occupation of Germany
Konrad Adenauer Joins the West
Cultural Diplomacy and the Duck
Saludos Amigos and Three Caballeros Revisited
Disney Comics and the Power of Donald Duck
The Good Duck Translator
Erika Fuchs and Translation Studies
The Fuchs Effect Illustrated
References
Chapter 6: “Guardians of the Lost Library”: Developments of the Duck Fan Communities
Comics Collecting Communities
Pre-Digital Fan Communications
Gladstone Comics Arrives on the Scene
Gladstone Grows a New Fan Community
DuckTales (Woo-ooo!)
The Eisner Era
The End of Gladstone and the Rise (and Fall) of Disney Comics
References
Chapter 7: “The King of the Klondike”: Don Rosa and (Re)envisioning the Frontier
The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck as Fan Fiction
Don Rosa and “The King of the Klondike”
Don Rosa and “The Vigilante of Pizen Bluff”
References
Chapter 8: “The Dream of Three Lifetimes”: Barks, Fuchs, Rosa, and Artistic Hybridity in Donald Duck Comics
Reference
Index

Citation preview

PALGRAVE FAN STUDIES

Creation, Translation, and Adaptation in Donald Duck Comics The Dream of Three Lifetimes Peter Cullen Bryan

Palgrave Fan Studies Series Editors Louise Geddes Adelphi University Garden City, NY, USA Lincoln Geraghty University of Portsmouth Portsmouth, UK

This book series represents the interdisciplinary field of fan studies. It considers the different ways in which fan studies exists at the intersection of media (old and new), cultural studies, and reception studies and as a result, rethinks the production of the fields of literature, art, philosophy, theater and performance, film and television, and beyond. The series welcomes a diverse set of methodological approaches including Marxism, race theory, gender studies, affect theory, the history of print, convergence theory, digital studies, material culture, and participatory culture, as well as geographies, historical periods, and disciplines. The aim of the series is to showcase how fan studies can offer new theoretical frameworks for understanding significant artistic, literary, historical, and cultural movements, and in turn, how these innovative approaches to representing contemporary culture and media theory have expanded the Humanities. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/16367

Peter Cullen Bryan

Creation, Translation, and Adaptation in Donald Duck Comics The Dream of Three Lifetimes

Peter Cullen Bryan Communication and American Studies Penn State University Middletown, PA, USA

ISSN 2662-2807     ISSN 2662-2815 (electronic) Palgrave Fan Studies ISBN 978-3-030-73635-4    ISBN 978-3-030-73636-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73636-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Divina Epiphania / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

No project is a buried treasure waiting to be dug up, nor does it result simply from being smarter than the smarties or tougher than the toughies. Just as the Donald Duck came from the work of a dozen hands, so too is this book the result of many hundreds of hours of toil that were only possible with the support of others. This is the dream of a lifetime (to borrow a phrase from Don Rosa that he borrowed from Sergio Leone), but unlike Uncle Scrooge, I did not go it alone. This project represents a further development of my doctoral research, and I am firstly appreciative to my dissertation committee. Charlie Kupfer always kept a sunny disposition even on the darkest days when I feared I had hit a brick wall, and gave the early foundations to what would develop here. Simon Bronner pushed the arguments further, inspired new lines of inquiry, and helped undergird the fan studies portions of this work with a keen understanding of folkloric traditions. Anthony Buccitelli aided in filling out the theory, locating connections between the various aspects of an at-times scattershot process, developing new, interdisciplinary angles to this. Sam Winch located new ways of seeing and new capacities for understanding the intersections of visual culture, art, and audience. Roderick Lee provided insight into the nature of the business, and pushed me to dig deeper into how Disney works, exactly. There are others still. Peter Kareithi imparted the power of a story retold, and embodied new perspectives for understanding audience and reception. John Haddad helped developing the frontier framing and gave feedback to early versions of some of these chapters. Charity Fox helped to comprehend aspects of performance and masculinity in transnational spaces. Michael Barton mentioned seeing Donald Duck comics on a newsstand in Germany v

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

that first prompted my curiosity about Erika Fuchs. From my time at Western Michigan University, Jennifer Machiorlatti set me on the road to American Studies, and Paul Johnston gave me a grounding in linguistics. Peter Berg cultivated an excellent archive of fanzines at the Michigan State University Special Collections, and mentioned that I was likely the first scholar to examine those fanzines since they were donated. Lynn Bartholme ran the Popular Culture Association’s summer school, held at the Ray and Pat Browne Library of Bowling Green State University, which provided the much-needed original Gladstone Comics and fanzines without breaking the bank of a poor graduate student. Nicole Freim has likely sat through most of these chapters as presentations as chair of the Comics section of the Popular Culture Association, which has always provided a home for interdisciplinary work like this. Special thanks to everyone who sat through presentations on these topics at various conferences; special thanks to Paul Malone with helping to get the German side of things in order; Zack Kruse for introducing me to the magic of Comichron; Alexandra Hentschel at the Erika Fuchs Museum for kind words early in the process, and who I will hopefully meet once the pandemic is over; Brannon Costello and Brian Cremins for the feedback on the Gladstone Era; Phil Smith, Mitch Goodrum, and Dorian Alexander for providing additional focus on the frontier; Sabrina Mittermeier who inspired the final push for publication in the midst of this pandemic, and all of the other Disney and comics scholars that have kept me writing, many of whom are cited in this text, while others still I eagerly look forward to reading. Thanks as well to the organizers of the Popular Culture Association, Northeast Modern Languages Association, the Comics Studies Society, and the Mid-Atlantic Popular Culture Association, which have helped grow these ideas from seedlings into the result here. The grand work continues! I would be remiss not to thank my friends and family members. My mother Mary instilled in me a certain productivity in the night hours, often reminds me that we live many lives (as with the creators I will discuss here), and inspired me to keep telling stories. My father Bill imparted incredible work ethic, overcoming even the most difficult challenges, but still finding moments to rest. My sister Katie always pushed me to be a little better (I beat her to a PhD, and this book will slightly edge out her own first effort). Moira has been a friend in Disney since we were young, and might be the most to credit/blame for the trips to Disney World. Delia took the path of the world traveler, and this book was in part inspired by that spirit, of seeing what else is out there. My uncle Chris and aunt

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

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Collette both inspired the early parts of this journey, and have offered assistance throughout. My partner Brittany Clark has been eternally patient in the creation of this work, and has carried me through some of the darkest hours. Matt Denton has been a kind friend for many years, and inspired me to take up writing by being the superior artist in grade school. Peter Lehman forced me to rethink The Three Caballeros, and why Disney works. Julia Morrow’s friendship helped carry the difficult years of grad school and since. Emilia Yang put me on this track toward Henry Jenkins and fan studies more broadly. Sean Rodeman reminds me of why the Ducks matter and prompts me to question what comes next. Dan Benzing has boosted morale throughout this long process, in part because he was the first non-­academic I met who knew who Carl Barks was. There are hundreds of others who have aided in this journey, and I hope there will be time enough to thank them in person. I love and appreciate you all. I do regret that some loved ones are not able to see what came of this. My grandfather Francis Xavier Cullen is not alive to see this day, but I am grateful for the love of learning he passed down to my mother, and to me. My other grandfather Robert Bryan worked to inspire a joy of history in me, having lived through some of the worst of it. Joseph Cullen passed away before I completed my PhD, and I wish there had been one more conversation about this. Martha Goode helped me find joy in the world in many uncertain hours, and helped me grow as a person at a crucial moment. Jeanine Ruhsam, who I once shared a thoughtful late night drink with at a conference in Chicago, where some of the first threads of this book were laid down. I would thank as well the fans that came before me. This book would not exist without John Spicer, Hans von Storch, Jon Gisle, Gangolf Seitz, Maggie and Don Thompson, Elke Imberger, Klaus Spillmann, Jürgen Wollina, Stefan G. Bucher, and countless others. This book is most of all dedicated to the three dreams at the heart of this. Carl Barks found humanity in some ducks, weaving stories that will last through the ages long after even I have left this Earth. Erika Fuchs saw Germany in those same ducks, figures that embodied the German past and spoke for that history, good and bad. Don Rosa exemplifies the nature of the modern media landscape, reconstructing an old property on behalf of international business while leaning heavily on his own fandom. There is no book without these authors and the care they put into their efforts, and each deserves consideration as part of the grand present of popular culture.

Contents

1 “A Duck’s Eye View of Europe”: How to Read Donald Duck  1 References  26 2 “The Empire-Builder from Calisota”: Donald Duck and the Rise of Disney 29 McCay, Bray, and Early Animated Propaganda  31 Building The House of Mouse  37 The Duck Appears  40 References  45 3 “Donald Gets Drafted”: Donald Duck at War and as Propaganda 47 Animation as Propaganda  49 Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros  53 The Darker Side of Propaganda  60 Merchandising, Merchandising  66 References  67 4 “The Buckaroo of the Badlands”: Carl Barks Remembering the Frontier 69 Carl Barks as a Creator  71 The Philosophy of Carl Barks  77 Carl Barks and Frontier Theory  82 Carl Barks and the Sheriff of Bullet Valley  88 ix

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Contents

Scrooge McDuck as the Frontiersman  92 Carl Barks Goes Back North to the Frontier  94 Carl Barks at the End of an Era  97 Finding Carl Barks  99 References 101 5 “The Good Duck Translator”: Erika Fuchs and the Exporting of Donald Duck105 Cultural Exchange and the Occupation of Germany 106 Konrad Adenauer Joins the West 112 Cultural Diplomacy and the Duck 116 Saludos Amigos and Three Caballeros Revisited 120 Disney Comics and the Power of Donald Duck 122 The Good Duck Translator 125 Erika Fuchs and Translation Studies 129 The Fuchs Effect Illustrated 135 References 139 6 “Guardians of the Lost Library”: Developments of the Duck Fan Communities143 Comics Collecting Communities 146 Pre-Digital Fan Communications 151 Gladstone Comics Arrives on the Scene 164 Gladstone Grows a New Fan Community 168 DuckTales (Woo-ooo!) 171 The Eisner Era 174 The End of Gladstone and the Rise (and Fall) of Disney Comics 176 References 181 7 “The King of the Klondike”: Don Rosa and (Re)envisioning the Frontier185 The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck as Fan Fiction 191 Don Rosa and “The King of the Klondike” 198 Don Rosa and “The Vigilante of Pizen Bluff” 199 References 208

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8 “The Dream of Three Lifetimes”: Barks, Fuchs, Rosa, and Artistic Hybridity in Donald Duck Comics211 Reference 218 Index 219

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Wartime animated productions (based on Shull and Wilt’s data) 57 Table 6.1 Dell and Western Era Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck Sales Figures (based on Comi chron’s data) 144 Table 6.2 Gladstone Comics Era and Disney Comics Era Uncle Scrooge Sales Figures (based on Comichron’s data) 180

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CHAPTER 1

“A Duck’s Eye View of Europe”: How to Read Donald Duck

Who is Donald Duck? How did the Duck displace Mickey Mouse as the face of Disney worldwide? What is that makes the Ducks so translatable and adaptable? In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Donald Duck comics were the best-selling comics in the American market, with Uncle Scrooge #1 being one of the best-selling comics in history, moving over a million copies a month, a feat that would only be repeated once since. The Silver Age of superhero comics lead by Marvel Comics resurgence saw the Duck displaced in American newsstands, while his popularity concurrently grew worldwide, resulting in divergent evolutions among different fan groups. Americans still recognize Donald Duck: most anyone over the age of three knows the character on sight. He is certainly a cultural icon of some force: his visage appears on orange juice and ice cream, and he has masqueraded as the Oregon Duck during various University of Oregon sporting events since 1947. Still, there remains a comparative dearth of Donald Duck-­ related media in America: a perennially low-selling comic and the 2017 revival of Ducktales comprise the current output of the character, his popularity relying more on history and 21st century Disney intellectual property management for recognition than on contemporary textual output in comics. In present-day Italy, Donald Duck (there called Paperino) appears on every newsstand, often in the guise of the Batman-esque superhero Paperinik. In Sweden, Donald Duck (Kalle Anka) is a Christmas tradition watched by half the country annually. In Germany, Donald Duck has © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. C. Bryan, Creation, Translation, and Adaptation in Donald Duck Comics, Palgrave Fan Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73636-1_1

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inspired a travelling art exhibit called Duckomenta. Though they are members of the European Union, these countries each have considerably different cultures; part of different regions: Sweden in Scandinavia, Italy in the Mediterranean, Germany in Central Europe; and possess different histories, particularly in the post-World War II period. Each must be approached as independent settings, and while the emphasis in this project will be on the American and German components, Donald Duck delights readers worldwide for reasons that will be identified and analyzed. One of the key points of any research on Disney the company is upon Disney the man. This work will touch on Walt Disney as a key fixture in the genesis of Donald Duck and the formation of the company at large, and the development of a global enterprise that would position Donald Duck to become the centerpiece of a global empire. Though he is ultimately a secondary figure in the history of the Duck comics, Walt Disney looms over any discussion of Disney at large. To that end, I will discuss some of the texts that informed the understanding of Disney himself within the enterprise, even if his direct influence on the comics was somewhat limited beyond the very early output. Walt Disney is well-covered in scholarship, and this will serve as a brief primer on how I approach him, and incorporated his influence into the text. Disney comics underwent an evolution divergent from Disney’s animation and the rest of the company starting from the 1940s. While the animation studio remained firmly under Walt Disney’s control, the comics became increasingly decentralized, under the control of publishers or individual creators with the Disney company having theoretical approval over content. Print cartoons were among the first arms of Disney’s animated empire to take hold outside of its fledgling film success, with the comics in particular achieving great success in the early success in an open market: Disney comics started up in 1930, eight years before Superman hit the newsstands. There is little indication that Disney himself had much hand in the early productions; he had scripted a few early Mickey Mouse strips (which were in turn drawn by Ub Iwerks), but his involvement effectively ended as the Disney conglomerate began to grow. The duties of art and writing for the comics were taken up by a number of young animators, including Al Taliaferro and Floyd Gottfredson, who were given some leeway in developing the characters and stories (certainly greater freedom than while producing shorts under Walt Disney’s watchful eye at the studio), and who began pulling the characters in other directions than what

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might have been originally intended by Walt Disney.1 Disney further moved their publishing efforts out of house, handing off their stable of licenses to children’s book publishers Western Publishing, whose comic division Dell Comics had achieved some success with the early Tarzan comic books. One of the artist/writers that worked for Dell was Carl Barks, then a former Disney animator, who had made a career for himself writing and drawing the comics, far removed from the oversight of Walt Disney.2 While all the comics in theory traveled through the Disney pipeline, the only connection to Walt Disney himself seems to have been the man’s name on the cover, which did create a false perception for audiences globally.3 Carl Barks is a significant figure in the history of comics, even if he was not as universally recognized as someone like Stan Lee. Barks wrote, largely anonymously, many of the Duck Family titles (Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, Four Color Disney Comics) for over twenty years, retiring in 1966, coincidentally the same year Walt Disney died. He was by all accounts a humble man, working for low pay with little complaint, and remained almost awestruck by his post-retirement fame. He had originally come to California to work for Walt Disney Studios, had a hand in writing jokes in several early, mostly Donald Duck cartoons, though he quit shortly after the outbreak of World War II, quickly winding up as a freelance writer of Donald Duck comics.4 His identity was outed by a few resilient American fans, who managed to uncover his name and address though the publishing company of the comics (then Dell Comics), and went to interview him for a fanzine article in 1962. Barks had been something of a notable figure even before his identity was learned, referred to in fan circles as “The Good Duck Artist” due to the attention and skill he applied 1  Carl Barks mentions that “no feedback came from Walt on my comic book work. Don’t know if he ever read the comic books.” Markku Kivekas, “Carl Barks Speaks with The Finnish Press,” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 162. 2  Barrier, J. Michael, Glenn Bray, Bob Foster, and Bill Spicer, “A Conversation with Carl Barks,” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 21. 3  Barks did work with Disney in the 1930s at the animation studio, and had occasional interactions with him, but they never exchanged any further communication after Barks quits the film studio. Thomas Andrae, Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 37. 4  Erik Svane, “When Donald Duck Turned 60,” in Carl Barks: Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 170.

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to the scripts and drawings in his stories. He became a minor international celebrity in the ensuing years, though he would not leave the United States until he was in his 90s, when he undertook something of a farewell tour through Europe. It should be noted that it would have been almost totally impossible for Dorfman and Mattelart to have been aware of the man; his name and identity were only known in some limited fan circles, and the full scope of his work would not become apparent until well after his retirement. Rather, they assumed that the simple lie (that Walt Disney wrote the stories, as his name was emblazoned across the front of every issue) had some truth, that the writers of these comics had no real agency within the Walt Disney Company, that they were beholden to a strict set of corporate rules that put the expansion of Disney’s cultural hegemony above all else. In the case of Barks, this presumption was inaccurate. Despite his humble standing, Barks crafted the Duck Family universe in myriad ways, with some 700+ stories representing several thousand pages worth of writing and drawing, creating a consistent, stable world.5 He was responsible for the creation (and refinement) of some of the most well-­ known figures within Disney comics, including perhaps the best known of all: Scrooge McDuck. While many cite Scrooge as a poster child for the righteousness of unchecked capitalism, Barks posits him as a more complicated, even tragic figure at various times. His desire for money is insatiable, but his greed often reflects a great personal cost, and his fortunes are often fleeting or used to impart some moral lesson. The sheer volume of Barks’s output looms large in any discussion of the Duck comics (his closest rival for stories created, Italian writer and artist Romano Scarpa, clocks in with just over 400 works), and his stories are consistently among the most reprinted worldwide. By virtue of his reputation and prodigious yield, Barks is almost certainly the most significant author of Donald Duck comics, and has deeper influence upon the genre of Disney comics in a manner that few other individuals could hope to wield. He is the singular author that nearly all who followed were inspired by, he is the dominant creator, not just among the American fandom, but among the fans 5  A note on vocabulary: while most comic books are published in individual issues, Disney comics tend to be collected in somewhat longer formats, ranging from the traditional comic book of roughly thirty pages to a digest format running up to several hundred pages. “Stories” are individual sections within those, running somewhere between one and thirty pages, comprising a single narrative (though they in turn could be broken up into multiple parts and repackaged to regional publishing needs). Thus, the original American publications will be cited herein, though most have received multiple reprintings.

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worldwide, the man whose work inspired the cataloging of Disney comics by the European fans (who sought to determine just how many stories he actually wrote), and who stood at the heights that many of those who followed would aspire to.6 Disney comics are now broken up across linguistic and national lines, with various publishers taking on the duties, and making their own versions of the characters out of the guidelines provided by Disney. The goal is to reach each market in receptive spots, perhaps undercutting the concept of American products haphazardly breaching the local cultural milieu. This does not even consider the role that individual translators play in how the comics’ scripts would change through the language barrier; translators had an even freer rein than the comics creators, and could influence the messages and quality of the comics, for good or ill, at the behest of their publisher or of their own personal beliefs. Previously, when Dell Comics handled the creative aspect of the comics worldwide, it was Barks who was the most prolific, and who most often stretched the limits of the stories he told and the mediums he worked in. While not all of his stories could be called masterpieces, he often crafted narratives that seem out of sync with the charges levied against Disney comics in general; Barks wrote comics that contemplated the repatriation of native artifacts (“Donald Duck and the Mummy’s Ring,” Donald Duck Four Color #29, September 1943), the problems of seasonal charity (“A Christmas for Shacktown,” Donald Duck Four Color #367, January 1952), the use of child labor (“Uncle Scrooge and the Golden River,” Uncle Scrooge #22, June–August 1958), even multi-faceted ruminations on the nature of wealth itself (“Only A Poor Old Man,” Donald Duck Four Color #386, March 1952). While Barks at times seems to be presenting a variation on the dominant neo-liberal capitalist ideology often credited to the Disney Company, he in fact offers up a more multi-dimensional worldview than some explanation of his worldwide popularity. It is difficult to level accusations against the Donald Duck comics as tentacles of the vast Disney when they appear to be unconnected to the center itself. The case could certainly be made for the films, theme parks, and television programs as elements of Disney’s imperialist agenda,

6  One measure of his influence is the internet-based Disney comics database I.N.D.U.C.K.S., which rates the top stories in the Disney canon. Carl Barks occupies 98 of the top 200 spots as of December 2020, giving some sense of the depth of his power within the Duck comics community (http://coa.inducks.org/recommend.php?top100=1).

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but it becomes difficult to connect the comics directly to the company, particularly in context of how early the oversight appears to have faded out.7 Dr. Erika Fuchs is emblematic of countless translators that rewrote the comics for global audiences far outside any awareness of Carl Barks. Disney was one of the first cultural products to enter the post-war Germany; the militarized, de-Nazification efforts of the occupation, succeeded by the Adenauer Era, created a fertile space for American culture to flourish, while staking a position in the larger cultural diplomacy of the early Cold War. As editor, Fuchs was single-handedly responsible for the written content of these comics in Germany for several decades, allowing her readers to consume them not as exotic foreign media but as familiar storybooks. Her translations are especially notable for subtly shifting and changing the written words to suit the German audience, and reflects a significant case for the consideration of translation studies. Germany is just one possible test case for exploring these comics through a translational lens, and the specific circumstances under which these comics were read and grew a fandom will be explored accordingly. The worldwide face of modern Disney comics is Don Rosa, an unassuming writer and artist from Kentucky, whose contribution to the comics canon is relatively small, with online database  I.N.D.U.C.K.S. counting 88 stories, yet well-accepted by fans the world over. Rosa’s unique position is informed by his personal history: a life-long Scrooge McDuck fan, he gave up a lucrative career to draw and write comics full-time, following in the footsteps of his idol, Carl Barks, while planting himself firmly as a fixture in the transnational Duck comics fan community. He explained his reasoning thusly: “I have to keep myself interested in this job. The pay doesn’t keep me interested, but the reception the stories get around the world; and the type of people who I know I’m working for, people who like the same kind of comics as I do.”8 Rosa was a unique figure among the Disney comics creators; whereas Barks, Martina, and other major figures were professionals first and foremost, Rosa was a fan, interested in exploring many aspects of the characters and examining the nature of Barks’s creations. His attention to detail, in-depth historical research, and love of 7  In fact, the most direct control of Disney comics production came in the early 1990s, when the company took back the license for their comics following the modest success of Gladstone Comics, and proceeded to run it into the ground. Roger Ash, “A Gander at Gladstone,” Back Issue #23, August 2007. 35–41. 8  Elliot, “Interview With Don Rosa.”

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both Barks and the characters propelled him from a simple member of the fan community into the preeminent living author of Duck Family comics. He is best known for the collected story arc The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, though his engagement with the global fandom is unique among his fellow authors. Don Rosa builds on many of the themes of Barks, deepening the character of Scrooge and weaving in threads from other Disney comics traditions. Rosa represents a transnational bridge, relying on digital contacts and in-depth research to explore the significance of Barks within a creative space. Don Rosa is crucially a fan, a reader of the comics who was inspired to work in his right, and who helped revive the stories for American and European readers, becoming Barks’s successor in the mind of many. While many of the creators of these Disney comics are popular in their home countries, it is only Barks and Rosa that have a consistent global appeal, even while Disney comics in America linger as a niche product even within a diverse and expansive comics market. Within this, Germany presents a test case, a country where the readership (and fan community) remains very active, despite the lack of homegrown product, which seems owed to the translation efforts of Erika Fuchs. The approach here is not to regard Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge as one interchangeable product, but several, with the meaning of the stories playing out to diverse audiences in diverse spaces, and recognizing that there is not one way to read (or create) Donald Duck. The legacy of Disney is complicated, as I will endeavor to untangle over the next few chapters, before we approach the comics themselves, and seek to locate just why these comics remain popular in certain places and times, while in others they are overlooked and forgotten but for a few collectors and lingering fans. The scholarly approach to Donald Duck comics has tended to be somewhat monolithic. For some forty years, the definitive critical work of all Disney comics has been Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s How to Read Donald Duck (1972).9 Written on the eve of the Pinochet coup in Chile, which served as a focal point for conspiratorial revisionism regarding American foreign policy during the Vietnam era, the authors argued that Disney, exemplified by the Duck Family comics (Donald, Scrooge, Huey, Dewey, Louie, etc.), was a tool of cultural imperialism, a propaganda weapon intended to overturn the democratically elected socialist 9  Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic Book (New York: International General, 1991).

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president. They theorized that Disney intentionally created a world without strong family connections (there are no mothers, for instance, and few fathers within the world of the Ducks) in order to make children comfortable with a horizontal, capitalistic world order. They find the comics’ world scrubbed clean of any sex or violence, with the only violence allowed being occasional slapstick. They argue that, within this world, wealth is not the result of hard work, but of simple luck, that indigenous tribes are shown as somehow undeserving of their wealth, that the whole enterprise was a tool of indoctrination in the neo-liberal paradise that Walt Disney and his writers envisioned. It is a classic work, and rightfully regarded as a significant milestone in the development of cultural criticism, but it rests on a very narrow view of what these comics were at the time, in a specific context of history and translation. There are weaknesses apparent now, both in terms of new theories that have arisen (particularly cultural hybridity), as well as some of the underlying presumptions: Dorfman and Mattelart assumed that the content in the comics was written by Disney (or his direct employees), rather than as being translated by the comics’ Chilean publisher.10 The shape of events that followed, not only Pinochet’s coup and dictatorship, but also the wars in Indochina and the Cold War at large, makes their undoubtedly sincere foreign policy outlook far from indubitable. In the same vein, David Kunzle’s “Dispossession by Ducks: The Imperialist Treasure Hunt in Southeast Asia” from 1990 offers an updated view on imperialism within Disney comics, particularly within the later Carl Barks era.11 Kunzle, the original English translator of How to Read Donald Duck, finds that the narratives put forth tended to be both critical of and favorable to imperialist ideologies; there was no singular message within these comics with regard to the question of imperialism. Barks’s 10  Marwan Kraidy argues that “the boundaries between ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign’ cultural influences are not always clearly demarcated. Hybrid media texts reflect the existence of a variety of historical, economic, and cultural forces whose enmeshments with one another are as manifest at the local, national, and regional levels as they are visible globally. A singular focus on the media is insufficient to comprehend these complex relations. Marwan Kraidy, Hybridity: or the Cultural Logic of Globalization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 6–7. Rather, we need to situate the media in their societal environment and disentangle various links, processes, and effects between communication practices and social, political, and economic forces. 11  David Kunzle, “Dispossession by Ducks: The Imperialist Treasure Hunt in Southeast Asia,” Art Journal, Vol. 49, No. 2, Depictions of the Dispossessed (Summer, 1990): 159–166.

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work tended to create sympathy with the exploited natives: though Scrooge was  generally the erstwhile protagonist of the stories, readers were not always called upon to side with his brand of overt capitalism, and Scrooge would often act honorable toward the natives out of a similar sense of sympathy. Kunzle explains that these were not simple stories of a Western imperialist who brings technology to “civilize” the “savages,” but rather creates a more nuanced view of the problems of technology and modernization. It is not always perfect: the natives, given the choice, will generally elect to return to a monarchy rather than embrace a new form of government, and there were censorship problems with the Walt Disney Company in America, as several of Barks’s stories served as Vietnam allegories that seemed to raise some concerns during reprints. Ultimately, Kunzle finds, Barks tries to remain even-handed, and is more fair than other writers of the day for the plight of the exploited native, and is not entirely in line with the cultural imperialist ideology often ascribed to his work. Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version (1969) actually predates Dorfman and Mattelart, and might be the ur-example of anti-Disney criticism.12 Schickel approaches Walt Disney as a purveyor of middle-brow entertainment, a master of business, and a defender of nostalgia, but not as an artist of any significant talent. Disney’s work, in Schickel’s estimation, is produced for the masses, and posits that these works stand in for the nostalgic myths of Middle America. This approach set the tone for much Disney scholarship that followed, with the media productions regarded more as mass media entertainment for broad audiences and not worth scholarly examination; popular culture studies was still very early in its development in 1969, and Disney (as well as comics at large) was not taken all that seriously. Schickel concludes of Walt Disney that “one must, at last, take him seriously, because whatever the literary content of works, however immature his conscious vision of his own motives and achievements was, there was undeniably some almost mystic bond between himself and the moods and styles and attitudes of this people.”13 He inexorably equates Disney with low culture, but recognizes his unique position in the creation of the modern mass media, possessing a curious fascination with the man. 12  There were a few earlier scholarly efforts examining Disney; Robert D. Felid’s The Art of Walt Disney (1942) appears to have been the first such text, though it focused more directly on the advent of animation as a new art style than the deeper cultural implications of the work. 13  Richard Schickel, The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney (Chicago: Elephant Paperback, 1997).

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Schickel is representative of the first wave of serious pop culture scholarship alongside luminaries like Ray Browne, and his work is useful as context for the period. Henry Giroux and Grace Pollock’s The Mouse That Roared (2010) takes Schickel’s position to its ultimate conclusion, positing Disney as an unsavory and deeply problematic enterprise, a corporate entity engaging in directionless creation of mass media content.14 Giroux and Pollock offer a sense of this approach: “how audiences interpret Disney’s texts may not be as significant as how some ideas, meanings, and messages under certain political conditions become more highly valued as representations of reality than others—and further, how these representations assume the force of ideology by making an appeal to common sense while at the same time shaping political policies and programs that serve very specific interests.”15 Everything is framed though this view: each of Disney’s actions serve its larger operations, from the days of Walt to the ascendance of Michael Eisner, and the content itself is secondary to the presumed intentions of the Walt Disney Company. The actual media content being produced is of less interest than what it represents, shifting away from efforts like How to Read Donald Duck, as it places greater agency in the hands of the audience. Giroux’s view is emblematic of larger anti-Disney sentiment that developed in the later 20th century that cast Disney as the most destructive of contemporary corporate culture, something that is quite relevant to the development of the Disney comics fan subculture. The title of the work, borrowed Leonard Wibberley’s 1955 novel and Peter Sellers-­ starring adaptation, speaks in part to the position of the Walt Disney Company in the period: a company specializing in theme parks and animation suddenly finding itself (as much by accident as intent) positioned as one of the dominant media corporations of the 21st century. Janet Wasko, Mark Phillips, and Eileen R. Meehan’s large-scale research project Dazzled by Disney (2001) offers a more research-based reading of Disney’s reach, focusing heavily on audience reception in a variety of countries (including two studies in the United States, several in Europe, though unfortunately no Germany).16 The study is wide-ranging in 14  Henry A.  Giroux and Grace Pollock, The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (Latham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 15  Giroux and Pollock, The Mouse That Roared, 6. 16  Janet Wasko, Mark Phillips, and Eileen R.  Meehan. Dazzled By Disney?: The Global Disney Audiences Project (London: Leicester University Press, 2001).

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subject matter, exploring attitudes toward Disney’s animated films, theme parks, television, comics, and other aspects of the Disney empire. Wasko provides a great deal of data in how Disney is perceived abroad, and how that perception changes in multiple spaces. It is a dense, focused study, that emphasizes the growing globalization and the transnational aspects of contemporary American culture, and generally avoids making any moral judgments about Disney’s larger endeavor, though regrettably overlooking Germany in the overall project, despite focusing heavily on fan reception elsewhere in Europe. Wasko’s Understanding Disney (2001) serves as a companion work, offering a more theory-based approach to the question of Disney, couching the reading of Disney in communication and political theory, approaching the company itself rather than the audiences at large.17 It offers a grounded approach to what Disney is, with a heavy emphasis on the theme parks within the larger Disney enterprise, and does provide a framework for approaching the input of the audience. There is a great deal of discussion on the corporate and studio dealings of the Walt Disney Company, both before and after Walt Disney’s death. Ron Grover’s The Disney Touch (1991) discusses the events surrounding the Disney Renaissance as it was occurring, focusing on the work of Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, and Roy E. Disney.18 This is a fine example of an entire subgenre of books that examines the inner-workings of Disney from a business perspective. Grover keeps his focus on the facts and figures, relying on interviews with the Disney leadership to explore the company’s resurgence. This is useful in understanding the changes in the corporate culture that would eventually impact the development of Disney’s comics in America, particularly with regard to Gladstone Comics in the 1990s, as well as the creation of the borderline-spinoff Ducktales, that informs much of the developments in fandom that occur thereafter. James Stewart’s Disney War (2005) is an extended account of Michael Eisner’s tenure as CEO of the Walt Disney Company.19 It emphasizes the battle between Roy E. Disney and Michael Eisner that would eventually see Eisner ousted from Disney in 2004, which is outside the purview of 17  Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy (Medford, MA: Polity, 2001). 18  Indicative of this timeliness, Grover is writing when The Lion King (1994) is still under its production title King of the Jungle. Ron Grover, The Disney Touch: How a Daring Management Team Revived A Business Empire (Homewood, IL: Business One Irwin, 1991), 133. 19  James Stewart, Disney War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005).

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this project. It provides a useful background to Eisner’s takeover of the company in 1984, along with the subsequent reorganization that saw a shift in the larger corporate culture  that resulted in the hiring of Jim Shooter and the Disney Comics experiment. Furthermore, it offers insight into the financial growth of the company, particular in the late 1980s, and the effort to modernize operations. It has the advantage of distance from the events, with a longer perspective than Grover, as mentioned above. Steve Watt’s “Walt Disney: Art and Politics in the American Century” (1995) offers some insight of the man at the top.20 While Disney was largely uninvolved in the comics division of his company (the only time Carl Barks met him was when Barks was an animator in the 1930s), he was ultimately the leader of the corporation, and thus set the course for the larger enterprise. Watt contains his discussion largely to Disney’s stateside actions, but he does offer a great degree of insight into the man’s politics and philosophies. Walt Disney is put forth as a populist, who believes that culture belongs to everyone, and should not be constrained by social boundaries. He posits culture as a choice, a freedom to decide upon which things are worthwhile and which are not. Disney was a political conservative, and vehement anti-Communist, and Watt examines the full meaning of this in the context of Disney’s work during the second half of his life. Based on this, we can understand the Walt Disney Company’s efforts not merely as money-making schemes, but a more concerted effort to posit the American exceptionalism to a foreign audience. Watt elaborates on the “cinematic Marshall Plan” put forth by Walter Wagner, explaining it in the context of the larger efforts of the studio beyond simply selling pre-­ established animated characters (Davy Crockett, for instance, plays a significant role in the effort). While Watt ultimately does not offer much criticism, he paints a vivid picture of the events that led Disney to put forth the concerted, worldwide effort that it would in the post-war years. State Department Henry J. Kellerman authored Cultural Relations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Educational Exchange Program Between the United States and Germany 1945–54 (1978), which offers a sense of the underlying decisions of the State Department during the post-­ war years, with an eye toward the reforming of the educational system.21 20  Steve Watt, “Walt Disney: Art and Politics in the American Century,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 82, No. 1, (June 1995): 84–100. 21  Henry J.  Kellerman, Cultural Relations as an Instrument of U.S.  Foreign Policy: The Educational Exchange Program Between the United States and Germany1945–54 (Department of State Publication, 1978).

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The text is relatively dry and diplomatic, but is a valuable primary account of the administrative approach taken, and some of the reasoning behind. Kellerman illuminates the conditions that allowed Donald Duck to gain a foothold in the culture, with the larger U.S. efforts to erase Nazi tendencies among the German population. This was a continuation of policies begun in the 1940s under the Roosevelt administration as part of a larger effort to contain encroachment by Nazi and Communist ideologies into American spheres of influence, particularly South America. Walt Disney himself played a role in the effort, notably with Saludos Amigos (1943), which featured Donald Duck with new character Jose Carioca. The Ducks have not received the same attention that other aspects of the Disney enterprise receive, at least within American scholarship. Disney is typically approached through their animated features, certainly the most accessible aspect of their output for modern audiences, and great deal has been written dissecting the extensive output: Douglas Brode’s Multiculturalism and the Mouse (2005) approaches Disney (both the company and Walt himself) as a vehicle for the furthering of diversity in America, finding the efforts admirable, if imperfect.22 Brode often takes a combative approach to overarching academic criticism of Disney at large, positing that “the academic demonization of Disney seems not only wrongheaded but takes on a strikingly antipopulist quality.”23 Brode’s approach positions Disney’s output as an ultimately progressive effort, engaging with particular segments of their audience—casting black cowboys in 1960s television Westerns, creating female protagonists with agency—often in a coded or subversive manner. Brode approaches films like Song of the South (1946) with a new perspective, running against the conventional wisdom to find value in even the more infamous of and disrespected of Disney’s output. Russell Belk’s “Material Values in the Comics: A Content Analysis of Comic Books Featuring Themes of Wealth” (1987) deals with portrayals of wealth in various comics.24 Belk offers a framework for understanding portrayals of conspicuous wealth in comics, particular how they were meant to appeal to readers and frame a given narratives. Belk takes care to 22  Douglas Brode, Multiculturalism and the Mouse (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). 23  Brode, Multiculturalism and the Mouse, 14. 24  Russell Belk, “Material Values in the Comics: A Content Analysis of Comic Books Featuring Themes of Wealth,” Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 14, No. 1 (June 1987), 26–42.

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distinguish Scrooge’s great wealth from other comics characters (most notably Richie Rich), examining its portrayal and utility within the comics universe, and offering some clues to why audiences relate to Scrooge. He is not simply a wish-fulfillment fantasy in the manner of Richie Rich (he has great wealth, but rarely enjoys it), but could stand as a symbol of the value of hard work and dedication, and makes a counterpoint to the luckless and short-tempered Donald. He concludes that the Uncle Scrooge stories offer the most nuanced and balanced views of wealth in the comics he examined (wealth was neither inherently good nor bad, and often caused as much trouble as it solved), with Scrooge himself often being portrayed as overtly selfish if not heartless, though things became a little less complicated after Barks’s retirement. These themes would be revisited in the work of Don Rosa, in particular the conclusion of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, which reframes Scrooge’s greed as something more nostalgic. Thomas Andrae’s Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book (2006) is the first full-length scholarly contemplation of Carl Barks, the man most responsible for the creation and development of Donald Duck and his extended clan, and of the worldwide popularity of the character.25 Andrae interviews Ariel Dorfman and translator David Kunzle, using How to Read Donald Duck as a counterpoint to explore the work of Barks and what set those stories apart. His book goes on to relate the life of Carl Barks, from his childhood to his work for Disney to his rather active retirement, before delving into the meaning of his works. Andrae finds Barks a conservative nostalgic, a wistful old man who perhaps too fondly remembers his youth, and writes his stories as ruminations on what was. He finds that Barks is distrustful of technology and the modern world, in favor of the preservation of other cultures and historical treasures, and contemplative of the nature of wealth and happiness (specifically that the two are not strongly correlated). Andrae is concerned more with the content and significance of Barks’s work in the comics itself than its cultural impact, leaving space for the exploration here of the reception of the works and development of the various global fan communities. He considers at length what Barks’s stories relate about the American myth of success, though does take some consideration of larger issues, particularly with a thinly veiled story about Vietnam late in his career that raised some serious questions about American involvement there. Andrae’s viewpoint emphasizes Barks’s work  Thomas Andrae, Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book.

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in America with limited attention to the global audiences for Disney comics, providing a detailed picture of the particular qualities of a Carl Barks comic book, and gives some sense of why these stories seem possessed of some universal appeal. Andrae represents the most detailed scholarly account of the work of Carl Barks, and informs much of my approach here, particularly toward the work of Erika Fuchs and Don Rosa. Michael Barrier’s work, particularly his recent Funnybooks: The Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books (2015), has explored the popularity of Disney, both in film and comics.26 He was one of the first scholars to seriously approach Carl Barks as a subject, and has written the definitive volume on the output of Dell Comics with Funnybooks, which provides a great deal of information on the business model that allowed Carl Barks a free hand to create the Duck comics, and subsequently caused the first death of the Duck comics in America. Additionally, Barrier conducted several early interviews with Barks, with an eye toward specificity in the choices Barks made, as well as his role within the larger Disney enterprise. Barrier has access to sources and individuals that I do not, considering that several subjects have since died, and thus forms a crucial supporting component of this work. Erika Fuchs translated the comics at a dizzying pace, with changes major and minor, inserting jokes, puns and references that appealed to her German-speaking audience, shifting the cultural and historical references to be better understood by a German audience, eventually rising to a reputation on par with Barks in the German community. Her efforts were a contributing factor in the enduring popularity of the character and stories, and help explain why Donald Duck remained dominant in the German market even as his sales collapsed domestically. Fuchs has effectively gone un-discussed by American scholars, yet is recognized as one of the most significant forces in the popularization of the comics in Germany. Klaus Bohn’s Das Erika-Fuchs-Buch (1996) (trans.: The Erika Fuchs Book: Disney’s German Translator of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, A Modern Mosaic) is a fairly standard biography of her life, serves here more as background than as a critical source.27 He offers a few insights into her life, but serves more as a reference point to further research, as it is somewhat 26  Michael Barrier, Funny Books: The Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015). 27  Klaus Bohn, Das Erika-Fuchs-Buch: Disneys deutsche Übersetzerin von Donald Duck und Micky Maus: Ein modernes Mosaik (Lüneburg: Dreidreizehn, 1996).

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outdated considering subsequent writing. Ernst Horst’s Nur keine Sentimentalitäten (2010) (trans.: No Sentimentality: When Dr. Erika Fuchs Moved Duckburg to Germany), though intended for a general audience, provides useful insight into Fuchs’s translation work and her motivations.28 It is approachable and relatively easy to comprehend, while providing a deeper exploration into her work and motivations. Ilaria Meloni’s Erika Fuchs’ Übertragung der Comicserie Micky Maus (2013) (trans.: Erika Fuchs’s Translation of the Mickey Mouse Comics Series) offers the most scholarly of the major Fuchs texts, examining the work from the perspective of translation studies.29 She offers very detailed in its examination of how the original texts were changed in their adaptation, and the cultural significance of the choices that Fuchs made. Meloni ties the discussion quite directly in to translation studies, exploring the very linguistics of Fuchs’s efforts, and making the case for deeper meanings even in seemingly minor word choices. The contributions of Erika Fuchs and Don Rosa are be best understood through a lens of hybridity. Marwan Kraidy’s Hybridity: or the Cultural Logic of Globalization  (2005) locates various framings and definitions, with an emphasis on popular media examples. Kraidy notes that “since hybridity involves the fusion of two hitherto relatively distinct forms, styles, or identities, cross-cultural contact, which often occurs across national borders as well as across cultural boundaries, is a requisite for hybridity…international communication contact entails the movement of cultural commodities such as media programs.”30 This framing fits clearly with the translation work of Fuchs (which transforms American media content into German in ways beyond a straightforward one-to-one translation). Kraidy goes on to explain that “while global media conglomerates control production structures, program content, and distribution networks, two decades of research on audience behavior…suggest that the processes and outcomes of cultural reception remain somewhat unpredictable.”31 This complicates the questions raised by critics of Disney, and offers an argument for approaching Rosa’s work (much of it done at the behest of European publisher Egmont for a European audience) as an example of hybrid popular culture.  Ernst Horst, Nur keine Sentimentalitäten: Wie Dr. Erika Fuchs Entenhausen nach Deutschland verlegte (Munich: Karl Blessing Verlag, 2010). 29  Ilaria Meloni, Erika Fuchs´ Übertragung der Comicserie Micky Maus (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2013). 30  Kraidy, Hybridity, 5. 31  Kraidy, Hybridity, 93. 28

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As mentioned above, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s How to Read Donald Duck (1973) is the first, serious scholarly examination of Disney comics outside of fanzines like Michael Barrier’s Funny World. It is a seminal work of 1970s Marxist cultural criticism, a precursor to much of the Disney scholarship that would follow in later decades. It is important to explore the book, still a touchstone of Disney criticism (a new edition was released in Autumn 2018), though its worldview is a bit narrow. It should be understood as example of what this book is responding to, specifically the limitations imposed by an ideological viewpoint that exists without the perspective of how the original comics were created, produced, and understood by their original audiences. How to Read Donald Duck was developed following the election of Salvador Allende in 1970. Allende, a socialist, sought to transform the Chilean economy and its society at large, engaging in a series of major products aimed at upending the existing social power structures; within the administration was Ariel Dorfman, a professor of Spanish literature and cultural advisor to President Allende. Though young (Dorfman was 28 when he joined the Allende administration), he was a true believer, active in his critical examination of Chilean culture. He was joined by Armand Mattelart, a Belgian professor of sociology who had been sent to Chile at the behest of the Catholic Church, on a project to engage with the most popular children’s literature in the country: Donald Duck. Their cooperation produced a satirical/scholarly essay that attempted to ascertain the messages in the comics, particularly the capitalist underpinnings that are intrinsic to the worldviews of Walt Disney and Carl Barks. Dorfman states in a recent article that the project “was meant to respond to a very practical need: the mass-media stories Chileans had been consuming, that mentally colonized the way they lived and dreamed of their everyday circumstances, didn’t faintly match the extraordinary new situation in their country. Largely imported from the United States and available via outlets of every sort (comics, magazines, television, radio), they needed to be critiqued and the models and values they espoused, all the hidden messages of greed, domination, and prejudice they contained, exposed.”32 The choice of Disney was based on the cheapness and availability of the comics, and an underlying belief that the comics functioned as pro-­ capitalist propaganda intended to warp the minds of children. 32  Ariel Dorfman, “What A 1970s Chilean Satire Can Tell Us About Donald Trump,” The Nation, 14 September 2017.

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There are several key problems with the thesis of How to Read Donald Duck that have become apparent in the years since its initial publication. Dorfman and Mattelart took a limited view of Disney comics, framing it as a singular enterprise overseen by Walt Disney Company, a sort of continuation of the actual propaganda efforts of the company that had produced Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros for the South American market partially at the behest of the United States State Department. This did not fit with the actual creation process of the comics in America, but did fit within an expectation that cultural output was another front of the Cold War. This approach reflects their perspectives as members of the Allende coalition, which viewed the United States suspiciously, casting the government (and particularly the CIA) as the hydra intervening in every revolution worldwide. In their minds, Disney was simply another head of that hydra, essentially a state-run propaganda arm, that worked to target and indoctrinate children specifically. This viewpoint diminishes the reality that Allende faced massive domestic opposition from entrenched religious, business, and military interests, further complicated by an economic downturn that arose from his policies, larger global economic trends, and trade decisions by the Nixon administration. The coup that overthrew Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973 was the result of domestic opposition more than foreign intervention, resulting in a specific authoritarian capitalist regime that they viewed as a natural endpoint for the United States and Disney. Dorfman and Mattelart’s work was a sincere effort to come to terms with what happened, but it is a period piece, written under the shadow of an oppressive regime, and lacks perspective on the American comics industry as it existed at that time. Disney’s approach to their business did not reflect the worst fears of Dorfman and Mattelart, at least not directly. Nearly from the beginning, Disney comics were licensed out, primarily to Dell Comics in America, and various local and regional publishers worldwide, who often published content previously produced for Dell. By 1973, Dell Comics had effectively been put out of business by corporate in-fighting and a shifting comics market in America. The decline of Dell (which started a decade earlier) affected a paradigm shift in how the comics were produced, as the process, already largely decentralized, had begun to shift toward local publishers and authors; while Disney set basic guidelines in terms of what was (and was not) allowed content-wise, the local editors gained an increasing degree of control over their production. These editors had access to plenty of reprints of the classic stories, but demand for new works

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was such that the new comics shifted away from whatever homogeneity they had and toward localized content targeted toward specific audiences (Italy being the preeminent example, but this was true in Chile as well). Dorfman and Mattelart do note that the publisher of the comics in Chile is Empresa Editorial Zig-Zag, but simply see as a functionary of the larger Disney enterprise, rather than an independent publisher with conservative leanings.33 The problem with this approach is that Disney, not to mention many of the writers, of their comics had little control (or interest) of the messages contained in stories published overseas. While Disney does wield centralized control over its animation and theme parks, the comic books were never considered to be a top priority or big earner for the company, and thus were left in the hands of local publishers and writers, with Disney simply collecting large sums of money for the license. Very rarely did the company enact censorship or direct control until the Eisner Era in the 1980s, even in America, and were generally more concerned with copyright violations and the like than policing the content (this allowed for the much more violent Italian comics, for instance). Dorfman and Mattelart assumed that Disney (and Donald Duck in particular) were the face of a larger CIA operation to subvert social justice in Chile and beyond, while in reality the publications and their translation were largely decentralized, even in America. Within the canon of the Disney comics, the patriarchy and particularly the lack of female characters concern Dorfman and Mattelart greatly, but they do not consider the larger implications of the comics culture that existed within the 1970s. For Dorfman and Mattelart, it appeared that Disney comics are pushing an agenda of patriarchy and masculine domination, though they fail to consider that the preponderance of male characters is hardly unique to Disney comics (and is perhaps slightly more representative of gender than most superhero comics and their ilk); they point out that “the genealogy is tipped decisively in favor of the masculine sector.”34 Moreover, they overlook the culture of machismo that exists within Latin culture: Donald Duck did not introduce a male-centric  Dorfman and Mattelart, 28.  Dorfman and Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck, 34. It should be mentioned that Don Rosa’s official family tree includes fifteen female characters to thirty males, a disparity that should be noted, though the number of characters appearing regularly in the comics tends much closer to gender parity (depending somewhat on the writer of a given comic). 33 34

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worldview for Latin America, for instance.35 The preponderance of male characters is a notable issue, one that afflicts comics on a large scale, even into modern day, and is not indicative of some conspiracy carried out by Walt Disney and his minions. Presently, modern media producers are wrestling with questions of diversity and representation despite spending decades catering to a heavily male audience (consider the pushback over the female Thor in Marvel Comics or the female-lead Ghostbusters reboot). It was the case in the 1970s that nearly all figures within the production of the comics, from writers, artists, and editors, from printing technicians to managers, and even translators, were male, a fact that held true to Disney comics (although there were exceptions, as we will discuss) as much as it did for “mainstream” superhero comics of the era.36 Furthermore, the readership of comics was generally assumed to be adolescent boys in this period, which further ensured the dominance of male figures, particular younger males in the vein of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, who were presumed to serve as audience surrogates.37 Carl Barks himself assumed his comics were intended solely for the youthful crowd, appearing confused in many early interviews that adult fans still read and collected his stories. The whole masculine culture of the comics industry has been discussed in greater detail elsewhere; it is indicative of larger trends, rather than a

35  There are some scholars that accuse Disney of contributing to the problems that exist, albeit in a more general sense. Julianne Burton-Carvajal proposes “The Three Caballeros, though appearing to challenge it, in fact conforms to what some theories of machismo (the cult of male superiority) call the ‘colonial compact.’ [The argument is] the reward for male acquiescence to the will of the conqueror was his socially and civilly enforced superiority to and dominance over the female.” Julianne Burton-Carvajal, “‘Surprise Package’: Looking Southward with Disney,” Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom. Edited by Eric Smoodin (Routledge, 1994), 144. In her argument, Donald is often feminized compared to the native Jose Carioca and Panchito, who are allowed to maintain their masculinity, ultimately maintaining the long-established social order. Disney is not actively creating a culture of machismo, but rather building upon what already exists. 36  Representation, both in the comics themselves and in publishing offices, has been a problem since the inception of comics, and remains a contested issue today, despite advances. 37  Dorfman and Mattelart do discuss Huey, Dewey, and Louie at some length, remarking “it is the adult who produces the comics, and the child who consumes them. The role of the apparent child actor, who reigns over this uncontaminated world, is at once that of audience and dummy for his father’s ventriloquism. The father denies his progeny a voice of his own, and as in any authoritarian society, he establishes himself as the other’s sole interpreter and spokesman. All the little fellow can do is to let his father represent him.” Dorfman and Mattelart, 30.

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Disney conspiracy.38 This is not to say that female characters were not marginalized within the comics, but that Dorfman and Mattelart singled out Disney for its role in propagating the patriarchy, insofar that he was complacent within the larger culture of comic production. The issues of patriarchy in the entertainment industry loom large, certainly, but it is problematic to single out Disney as the source of this issue. This is an issue that effected the comics industry at large, and demands a more nuanced approach. This is not to impugn the intent or efforts of Dorfman and Mattelart: the field of comics studies essentially did not exist when they did their work, and lack of full-scale analysis of the reader response and adaptation theory. Utilizing the tools they had at the time, they had a point to make and made it well, though it is best understood as a relic of that period. Dorfman and Mattelart make broad assumptions about the readership and how the readers are consuming the comics. While the comics can be assumed to be aimed at a youthful audience (though the Duck fandom hewed much wider in many countries, Disney comics are at least marketed toward children), the authors assume that this audience simply exists as passive consumers, absorbing the purported messages of the works without any sense of the impact it actually had. They offer a critical perspective on the comics themselves, but offer little sense as to how they were being consumed by the readership.39 They make broad statements about how the readers of Donald Duck are receiving the messages (or, at least, the messages as they see them), without much regard for the reality of the situation or the intentions of the authors. Dorfman and Mattelart presume the comics are targeted at children as a form of Western/capitalist propaganda, and that the readers are made to identify with Donald Duck as a method of subverting the traditional social order. They outline the relationship thusly: “Children will not only identify with Donald Duck because Donald’s situation relates to their own life, but also because the 38  Bradford Wright’s Comic Book Nation (2001) and Susan Douglas’s Where the Girls Are (1995) discuss the issue in greater length, from other perspectives. 39  To their minds, children’s literature in general is distracting nonsense. “In juvenile literature, the adult, corroded by the trivia of everyday life blindly defends his image of youth and innocence. Because of this, it is perhaps the best (and least expected) place to study the disguises and truths of contemporary man. For the adult, in protecting his dream image of youth, hides the fear that to penetrate it would destroy his dreams and reveal the reality it conceals. Thus, the imagination of the child is conceived as the past and future utopia of the adult” (Dorfman and Mattelart, 31).

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way they read or the way they are exposed to it, imitates and pre-figures the way Donald Duck lives out his own problems.”40 They presume that Donald is the character with which child readers are meant to identify, and that his difficulties (notably a lack of sexual drive) are meant to subvert young readers. Dorfman and Mattelart further take aim at Huey, Dewey, and Louie, Donald’s three nephews, who would seem to serve as the obvious audience surrogates, characters who are adventurous, capable in their own right, and occasionally smarter than even the adults (though not always). Despite their youth, they enjoy a great deal of freedom, and even a degree of agency, though they are still generally subservient to the adults in their lives. Dorfman and Mattelart believe that the whole process is just a ruse, arguing that the subversions of the power structures serve in fact to reinforce them. “Since the child identifies with his counterpart in the magazine, he contributes to his own colonization. The rebellion of the little folk in the comics is sensed as a model for the child’s own real rebellion against injustice; but by rebelling in the name of adult values, the readers are in fact internalizing them.”41 The nephew-centric storylines, where they often antagonize their uncle Donald, are understood to function as disruptions to the social order and to reinforce capitalist values. Dorfman and Mattelart assume that all aspects of the story exist as part of a plot to colonize the minds of children, to pave the way for capitalist brainwashing and the subjugation of a generation. Dorfman and Mattelart problematize the character relationships in several ways. The first is arguing that the basic power structures within Disney tend to favor the rich and well-connected and utterly permanent, without seeking to understand the author’s intent of the situation.42 Donald Duck will invariably remain luckless, trapped in a sexless relationship with Daisy, stuck under his rich, skinflint uncle’s thumb, bemoaning the cruel twists of fate rather than attempting to gain any purchase in pulling himself out of his spiral of poverty and despair. Uncle Scrooge invariably retains his immense wealth, with most stories seeing his incredible riches continue to grow, constantly seeking more money and suffering (at best) a temporary setback to his acquisition of ever greater wealth in the stories. Huey, Dewey, and Louie are invariably trapped in their positions as the inferior  Dorfman and Mattelart, 32.  Dorfman and Mattelart, 36. 42  Dorfman and Mattelart, 35. 40 41

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to Donald and Scrooge; while they score temporary victories against their parental figures, the status quo will always reassert itself, and no revolution on their part will have any lasting impact on the power relationships that persist among the main cast. The status remains quo, no one ever ages, and the world never changes, all seemingly reinforcing the inevitability of power structures to the child reader. The problem is that the stories that Barks is telling are not so clear cut; the messages are not meant to reinforce an agenda of hegemony, and in fact were at times utilized to anti-­ colonialist effect. Dorfman and Mattelart mistake this idyllic, Arcadian stasis for something sinister, a charge that had been lobbed at Disneyland (and the Disney empire at large), but in fact represents a much more complicated relationship with history and American idealism. How to Read Donald Duck has earned a near-mythical reputation for reasons beyond the content of the book itself. President Allende was overthrown in a military coup lead by Augustin Pinochet in September 1973, forcing Dorfman and Mattelart to eventually flee the country with their lives in real peril. The scale of retributions visited upon Allende’s allies extended well beyond the borders of Chile: the assassinations of Carlos Prats in Buenos Aires and Orlando Letelier in Washington DC would have weighed heavily on the minds of Dorfman and Mattelart. The response to the book in Chile was deadly serious, and the book itself was burned by the Pinochet government.43 While no one has been to my knowledge no credible accusations of Disney masterminding the coup, they became a stand-in for accusations of C.I.A. involvement, further proof of an imperialist plot engineered by U.S. corporate interests. The legend only grew with the difficulties of publishing the book in America; Dorfman explains “no publisher in the United States was willing to risk bringing out our book because we had reproduced—obviously without authorization—a series of images from Disney’s comics to prove our points, and Walt’s company was (and still is) notorious for defending its copyright material and characters with an armada of lawyers and threats.”44 Disney’s litigiousness (which was quite real, at one point resulted in translated copies of the 43  “A few days after the neo-fascist takeover of Chile’s long-standing democracy, I was in hiding in a clandestine house when I happened to see a live TV transmission of a group of soldiers throwing books onto a pyre—and there was [How to Read Donald Duck]. I wasn’t entirely surprised by this inquisitorial blaze. The book had touched a nerve among Chilean right-wingers. Even in pre-coup times, I had barely avoided being run over by an irate motorist who shouted, ‘¡Viva el Pato Donald!’” Dorfman, “1970s Satire”. 44  Dorfman, “1970s Satire”.

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book being sent back to England) also plays a role in the myth, so much so that the first official American printing by International General in 1991 included the all-caps text: “BURNED IN CHILE 1973—BANNED IN THE USA 1975—FINALLY AVAILABLE!”45 Dorfman and Mattelart’s How to Read Donald Duck is a product of its time, much as any scholarship is. The school of Marxism represented by the pair failed to outlast the end of the Cold War. Contemporary academic criticism owes more to figures such as Herbert Marcuse and Mikhail Bakhtin, who were seen as ancillary by mainstream Marxist-Leninist scholars in the days when the Soviet Union dominated Marxist scholarship. They could not have foreseen these developments, nor could they have anticipated the arrival of critical theory, embodied by figures like Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School. That they lack awareness of certain key elements of the comics’ production does not call for dismissing their arguments out of hand, nor does the larger scholarly shift away from cultural imperialism and toward more modern concepts of the spread and exchange of culture. The book is not a relic, and rightfully remains a foundational source of several disciplines. But it is a text that has effectively silenced much critical study on the issues of Disney comics, at least among the American scholarly community. To offer an example, Henry Giroux and Grace Pollock’s The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (2010) is indicative of much of the present discourse surrounding Disney, updating the framework of Dorfman and Mattelart to a suit a contemporary moment. In their view, Disney is indicative of the larger corporate media efforts to gain control over the American political system, to subvert democracy to their own ends (echoing the same accusations found in How to Read Donald Duck). Giroux and Pollock argue that “corporations like Disney use media culture as one of the most important vehicles through which they can express their commitment to middle-class family values, the welfare of children, and expansion into noncommercial sectors such as public schooling. But the public relations rhetoric represents more than the staged authenticity of the corporate swindle…”46 Disney, in this view, is an entirely artificial, dishonest corporation putting forth a media narrative in order to sell products (in this case, the focus is on the theme parks), warping democracy around these efforts. In particular, the creation of products for  Dorfman and Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck, cover.  Giroux and Pollock, Mouse That Roared, 25.

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children mark them as uniquely dangerous in the view of the authors, beyond the efforts of others: “Disney, unlike other media conglomerates such as Time Warner or News Corporation, is uniquely situated as an icon of American culture and middle-class family values. It actively appeals to both parental concerns and children’s fantasies as it works hard to transform every child into a lifetime consumer of Disney products and ideas.”47 This isn’t to say that they are incorrect in their arguments, but that they lack nuance, viewing Disney as a monolithic enterprise, the marching orders coming from on high as part of a decades-long plan to seize control of America. Disney is a large corporation, and should not be presumed to be inherently benevolent or malevolent (the narratives pushed for by the company itself and its detractors, respectively), but understood in multiple contexts. Statements like “Disney’s educational practices should be understood as part of a broader assault on public discourse that seeks to dispense with the principles of autonomy, critical self-reflection, and self-­ determination. Disney’s pedagogy is not about harnessing the imagination to produce counternarratives capable of helping us to see beyond mundane reality” would not sound out of place in How to Read Donald Duck, and represent a fealty to scholarly thought on Disney that has persisted for fifty years.48 The idea that Disney is only one thing, to be read only one way, with one singular message overlooks both the agency of the consumers and the complexities of corporate governance in a company on that scale.49 The focus here will not be simply on refuting what others have written, but exploring the complicated nature of Disney’s comics publications. Carl Barks himself has experienced a slow rise in popularity since his retirement, and his work has been recognized as among the major comic art contributions of the 20th century, a figure more nuanced than he is given credit for, and his work has a greater depth than seems readily apparent. There is a further issue of translations that I will approach in greater depth  Giroux and Pollock, 27.  Giroux and Pollock, 54–55. 49  Notably, there is a difference of approach depending on politics. Leftist critics tend to assume that Disney’s activities, even progressive efforts like gay-friendly policies at Disney World, are motivated entirely by profit-seeking. Critics on the right frame Disney as a progressive force in the culture war, framing incidents like the firing of Roseanne Barr in 2018 by the Disney-owned television network ABC as a broadside against President Donald Trump, who she was an outspoken supporter of. This isn’t to say that either viewpoint is inaccurate, but that preexisting political beliefs influence how Disney is understood. 47 48

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here; Dorfman and Mattelart seem to assume that what is printed in Spanish is a direct translation of what was written in may not universally be the case. I would raise further issue with the fact that Dorfman and Mattelart posit the comics as children’s literature, which is largely accurate in this context, but fail to offer much sense of how the children are utilizing it, who they identify with, and what lessons they take from it. Nor does it deal with a key point of modern popular culture studies scholarship: namely that there is no line between juvenile and adult literature, especially where comics are concerned. This is a work of literary criticism, to be sure, but their book offers a much better sense of how a pair of trained academics with a socialist bent would read children’s comics, without much attention to how the child audience might relate to the work (Scrooge is often a target of scorn and derision, and not a role model looked up to, at least within the original Barks comics). This book looms large within the larger project, and a way must be found to deal with its arguments and the scholarship that sprung forth from it. They may have captured a sense of the process at the heart of the larger issue: the role played by Disney’s comics in the de-Nazification of Germany, the long-­ term effects of that process, and the at-times subversive translations carried out by Erika Fuchs. Moreover, while they recognized the power of Donald Duck as a symbol, they read the comics as an aspect of larger political movements, rather than as appreciation for the comics themselves, though fan studies were not taken all that seriously until quite recently.

References Andrae, Thomas. Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2006. Ash, Roger. “A Gander at Gladstone.” Back Issue #23, August 2007. 35–41. Barrier, J. Michael, Glenn Bray, Bob Foster, and Bill Spicer. “A Conversation with Carl Barks.” Carl Barks: Conversations, edited by Donald Ault, 19–25. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Barks, Carl. “Donald Duck and the Mummy’s Ring,” Donald Duck Four Color #29. Dell Comics, September 1943. Barks, Carl. “A Christmas for Shacktown.” Donald Duck Four Color #367. Dell Comics, January 1952. Barks, Carl. “Uncle Scrooge and the Golden River.” Uncle Scrooge #22. Dell Comics, June–August 1958.

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Barrier, Michael. Funny Books: The Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. Belk, Russell. “Material Values in the Comics: A Content Analysis of Comic Books Featuring Themes of Wealth.” Journal of Consumer Research, Vol. 14, No. 1 (June 1987), 26–42. Bohn, Klaus. Das Erika-Fuchs-Buch: Disneys deutsche Übersetzerin von Donald Duck und Micky Maus: Ein modernes Mosaik [trans.: The Erika Fuchs Book: Disney’s German Translator of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, A Modern Mosaic), Lüneburg, Germany: Dreidreizehn, 1996. Brode, Douglas. Multiculturalism and the Mouse. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Burton-Carvajal, Julianne. “‘Surprise Package’: Looking Southward with Disney.” Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom. Ed. Eric Smoodin, New York: Routledge, 1994, 131–147. Dorfman, Ariel and Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic Book. New York: International General, 1991. Dorfman, Ariel. “What A 1970s Chilean Satire Can Tell Us About Donald Trump.” The Nation, 14 September 2017. https://www.thenation.com/article/what-­a-­1970s-­chilean-­satire-­can-­tell-­us-­about-­donald-­trump/ Elliot, Fieval A. “Interview with Don Rosa.” YouTube, 23 February 2011. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYUENWNAUR8 Horst, Ernst. Nur keine Sentimentalitäten: Wie Dr. Erika Fuchs Entenhausen nach Deutschland. Munich: Karl Blessing Verlag, 2010. Giroux, Henry A. and Grace Pollock. The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. Latham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010. Grover, Ron. The Disney Touch: How a Daring Management Team Revived A Business Empire. Homewood, IL: Business One Irwin, 1991. Kellerman, Henry J. Cultural Relations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Educational Exchange Program Between the United States and Germany1945–54. Department of State Publication, 1978. Kivekas, Markku. “Carl Barks Speaks with The Finnish Press.” Carl Barks: Conversations, edited by. Donald Ault. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. 161–164. Kunzle, David. “Dispossession by Ducks: The Imperialist Treasure Hunt in Southeast Asia.” Art Journal, Vol. 49, No. 2, Depictions of the Dispossessed (Summer, 1990): 159–166. Kraidy, Marwan. Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005. Meloni, Ilaria. Erika Fuchs’ Übertragung der Comicserie Micky Maus. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2013. Schickel, Richard. The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney. Chicago: Elephant Paperback, 1997.

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Stewart, James. Disney War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Svane, Erik. “When Donald Duck Turned 60.” Carl Barks: Conversations, edited by Donald Ault, 165–172. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Wasko, Janet, Mark Phillips, and Eileen R.  Meehan. Dazzled By Disney?: The Global Disney Audiences Project. London: Leicester University Press, 2001. Wasko, Janet. Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy. Medford, MA: Polity, 2001. Watt, Steve. “Walt Disney: Art and Politics in the American Century.” The Journal of American History, Vol. 82, No. 1 (June 1995): 84–100.

CHAPTER 2

“The Empire-Builder from Calisota”: Donald Duck and the Rise of Disney

Donald Duck was created in the height of the Depression and came of age in the midst of World War II: these roots affect the reading of the character in the modern day. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Donald Duck is tied to propaganda in the existing scholarly consciousness, not just through How to Read Donald Duck, as this period saw the Duck positioned as a propaganda figure (including an Oscar win for a propaganda film). When Disney is cast as a tool of American cultural imperialism, these accusations have roots in the 1940s, owing to Walt Disney himself being quite closely aligned to larger American interests (as was essentially all of the American entertainment industry). Donald Duck played a key role as the face of Disney worldwide in the 1940s and as the focus of this scholarly opinion, but this is a function as much of the medium of animation itself as something inherent about the character or Walt Disney. Animation seems to naturally lend itself to uses of propaganda, appearing among both sides during World War II. Both the Axis and the Allies made use of animation to express their political points and move public opinion, though the output of American animation studios outpaced all others. To better comprehend Donald Duck’s function in the scholarly memory, we should start with his creation in the context of animation history, and how he naturally grew into a figurehead of propaganda efforts of World War II.  Donald’s early evolution, from his role as a minor © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. C. Bryan, Creation, Translation, and Adaptation in Donald Duck Comics, Palgrave Fan Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73636-1_2

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antagonist during the ensemble cartoons of the mid-1930s to a sidekick for Mickey Mouse, to the most popular cartoon star in his own right, speaks to how he stands apart from other characters of the period. His popularity was a function of his character that allowed him to be adapted more easily into intercultural contexts in the post-war period, despite his use in American propaganda, as Donald Duck generally avoided problematic portrayals. The actual roots of the comic book as a genre are shrouded in disagreement. Different versions of the comic book creation myth have their adherents. Definitions of what a comic book is, or more significantly where it began, remain subject of considerable disagreement both in the graphic arts and academic communities. Bradford Wright, for instance, finds the foundation of the comic book in 1938 with Action Comics #1 and the dawn of the superhero, a form easily recognizable to modern audiences and one that effectively jump-started the industry.1 Ron Goulart puts forth Maxwell Gaines as the originator, as he preceded Superman in 1934, reprinting newspaper strips under the title Famous Funnies in a magazine-style release.2 George Delacorte of Dell Publishing printed The Funnies in 1929, a collection of newspaper strips intended as a newspaper insert, not as a standalone product. The 1928 adaptation of Tarzan into a newspaper comic heralded the coming of the superheroes, and reflected new possibilities of narrative in the comic format. Even if the definition is restricted to the “comic book” format itself, there are certainly other collections that were published, either as children’s books or by early fans, that have been lost to history, particularly outside of the United States. There are also many aspects we associate with comic books (characters, narratives, word balloons) have their origins earlier; Rodolphe Töpffer might be the father of sequential art with The Adventures of Obadiah Olbuck, published in 1837 (1842 in America), but certainly he had influences too. Comics, in whatever their form, are recognized as a major form of media in the 20th century, a type of culture unique itself, and a significant part of the landscape; Jeremy Tunstall’s statement that “comics were the first and true love of circulation managers” points to their value in drawing in audiences.3 But whichever starting point, it is incontestable  Bradford Wright, Comic Book Nation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001).  Ron Goulart, The Great Comic Book Artists (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986). 3  Jeremy Tunstall, The Media Are American (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 26. 1 2

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that the tale of comic books is long and winding, with multiple sources contributing to its development.

McCay, Bray, and Early Animated Propaganda Inexorably linked to the comic book is animation and, as with comic books, the first animated short is the subject of some contention. Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks often receive credit for Steamboat Willie in 1928, at least from the broad public, though it was not even the first Disney Studios cartoon, nor the first Mickey short, with Plane Crazy being exhibited to test audiences a few months prior. Felix the Cat first appeared on film in 1919 from the pen of Otto Messmer, though John Bray’s Col. Heeza Liar first appeared in 1913. The first animated short, according to Howard Beckerman, is Emile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908), but that ignores works like J.  Stuart Blackton Humorous Phases of a Funny Face (1906), which incorporated blackboard drawings.4 Earlier still was Emile Reynaud, whose praxinoscope could project pictures onto a wall, though that itself was a refinement of the zoetrope. Even still, there are undoubtedly lost experiments that never made it to the public; as Donald Crafton explains, no singular “event signaled the beginning of animation history. No one knows who first discovered that screen motion could be deliberately synthesized by making single-frame exposures. It is likely that many tinkerers had some vague feeling that such a process was possible and may even have made some crude experiments.”5 Animation was the result of a number of innovations and technological advancements, threads that wove together to create fertile ground for Walt Disney’s creations. Key within this discussion of the origins of comics and animation is a singular common ancestor: Winsor McCay. While not the first comic artist, nor the first animator, he played a key role in both. His drawing and writing Dream of the Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo in Slumberland codified the basic style of the newspaper comic, including morphic panels and rudimentary continuing narratives. He keenly demonstrated what could be done, and began the process of integrating narratives longer than a single page, particularly in Little Nemo, which saw the stories develop over months and years. Popular in their time, the full influence of his comics is  Howard Beckerman, Animation: The Whole Story (New York: Allworth Press, 2003).  Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898–1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 5. 4 5

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complicated, with a detailed style of comic art that would not be effectively replicated until the modern period. It was through his work in comics that he entered the world of animation; his first short was Winsor McCay, the Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics (1911), a co-production with experienced director Stuart Blackton, and featured his Little Nemo characters. As with comics, McCay’s work marked one of the first efforts to bring a semblance of narrative to animated films, with his follow-up How the Mosquito Operates (1912) adapted one of his strips into a short film, and had a conclusive beginning, middle, and end within the film. Although it may seem a bit disjointed and slow to today’s audiences, it is nevertheless a major advance as part of its genre, though his particularly labor-intensive animation style that was not economically feasible in the long run. His pioneering work in animation is best-recognized with Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), perhaps the first true cartoon star, solidifying the idea of the cartoon mascot, though John Bray possibly beat him to the punch; film records of the period are spotty at best.6 A lost sequel, in which Gertie travels across the United States, could have been the first attempt to create a cartoon franchise out of an animated character, but it is unclear if the film was ever completed. McCay’s later works were largely lost, or may have never been completed (let alone exhibited to audiences), and their true impact unknown. He was a consummate performer; his films were as much vaudeville routines as standalone products, with McCay presenting and performing within the larger show, which limited his audience, but nevertheless contributed to the development of the art (particularly as he was based in New York). There are many aspects of McCay’s work that deserve note,  specifically his significant role in the genesis of  animation and propagnda. In discussing Winsor McCay, it is necessary to discuss his counterpart, John Randolph Bray, who had a significant impact on the development of animation as well, albeit in a different fashion. Bray too was a newspaper cartoonist in the early part of the century, branching into animated films sometime before World War I, as did many other cartoonists of the day. He strikes a more controversial figure, however, as he apparently posed as journalist to visit McCay, who proudly showed off his techniques and work, which Bray tried to patent as his own. What followed was a short legal battle, with McCay emerging victorious, though Bray had made 6

 Michael Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12.

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some improvements on McCay’s techniques (though they were not sufficiently different). Bray’s major contribution to the field would be less in terms of the art, but rather in refining the production side of the equation. He was at least partly responsible for the invention of cel animation, a key technology in the development of animation on an industrial scale in coming years. Bray also developed perhaps the first animation studio, which would become the industry standard within a few years, utilizing an assembly-line style technique. Work was split among a myriad of assistants and secondary employees, which freed Bray to handle dozens of projects simultaneously. Barrier explains the system: “his staff included nine cartoonists, as well as four camera operators and thirty assistant artists. Such assistants, at his studio and others, shouldered the more nearly mechanical tasks…an assistant might trace the characters in ink from the animators’ pencil drawings.”7 Bray produced animation on an industrial scale, producing hundreds of films over a few decades, and laid the groundwork for the studios that would follow, including Walt Disney Studios. Bray was a consummate businessman, and recognized the potential of the form as a money-making machine, but he lacked the artistry of others like McCay, and his impact would be muted over time. Winsor McCay produced, nearly single-handedly, one of the first animated propaganda films: The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918). Released in July 1918, it had been intended of a call to action, beginning production some twenty-two months earlier (the attack on the Lusitania having occurred in May 1915).8 Donald Crafton notes that “its documentary character called for a more realistic graphic style, so the detailed crosshatching, the washes, and the spatter techniques…were used. The animated sequences were first conceived as alternating shots to simulate the editing style of newsreel subjects typical of the Universal Weekly, in which the film was included.”9 It purported to be a factual account of the event, and absent of any live action footage (either from the actual event or produced), it served as the public record. The film was ponderous but dramatic, slowly building tension as the Lusitania departs New York, nearly reaching its destination when a prowling German submarine comes into frame; McCay opines “Germany, which has already benumbed the world  Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 17.  John Canemaker, Winsor McCay: His Life and Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 2005), 193. 9  Crafton, Before Mickey, 116. 7 8

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with its wholesale killing, then sent its instrument of crime to perform a more treacherous and cowardly offense.”10 McCay builds tension for several minutes, the German submarine slipping through the frame as the cruise ship steams along, striking suddenly and causing a great billowing smoke to obscure the animation. From there, McCay lists the luminaries and public figures who perished in the course of the event, before returning to his reenactment of the event, as lifeboats are lowered and the ship slowly lists to its side, spilling lifeboats and passengers into the sea.11 The Lusitania slowly sinks beneath the waves as the title cards reminds the audience “no warning was given—no mercy was shown…AVENGE the most violent cruelty that was ever perpetrated upon an unsuspecting and innocent people.”12 The film concludes with a mother and child sinking through the water, while the German captain looks on through the periscope as they sink to a watery grave. McCay’s final message: “The man who fired the shot was decorated for it by the Kaiser!—AND YET THEY TELL US NOT TO HATE THE HUN!”13 The Germans are portrayed as inhumane monsters, a corrupt society founded upon the darkest aspects of human nature, though this was inevitable. Karla Rae Fuller notes that “the animated image can render key elements of artifice and constructedness where the visual shorthand used is most apparent. In this way, the cartoon can explode what the human form can only contain to follow the caricature at its most extreme manifestations.”14 The cartoon is perhaps within its very nature apt to pursue the most extreme version of its subject. McCay’s film stands as the ur-propaganda cartoon: not necessarily the first, but the one that is remembered. It is also a valuable reminder to historians of how often themes associated with World War II actually had their precursors during World War I. The Sinking of the Lusitania was not quite the first propaganda cartoon, just as Gertie was not quite the first cartoon character. Winsor McCay’s long-time rival J.R. Bray produced a series of shorts on the subject of the war starting in 1914, with various others completing similar low-quality, if timely, efforts, usually featuring his Col. Heeza Liar, one of the first  Winsor McCay, The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918; Image Entertainment, 2004), DVD.  Canemaker, McCay, 196. 12  McCay, Lusitania. 13  McCay, Lusitania. 14  Karla Rae Fuller, Hollywood Goes Oriental: CauAsian Performance in American Film (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 125. 10 11

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cartoon characters of note.15 It is more difficult to ascertain the meaning of those shorts: they tended to be much more comedic in tone, and did not seem to take a side (though much of what remains is short fragments of larger works). The first of the wartime shorts, Colonel Heeza Liar Foils the Enemy (1915) utilizes the wartime setting more as slapstick set piece, as Heeza Liar is rocketed around by explosions, only ineffectually bouncing off of a German officer at the end of the short (the end of the short was badly damaged, leaving the possibility of a longer short). The animation is stiff and basic, lacking the sense of life that McCay’s work did, but it was timely, something that McCay’s film was not, and Bray Productions would produce nearly a dozen war-related Col. Heeza Liar shorts by 1917, eventually shifting to creating live-action training shorts for the U.S. Army, a similar route to Walt Disney some thirty years later. Bray’s model of production, and his eagerness to work with the U.S. government, would serve as a blueprint in the following decades, when America returned to war. However, his animation studio would not survive the exodus of talent that occurred in the post-war years (Bray had given a start to the Fleischer Brothers, among others, who departed for greener pastures as animation came of age), and the attempts to revive the Col. Heeza Liar series could not compete with a new generation of cartoon characters like Felix the Cat and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.16 The coming of sound found Bray Productions reduced to a shadow of its former self as the producer of educational filmstrips and documentary shorts, surviving in one form or another until the 1980s, never quite recapturing the glory of the early days. The Sinking of the Lusitania is a grim and serious call for a war that had already begun for Europe in 1914 and drawn in the United States in 1917. It served as a retrospective interpretation of an event all Americans remembered and could now reinterpret as part of their consciences as citizens of a belligerent power, but the war proceeded devoid of McCay’s input beyond a few political cartoons, contrasting Bray’s more light-hearted Col. Heeza Liar shorts. While the film’s actual impact on the war was muted (it was released only a few months before the armistice was signed), it did signal an understanding of the potential of animation as a tool of 15  Michael Shull and David Wilt, Doing Their Bit: Wartime American Animated Short Films, 1939–1945 (McFarland, 2004), 11–20. 16  The more comedic nature of the Col. Heeza Liar shorts does point to the tone of propaganda shorts during the war years, including the Donald Duck shorts that will be discussed later.

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wartime propaganda, and informed more serious propaganda shorts. Through animation, real events could be portrayed: there was no film of the Lusitania’s sinking, but McCay’s animation could fill that space; his choice of style, reflecting contemporary newsreels, spoke to a recognition of what animation could be. The concept of animation as a tool to reflect the real world fell by the wayside, however. As the 1920s dawned, animation would remain firmly in the mode of Bray, of bright characters behaving in wacky ways; Shull and Wilt explain, “with the conclusion of [World War I], American cartoons, with the exception of a couple of anti-Bolshevik works released during the Red Scare (1919–1920), largely divorced themselves from international events and embraced the halcyon years of the 1920s.”17 McCay was always a firm proponent of the power of images, had pioneered the possibilities of propaganda within the new medium of the animated short, though he had few contemporaries who grasped the potential of the medium; The Sinking of the Lusitania was widely admired not only by the movie-going public but by McCay’s contemporaries in the animation industry. John Canemaker contends that “its power as an example of the moving picture art form’s ability to persuade was recognized by these experts. Certainly, war and public opinion were understood to be very serious issues, far removed from the alleged frivolity of a child-focused genre, as some observers came to consider animation. But McCay’s magnificent achievement could inspire only awe in his peers, for it was far ahead of its time and far beyond the sensibilities of the men turning out simple gag cartoon.”18 The film was popular with audiences and industry alike, but it came out so close to the war’s end that it did not immediately produce copycat films, as Gertie the Dinosaur and some of McCay’s other, earlier works had. The grim tone of the short put it at odds with the peppier propaganda of J.R. Bray, and for a time signaled a dead end for the art, just as McCay’s work would be without a successor for a generation to come. The animation industry, led by Bray’s model, focused on churning out a quantity of cheap, low-quality products; Bray himself boasted about producing a cartoon a week using assembly-line techniques, whereas the high-quality products that Winsor McCay produced often took years.19  Shull and Wilt, Doing Their Bit, 21.  Canemaker, McCay, 197. 19  Crafton, Before Mickey, 142–143. 17 18

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There are not many records of box office numbers or indications of popularity; McCay often presented his animation as part of a vaudeville road show, whereas Bray’s work was rented out to theaters. McCay’s work was far beyond what others were putting out in terms of quality, but it was slow work (he animated nearly every frame  personally, with some help from a few assistants), and his output was as much the rest of an incredible work ethic as any technological innovation. McCay’s influence was not only on the state of the art, but rather on the very roots: he proved that animation could be art, in a period when movies were still impugned as entertainment for the masses. There is no historical record of whether Walt Disney or Ub Iwerks encountered McCay’s work in New  York; Disney was certainly aware of Gertie the Dinosaur, featuring McCay’s son Robert on the television series Disneyland in 1955 to reenact the classic routine. Furthermore, there are some thematic similarities between Lusitania and the gloomier Disney propaganda shorts as I will discuss later in this chapter; Canemaker argues that “the dark somber mood, the superb draftsmanship, the timing of the actions, the excellent dramatic directorial choices of ‘camera’ angles and editing—all of these qualities would reappear only with Disney’s mature work in certain sequences of his feature-length cartoons and some of his World War II propaganda cartoon shorts, such as Education for Death (1943).”20 McCay’s style essentially skipped a generation, with animation studios slow to grasp the power, and perhaps unconcerned with the capacity for deeper messaging within cartoons; it was not until Disney that there was recognition of cartoons as worth time and effort and having some lasting value. The artform was still young, as was film itself, at McCay’s retirement from animation at the behest of William Randolph Hearst marked the end of an era, a shift away from experimentation and serious subject matter, with a renewed focus on funny animal cartoons.

Building The House of Mouse By the 1930s, the myriad small studios of McCay, Bray, and their peers had coalesced into a proper industry, responding to the pressures of the Great Depression and the development of Hollywood’s studio system. Talent followed the money: while cartoons become increasingly codified (with talented artists like McCay no longer able to keep up with the demands of production on their own), but improving in quality. McCay  Canemaker, McCay, 197.

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had railed against Bray’s low-quality assembly-line productions, but Walt Disney, the Fleischer brothers, and other pioneers of this period refined production to enhance quality. Technological improvements, both in terms of techniques for filming and drawing as well as the inclusion of synchronized sound, allowed animated shorts to evolve from simple novelties to an artform in their own right; the first Academy Award for Best Animated Short was given during the fifth Oscars in 1932, awarded to Disney’s Flowers and Trees  (1932).  Cartoon icons like Betty Boop and Koko the Clown rose and fell in the period, as studios scrambled to follow audience tastes. Even as these characters fell out of favor, they would reappear in syndication as cheap television programming, securing their popularity by adapting to a new medium, a major part of animation’s staying power. Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat epitomized the era, while Max and Dave Fleischer would initially gain fame for expanding the genre beyond the various “funny animal cartoons” into more mainstream, mass entertainment. There are far more animators and studios operating during the silent era than can be properly accounted for; many of the productions of the era have been lost to time and the elements, and animation was not seriously valued as an art form until decades later. The advent of movie theaters, and audiences hungry for new content, spurred the creation of new characters, with the churn of popular culture meaning only a few survived. Walt Disney entered the market with his Alice Comedies, a mix of live-­ action and animation (akin to what McCay had done with Gertie), and found a further degree of success with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit with Universal, though an acrimonious split left Disney without the rights to his creations. Working with Ub Iwerks, the pair created Mickey Mouse, a successor to Oswald, and the mascot of the Disney enterprise going forward. Mickey lacked the fluidity of motion that Oswald (and most other cartoon characters of the period) possessed, but this solidity helped to set him apart from the others. Fortuitously, Mickey appeared at the dawn of sound in movies, with his inaugural cartoon Steamboat Willie (1928) often appearing before The Jazz Singer (1927). Despite being famous as the first sound cartoon, there was more to his appeal; animator Ward Kimball notes that “Mickey didn’t talk for two or three years…it was all done with music and pantomime, which means you could run them in India, South America, anyplace. Four years after he was invented Mickey was a

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household word whether the house was in China, Moscow or Beverly Hills.”21 Mickey could speak, but did not need to: he was less reliant on speech than rival contemporary characters, generally singing simplistic songs or “speaking” with a high-pitched squeak. This allowed Disney’s cartoons to be more easily translated, and to wider audiences. As John Wills argues, “the early success of the studio in Europe owed much to Disney selling Europe to itself: the retelling of homegrown folklore aiding translation and popularity. Residents happily consumed Disney Culture. Mickey Mouse had become the new cultural ambassador for the United States.”22 Film was no longer just the entertainment of America and Europe, but was quickly becoming a global phenomenon. By the end of the 1920s, Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop displaced Felix the Cat in the popular imagination, at least in America, and would in turn be displaced by Popeye the Sailor Man, while Disney’s Mickey Mouse began to carve out a market for the fledgling studio. Film became but a single medium among many for these characters: radio shows, pictures books, and comic strips became an increasingly significant percentage of income for the studios, even as the country reeled from the Great Depression.23 The potential of animated characters expanded; comic strips became secondary streams of income, and merchandising became a goal of many of these creations.24 During this period the understanding of the power of characters as icons of marketing and branding became much more widespread; what had begun with Robert Outcault’s Buster Brown serving as a mascot for a shoe company had expanded into a business that rivaled the exhibition of the cartoons themselves. Disney Studios operated under that same instinct, seeking to monetize the popularity of their characters into forms beyond the cartoon shorts. Walt Disney often left the business to his brother Roy, though maintained an interest in the production side, at least 21  Ward Kimball, “The Wonderful World of Walt Disney” (In You Must Remember This, ed. Walter Wanger, New York: G.P. Putnam, 1975), 275. 22  John Wills, Disney Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017), 57. 23  Douglas Gomery relates “In February 1930 Roy Disney signed the initial contract for merchandising, granting the George Borgfeldt Company the right to manufacture and sell items embodying Minnie and Mickey Mouse…by the depths of the Great Depression the Disney company was generating hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.” Douglas Gomery, “Disney’s Business History: A Reinterpretation.” Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom (Ed. Eric Smoodin, New York: Routledge, 1994), 73. 24  Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (New York: Knopf, 2006), 196–198.

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initially; Michael Barrier found that “[Disney] showed a continuing interest in the [Mickey Mouse] comic strip,” including sending notes on continuity to Floyd Gottredson.25 As his empire grew, his attention would inevitably turn elsewhere; there is no evidence that Walt Disney affected any direct control over Dell Comics or Western Publishing during the height of the comics popularity, but these early choices helped ensure that the comics were Disney products, that their content and style was in line with the rest of the company, an extension of the brand. Gabler explains that “just as Mickey on film had come to be regarded as the tonic antidote to the Depression, so did Mickey’s image on the merchandise. Round, colorful, appealing Mickey Mouse had become the graphic representation of indomitable happiness even in the face of national despair.”26 Still, the studio was growing, and while Mickey Mouse remained the mascot of the company, a different character would prove far more adaptable to other media: Donald Duck.

The Duck Appears Donald Duck was created in 1934 as another member of the sprawling Disney cast. He was, as with most of the Disney stable, a background addition first, existing as just another anthropomorphic animal within the menagerie. Andi Stein states, “the idea was to create a not-so-perfect character whose personality was the opposite of Mickey’s calm, good-natured manner—someone who was short-tempered, stubborn, a scrappy fighter at heart…Donald was the perfect antidote to Mickey Mouse.”27 A side character for his first few appearances, he soon took on a more antagonistic role within the cartoons, notably in The Band Concert (1935). The cartoon served as Donald’s first major role, casting him as mischievous interloper into Mickey’s attempt at an orchestral performance of the “William Tell Overture,” constantly interjecting with the “Turkey in the Straw,” played on a series of slide whistles. Here we can also see at play the aural power of the genre, which is major, yet is usually overlooked compared to the obvious visual impact. Despite nominally being a Mickey 25  Michael Barrier. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007), 83. 26  Gabler, Imagination, 198. 27  Andi Stein, Why We Love Disney: The Power of the Disney Brand (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 52.

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short, Donald is the only character to receive a proper speaking role, though he is overshadowed by an errant tornado during the climax. This marked a turning point for Donald, where he alternated between antagonistic roles (On Ice and Mickey’s Polo Team) while becoming a member of Disney’s premiere trio with Mickey and Goofy, beginning with Mickey’s Service Station (1935) and Mickey’s Fire Brigade (1935). Donald still lacked a full personality: his trademark buccal speech was present, but he tended to be the butt of many physical jokes, and even his trademark temper did not appear in every short. As the Disney bench deepened, it became necessary to imbue the characters with more distinct personalities: Mickey lost his mischievous edge, Goofy became clumsy, and Donald became angry to a comical degree. His dyspeptic grumpiness was more amusing than off-putting, but it deepened his potential as a character. Richard Schickel quotes Walt Disney explaining “Mickey couldn’t do certain things—they would be out of character. And Mickey was on a pedestal—I would get letters if he did something wrong.”28 Many of the early cartoons were simply tagged as Mickey Mouse cartoons (with Mickey’s face appearing at the opening) as an effort to brand them as Disney cartoons, but as the roster developed (and other characters eclipsed the erstwhile mascot Mickey in popularity), it became advantageous to label the shorts for the starring character. These shorts often contained the same basic gags, the same comedic timing, the same level of artistry, though Mickey was still framed as the star. Disney remained wary; Michael Barrier explains “[Walt Disney] was concerned not just with personality, but with the danger of making the personality one-­dimensional; of Donald Duck, he said ‘You are depending too much on the idea of the Duck getting mad.”29 It was a feat in itself, finding the right balance, but the writers and artists employed by Disney would successfully navigate those potential pitfalls in coming years. It helped that Donald’s design allowed for an incredible range of motion and emotion; Disney explains in a speech from the 1950s: “look at Donald Duck. He’s got a big mouth, big belligerent eyes, a twistable neck and a substantial backside that’s highly flexible. The duck comes near being the animator’s ideal subject. He’s got plasticity plus.”30 These traits would help make him a star of the 28  Richard Schickel. The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney (Chicago: Elephant Paperback, 1997), 140. 29  Barrier, Animated Man, 137. 30  Schickel, Disney Version, 181.

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animated shorts, though his print version would  eventually take those same traits to a different end point. Donald took the long path toward animated stardom, but had a head start in other media. Though a supporting player to Mickey and others during his first years, “by 1935 he was being featured in his own series of books…though Donald had yet to star in his own cartoon.”31 Donald was already a property even before becoming a proper character in his own right, possessing an appeal that the increasingly straight-laced Mickey could not match, embodying a more anarchic, populist spirit. Mickey was invariably restricted by his status as the mascot of the Disney Studios at large, while Donald could more easily adapt to the needs of given writer and audience. Gabler argues that “Donald Duck seemed to offer audiences both a vicarious liberation from the conventional behavior and morality to which they had to subscribe to in their own lives and which the Duck clearly transgressed…at a time when the entire world seemed to be roiling in anger and violence.”32 Donald was a better symbol of the historical moment, one beset by a slow economic recovery and the rumblings of fascism from abroad, and was easier to identify with than the happy-go-­ lucky Mouse. Disney animator Ward Kimball explains that “the critics say we created an unreal world…emasculated and changed and sugarcoated…Walt realized a lot of these fairy tales were pretty grim. He realized you had to have a balance, you had to have gags and laughs to offset the pathos, the heavy stuff. He took the same license everybody takes with a story.”33 Though speaking of the adaptation of various fairy tales, it does also reflect why Donald was popular as well. Mickey was a fine symbol of pluck and perseverance during the darkest days of the Depression, with shorts like Mickey’s Orphans (1931) and Mickey’s Good Deed (1932), but as the gloom of the Depression began to lift, audiences sought entertainment that better reflected the changing times. Donald Duck was fresh and exciting, a figure selfish yet put-upon, one that would never be mistaken for a role model, more relatable to the lives of his fans; the same mix of laughs and pathos that Kimball found in the features. Donald, with all of his futile tantrums, was endlessly entertaining. Donald graduated from being a supporting player to Mickey in Donald and Pluto (1936), a short still featuring the Mickey Mouse headline, yet  Gabler, Imagination, 203.  Gabler, Imagination, 202. 33  Kimball, “Wonderful World,” 266–267. 31 32

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the character fails to appear, which also introduced an updated style for Donald that became the canonical design for the character. The cartoon also begins to codify Donald as a duck/man (or drake) ill at ease with the modern world. He suffers depredation from an automatic washing machine and a ceiling fan during his work as a plumber, simple gags that nevertheless pointed to the characterization that would develop. Ward Kimball’s recollection of these themes is that “[Walt Disney] was a man who loved nostalgia before it became fashionable. That’s why so many of his pictures were set in the harmless period of American history, the Gay Nineties or the early 1900’s—because that was when he was a kid.”34 Donald Duck is a figure unstuck from time, trapped in a world he did not create. Disney explained, “we got Pluto and the duck. The duck could blow his top…the stupid things Pluto would do, along with the duck, gave us an outlet for our gags.”35 There appears to be some uncertainty as to whether Donald could carry his own cartoon, with 1937 still leaning heavily on ensemble pieces, though he increasingly a co-star rather than supporting player. Don Donald (1937) was the first Donald solo cartoon, introducing a love interest in Donna (later Daisy) Duck. In addition to reinforcing Donald’s difficulties in the face of the modern world (his purchase of a car to impress Donna goes predictably awry, ending with him stranded in the desert alone), it also foreshadows Donald’s role as a sort of world traveler, easily at home in the quasi-Mexican locale of the short. Additionally, Clarence Nash’s voicework—the famous nasally, borderline unintelligible quack—allowed Donald to be more easily adapted to non-English-­ speaking locales, avoiding the need for translation and often even redubbing. This adaptability to foreign locales would become a key component of his popularity in the war years, but would also form the basis for the character’s strength in comic stories. The second solo short of the year Modern Inventions (1937), which takes Donald’s distrust of modern technology to its logical conclusion, featuring a visit to a “Museum of Modern Marvels,” including a robotic butler, an automated hitchhiker, and a mechanized wrapping machine, culminating in an encounter with a sentient barber’s chair that satirizes the limits of automation. This short reflects a full realization of Donald’s discomfort with encroaching modernity, and significantly included the first writing work that a young Carl  Kimball, “Wonderful World,” 274.  Schickel, Disney Version, 140.

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Barks did for Donald Duck, several years before he began producing the comics. By the time Donald was beginning to be featured in his own cartoons, Disney Studios was shifting focus toward a much more ambitious project: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937). The animation industry at large was becoming crowded with shorts, and Disney’s artistry necessitated quality over quantity, with the associated costs. Fleischer Studios, long-time rivals of Disney, had found great success with Popeye and Betty Boop, and then with the gritty and lavishly funded Superman shorts. Warner Brothers hired Tex Avery, Friz Freleng and Bob Clampett resulting in the creation of a stable of rival stars to Disney’s bench, including Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and Bugs Bunny. MGM had William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, whose Tom and Jerry would challenge the ascendency of Warner Brothers. Walt Disney’s ambitions were as much economic as they were creative: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was a passion project, but also reflected a canny attempt to foresee the development of the field. The shorts served to keep the studio afloat through cost overruns on that first feature, but by 1937, the incredible success of Snow White sounded a sort of death knell for the shorts, with the studio’s resources increasingly shifting toward the riskier yet more profitable feature animation. The shift of the creative talent, reflected by the Nine Old Men (including Ward Kimball), sounded a death knell for the shorts, but world events complicated matters further still.36 Foreign markets in particularly proved receptive to Disney’s features, and would form a crucial component of the business model as the Depression slowly wound down. Unfortunately, the looming storm clouds of World War II broke before Disney’s follow-up features arrived, closing off crucial markets in Europe and Asia; of the four films (Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942)), only Dumbo would turn a profit in its initial release.37 Disney was forced to seek out new markets, as well as new customers, and to reconfigure the business model once more. South America was one obvious venue, and José Carioca, the cigar-chomping parrot from Rio de Janeiro, 36  Disney himself also caused issues; Barrier remarks “Disney’s personality, so entrepreneurial at its core, made it difficult for him to delegate authority of any kind, particularly where features were concerned. He complained at times that he did not have enough really good animators to go around, but by expanding his studio’s output so rapidly, he all but guaranteed he would be short of the help he most needed.” Barrier, Animated Man, 137. 37  Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, 270.

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represented the attempt to develop that market, and mark a major foray of Disney into cultural diplomacy.

References Barrier, Michael. Hollywood Cartoons. New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 2007. Beckerman, Howard. Animation: The Whole Story. New York: Allworth Press, 2003. Canemaker, John. Winsor McCay: His Life and Art. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 2005. Crafton, Donald. Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898–1928. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1993. Fuller, Karla Rae. Hollywood Goes Oriental: CauAsian Performance in American Film. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 2010. Gabler, Neal. Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. New York: Knopf, 2006. Gomery, Douglas. “Disney’s Business History: A Reinterpretation.” Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom. Ed. Eric Smoodin, New  York: Routledge, 1994. 71–86. Goulart, Ron. The Great Comic Book Artists. New York: St. Martin’s Press. 1986. Kimball, Ward. “The Wonderful World of Walt Disney.” You Must Remember This, ed. Walter Wanger, New York: G.P. Putnam, 1975. McCay, Winsor. The Sinking of the Lusitania. 1918; Image Entertainment, 2004. DVD. Schickel, Richard. The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney. Chicago: Elephant Paperback, 1997. Shull, Michael and David Wilt. Doing Their Bit: Wartime American Animated Short Films, 1939–1945. McFarland, 2004. Stein, Andi. Why We Love Disney: The Power of the Disney Brand. New York: Peter Lang, 2011. Tunstall, Jeremy. The Media Are American. New  York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Wills, John. Disney Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017. Wright, Bradford. Comic Book Nation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001.

CHAPTER 3

“Donald Gets Drafted”: Donald Duck at War and as Propaganda

Disney is inexorably linked to propaganda in many scholarly approaches. The company’s status as multinational media conglomerate is viewed as its historic state: to many scholars, it has always been a corporate sponsor of the American Empire, with every facet of the enterprise committed to colonizing global culture. This scholarly truism is overly simplistic, as Disney is not some well-oiled organization under the total control of Walt Disney and his successors, and the company’s production of actual propaganda during World War II is more nuanced than commonly understood. Comprehending Disney’s wartime production is key to explaining the later success of the comics, which included both American allies and belligerents. The outbreak of World War II occurred in the midst of this golden age of animation, and complicated the fortunes of Disney Studios. The seeds laid decades earlier by Gertie the Dinosaur and Col. Heeza Liar had fully bloomed: Daffy Duck (1937) and Bugs Bunny (1938, 1940) represented an alternative to Disney’s high art; Fleischer Studios’ Superman introduced the superhero to a new audience in 1941; Popeye by 1938 had achieved recognition as the most popular cartoon character. Disney Studios was not the dominant cultural force they would become, but rather one studio among many, though their feature animation (and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. C. Bryan, Creation, Translation, and Adaptation in Donald Duck Comics, Palgrave Fan Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73636-1_3

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dominance of the Academy Awards) lent a certain prestige.1 Walt Disney’s work ethic found an interesting middle between McCay and Bray: while he was more a manager in the mode of Bray, not having drawn a frame of animation or a panel of a comic since the late 1920s, yet he nevertheless was as driven as McCay, being a common presence at the studio, often signing off on gags for cartoons, or directing his animators in small ways.2 He remained a perfectionist, and ensured that every Disney production maintained a certain level of quality; Kimball contends that, The reason for the incredible success of the whole Disney operation was Walt’s demand for high quality. No half efforts were permitted. He would do things over and over until he was satisfied. Pinocchio is a good example. After we’d worked six months on it, Walt thought the story wasn’t right. So he threw out all the animation and started over.3

It is difficult to extract Walt Disney from the larger enterprise that bears his name, as even the distant reaches of his empire bear aspects of his influence. The moment of crisis that faced Disney at the moment of his greatest triumph was more complicated than it first appears. The legend has Disney staving off bankruptcy as foreign markets dried up, single-handedly steering the ship through treacherous waters, but this is a simplistic reading of where the company was in the early 1940s. This was true of Disney Animation, but the enterprise had grown considerably; for instance, Michael Barrier finds that “Western paid Disney royalties on 252,000 copies of the first issue of Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories. As of No. 24, the September 1942 issue…[Western] paid Disney a royalty on a million copies of Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, and sales were continuing to rise.”4 The Disney enterprise grew beyond animation, with Walt Disney’s attention oscillating between television, film, and eventually theme parks. The 1  By 1950, Disney had won ten Academy Awards for Best Animated Short Film, including the first eight awarded, with a total of twenty-five nominations. 2  According to Michael Barrier, Disney “echoed the work of Fredrick W.  Taylor…what happened at Disney’s bore no resemblance to what Taylor had in mind, or, probably, to what Disney had in mind at first. Instead, the division of labor was increasingly pursued…as a means of artistic collaboration…the gains were less in increased output than in better-­looking cartoons.” Barrier, Animated Man, 81–82. 3  Kimball, “Wonderful World,” 267. 4  Barrier, Funnybooks, 24.

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comics, however, were an afterthought, a side-venture far removed from the studio’s oversight, but this freedom allowed for the comics to evolve in a different fashion. Tunstall elaborates that “[Walt Disney] had developed some star artists whose names he was able to keep secret…Disney, however, retained much flexibility and variety—between formats and media—and, like most successful media tycoons, he was first, last, and always a salesman.”5 Dell Comics (who distributed Disney comics for Western Publishing) in particular moved away from various fads (superheroes, horror, romance) to carve out a surprisingly large niche. Barrier explains, “separation from the mainstream bred in the Dell artists and writers a certain detachment that ultimately worked in their favor. They entered the field…because the work was in some way similar to the work they had already been doing. The best of them found challenges in the new industry that they never expected.”6 Animators who left the studios found use for their skills under Dell’s wing, unnoticed by Disney, who had other concerns on his mind.

Animation as Propaganda Disney’s first forays into wartime cartoon filmmaking was for the Canadian government, not the United States.7 By the time Walt Disney began more conscientiously soliciting work from the U.S. government, he had already produced several films for the National Film Board of Canada, formed just two years earlier. Barrier notes that “Disney had begun seeking defense-­ related work in March 1941, but not too eagerly, and with only limited success. His most important commissions came from the National Film Board of Canada, which ordered four cartoons…to promote the sale of war bonds, as well as a training film.”8 The shorts themselves served as blueprints for the future propaganda films, utilizing the studio’s most popular characters (the Seven Dwarves, the  Three Little Pigs, Donald Duck) in relatively innocuous roles. The Seven Dwarves, for instance, use the proceeds from their mining to buy war bonds, while Donald lazily makes his way to the post office to buy war bonds at the prompting of his angelic conscience. Here, Donald’s purportedly negative character traits  Tunstall, The Media Are American, 68.  Barrier, Funnybooks, 55. 7  Due to production time, the shorts were released between November 1941 and January 1942, with only The Thrifty Pig released before the entry of the United States into the war in December 1941. 8  Barrier, Animated Man, 183. 5 6

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are shown as merely endearing foibles which do not get in the way of doing his patriotic duty. These cartoons often reused animation and music, adding new footage but were limited to roughly three minutes in length; this footage lacked much in the way of strong writing or high-quality animation, banking more on recognizability than any high degree of quality. There was a soft touch to Disney’s propaganda; though Canada was already at war, there were no portrayals of the Axis powers in these shorts, no racist caricatures or offensive stereotypes. References to the war itself were indirect at best: a mailbox flag spins to approximate a swastika, the Big Bad Wolf wears a German-style cap. As with Disney’s features, these propaganda shorts helped to reinforce a business model that was increasingly reliant on foreign income. Disney was not the only studio to jump at the opportunity to produce films for the government, though Walt Disney’s prestige and personal history helped to smooth the studio’s entry into the war. Shale notes that “Disney received his first military contract on December 8th [1941], though the idea that this was completely unexpected or unsolicited is a popular (and frequently quoted) misconception. Certainly, Disney’s defense work for Canada and his dealing with the Coordinator of InterAmerican Affairs had paved the way for a close relationship between the studio and the federal government.”9 Disney Studios found itself in difficult financial straits with the loss of international markets in the midst of the war, and there is an inaccurate belief that the studio made use of the opportunity to stabilize itself with government assistance; however, Disney’s war effort actually comprised an expansion of production in order to keep up with demand, to the degree that the studio was often losing money in its work.10 Walt Disney may have been a true-hearted patriot just as easily as a cool-headed businessman playing the long game; the answer likely lies somewhere in the middle. Disney maneuvered his studio through the difficult war years by force of will and public goodwill, and positioned his enterprise to take advantage at the new shape of the world that followed the end of the war. 9  Richard Shale, Donald Duck Joins Up: Walt Disney Studio During World War II (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981), 22. 10  “Prior to the war, the studio’s greatest annual output had been 37,000 feet of film. In the fiscal year from 1942 to 1943 the output jumped to 204,000 feet. This volume and degree of government involvement made the Disney Studio unique in Hollywood, for no other studio even approached this wartime production.” Shale, Joins Up, 24.

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Disney Studios fell behind the other major studios in total output during the war years, owing to both Disney’s perfectionist tendencies and the low-boil financial crisis that loomed through the war years. The war had its demands all across American industry, and film and animation were no exceptions. The underwhelming performance of various features (Dumbo excepted) pushed the company to the brink of bankruptcy, exacerbated by labor disagreements with the animators. Still, Disney seems to have seen some profit in appealing to wartime audiences. Shull and Wilt contend that, “Disney seems to have been one of the few top executives to grasp the idea that cartoons could be used for political as well as entertainment purposes, and he had the power to implement his ideas (unlike the directors and animators at other studios, who were supervised by businessmen chiefly interested in the profit margin).”11 Within the animation industry, war-related cartoons comprised 44 percent of all works released in 1942, up to over 65 percent in 1943. More than any other studio, Disney pursued war-oriented filmmaking: while only four of Disney’s 19 productions related to the war in 1942 (around 21 percent), these increased dramatically to 11 of 13  in 1943, 85 percent of Disney’s output for the year. Other studios produced more total films, but Disney embraced the patriotic ideal, although followed the larger trends as the war wore on. One of the most significant intersections of popular culture and public policy (particularly where Disney was concerned) was the Office of InterAmerican Affairs. Established by President Roosevelt in August 1940, its stated function to “formulate and execute programs, in cooperation with the Department of State which, by effective use of governmental and private facilities in such fields as the arts and sciences, education and travel, the radio, the press, and the cinema, will further the national defense and strengthen the bonds between the Nations of the Western Hemisphere.”12 Headed by businessman Nelson Rockefeller, its function was to engage in cultural diplomacy with the nations of the Western Hemisphere, with a particular emphasis on reinforcing the bonds of friendship with South American nations, many of whom had been friendly with the government of Nazi Germany. Functionally, the Office acted as an intermediary between the federal government and various American  Shull and Wilt, Doing Their Bit, 69–163.  Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Executive Order 8840 Establishing the Office of Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs,” July 30, 1941. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara. 11 12

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organizations that had dealings with other countries, coordinating efforts ahead of the seemingly inevitable entry of the United States into the war. These efforts entailed a variety of undertakings, including hiring of Hollywood studios to create specific works toward these goals and offering guidance on messaging. It was built upon the preexisting Hollywood system, akin to the same process occurring within American industry, meant to allow the apparatus to fire on all cylinders. This was a much more organized effort than had occurred during World War I, in large part because Hollywood had grown from a novelty sideshow into a national entertainment in the intervening years with a powerful studio system organizing it. This embodied a philosophy of combined arms aimed at uniting America. The work that was produced under these auspices ran the gamut. The war bond drives that defined the propaganda of the World War I continued with an even greater fervor and scale than previously. The advent of cartoon characters and comic books created new avenues for selling war bonds, including the targeting of young readers. Comic books would often feature war bond ads on the cover, regardless of the actual content of the issue (which typically avoided the war itself), and famous characters would appear in print ads as well. There were further efforts in this vein: the gloom of the Depression had begun to lift before the introduction of rationing, and the various cartoon characters served as helpful ambassadors to their childish audiences, emphasizing the necessity of going without, and were further prompted to assist in the war effort, organizing drives for rubber and paper.13 The federal government was happy to make use of the preexisting properties to achieve their ends: these characters were popular for a reason, and Walt Disney was quite happy to lend them to the war effort. Disney’s popularity (and Donald’s in particular) played out in other ways, as Ron Grover states “Donald Duck made his first appearance in 1934. Five years later he eclipsed even Mickey in popularity; in World War II he was the symbol that appeared on more than 200 military insignias.”14 The recognizability of Disney characters, especially Donald Duck, combined with prior reliance on foreign markets fostered various relationships that were useful to these diplomatic efforts.

13  A side effect was the destruction of many early editions of comic books, leading to the relative rarity of many early magazines. 14  Ron Grover, The Disney Touch (Homewood, IL: Business One Irwin, 1991), 6.

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Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros Disney’s largest effort during the war were two features produced largely for South American audiences: Saludos Amigos (1942) and The Three Caballeros (1944). The films are significant within Hollywood history: “Saludos Amigos became the first Hollywood film to premiere in all Latin American countries before opening in the United States.”15 It was not the first time in history that a film had been created by Hollywood specifically for consumption outside of the American markets, but it nevertheless marked a change in how Disney produced his cartoons. Both these films were “package films,” incorporating a mix of live-action and animated shorts to achieve a feature-length runtime, though this meant 42 minutes in the case of Saludos Amigos (1944’s The Three Caballeros ran for a more respectable 71 minutes). Saludos Amigos (Spanish for “Greetings Friends”) featured Donald and Goofy, alongside new creation Jose Carioca, who was an anthropomorphic personification of Brazil (including being voiced by Brazilian entertainer José Oliveira). The Three Caballeros added Panchito Pistoles (voiced by Mexican-born American actor Joaquin Garay) as a representation of Mexico, with the film framed as a celebration of Donald Duck’s 10th anniversary. Saludos Amigos was not entirely created of Walt Disney’s own volition: the federal government suggested that Disney inject some “South American flavor” into his shorts, for which Disney resolved to take several of his animators down the Atlantic Coast to Puerto Rico, Rio de Janeiro, and Buenos Aires.16 Julianne Burton-Carvajal notes that “Disney’s South American project was thus built upon a self-conscious disposition formulated at high levels of national government to represent Latin being, culture, and experience with authenticity and respect for intraregional as well as interregional variations.”17 This was a serious attempt to explore and embody South American culture for a global audience, although still had shortcomings (the animators were still American, for instance). Nelson Rockefeller and John Hay Whitney were emphatic that film should appeal to audiences in South America, especially in light of the often-problematic portrayals of the nations in earlier Hollywood films.18  Shale, Joins Up, 47–48.  Barrier, Animated Man, 174. 17  Burton-Carvajal, “Surprise Package,” 133. 18  Burton-Carvajal points out that “they were well aware that the condescending and stereotypical images of Latinness long purveyed by Hollywood—the blood-thirsty bandido, the 15 16

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This drive for authenticity appears to have existed on both sides. Walt Disney, who emphasized American exceptionalism within his life and work, looked for the best of the South American nations he visited. Shale relates that “Walt, who was a guest to these countries as well as an ambassador of his own, was careful not to embarrass himself or his hosts by pointing his camera at their slums, or by questioning the economic or political structure which kept so many South American peasants in lifelong poverty.”19 He was no doubt aware of the issues that faced the citizens of these countries but he chose to emphasize the positive aspects of the culture.20 Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros are certainly propaganda, but function to glorify the nations they documented as much as to push American ideals; the films equated American traditions to those of South America, in particular emphasizing democracy as a way of life. Saludos Amigos was a considerable success in South America, though Disney Studios saw little profit from its exhibition opting for free or discounted screenings as part of the propaganda effort. Disney took criticisms of Saludos Amigos to heart, particularly the limited focus on Brazil, and created The Three Caballeros was an extension of the basic messages of that film, including new and different countries; Julianne Burton-Carvajal, though critical of many aspects of the film, admits “to its enduring credit, The Three Caballeros does utilize Latin American music, accents, performers, locales, artifacts, and modes of cultural expression more extensively than any previously Hollywood film. Disney’s quest for cultural authenticity was to that extent both sincere and successful.”21 There is not a clear dividing line between documentary and cultural appropriation here, and Disney’s own history (and present day issues) with appropriation should not be undercut. With regard to these films, they could be approached as appropriation; in Julie Sanders definition “on appropriation, the sexy spitfire, the somnolent peasant, and so on—struck Latin Americans as distorted and demeaning. One regional government after the other had registered protest in response of what they considered offensive representations of their citizenry…” Burton-Carvajal, 133. 19  Shale, Joins Up, 49. 20  An article in Time magazine notes that “To make the film (and others to come) Disney took 15 of his staff on a three-month, 20,000-mile tour of South America. They hobnobbed with artists and musicians, soaked up so much local color that when Saludos appeared, South Americans instantly recognized themselves. He constructed the character of Joe Carioca from thousands of papagaio (parrot) jokes Brazilians told him. Because their drawings speak an international language, Disney’s party had little difficulty making itself understood.” “The New Pictures.” Time, 25 Jan. 1943. 21  Burton-Carvajal, 147.

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i­ntertextual relationship may be less explicit, more embedded, but what is often inescapable is the fact that a political or ethical commitment shapes a writer’s, director’s, or performer’s decision to reinterpret a source text.”22 By virtue of these films and their content as political objects, they hew closer to the framing of appropriation, though it is complicated due to these works being intended for non-American audiences, something that will be explored further in the following chapters. These films reflected Walt Disney’s views on propaganda: they were bright, optimistic, and culturally sensitive.23 This was the animated extension of the Roosevelt administration’s “Good Neighbor” policy, which endeavored to project soft power and avoid the military interventions that had embodied U.S.-South American relations since the Monroe Doctrine, with a greater influence on cultural similarities than political influence.24 This was partially a response to the previous era of American diplomacy; Amy Spellacy remarks that “the Good Neighbor policy was a U.S. plan designed to gain the respect and trust of the people and leaders of Latin America, many of whom had become distrustful of their domineering, interventionist northern neighbor during the decades of ‘Big Stick’ diplomacy.”25 The United States State Department recognized that it was potentially vulnerable to accusations of imperialism, with a long history of military actions ranging from William Walker’s coup in Nicaragua to the support of Fulgencio Batista’s oppressive regime in Cuba. This did not mean that the Good Neighbor policy was a shift in overall attitude toward South America, but rather a new approach to existing issues.26 Walt Disney’s marketing acumen suited him well to the diplomatic effort, and he was careful not to patronize or talk down to the inhabitants.  Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation (New York: Routledge, 2016), 3.  This is not to say the cartoons were without insensitivities or racist imagery, especially from the perspective of modern standards, but the works nevertheless attempt to show a degree of respect in keeping with the war aim of cultivating good hemispheric ties. 24  Thomas Leonard and John Bratzel, Latin America During World War II (Landham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2007), 2–4. 25  Amy Spellacy, “Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor: Geography, Globalism, and Pan-Americanism during the 1940s,” American Studies, Summer 2006, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Summer 2006), pp. 39–66. 26  “By enabling both the rhetorical and physical mapping of the Americas, the metaphor of the good neighbor facilitated continued U.S. domination of the hemisphere. Through the creation of the construct of the Pan-American neighborhood, the United States participated in a process of imperial mapping that conveniently justified U.S. appropriation of Latin American resources during World War II.” Spellacy, “Mapping the Metaphor,” 44. 22 23

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Brand awareness around Disney framed the effort to reinforce the shared aspects between North and South America; Shale remarks that, “to ensure that no South American be offended by this humorous portrayal of a gaucho, Goofy is first seen as a Texas cowboy who is then whisked across the Rio Grande to the Argentine pampas. The transferal suggests visually and thematically the similarity in North and South America which is, in fact, the major point of this cartoon.”27 By emphasizing the comparisons, Disney brings the audiences into conversation, reflecting a deeper philosophy that would play out within the Disney empire at large (like the Epcot park or the “It’s A Small World” ride), one of multiculturalism and democracy intermixed with a humble strain of American exceptionalism. Donald, the beleaguered everyman who had faced consistent ridicule and suffered deprivations in his cartoons (just as the nation had suffered in the Depression), embodied the resilient spirit of the American public both at home and abroad. These films were certainly American-centric in philosophy, but emphasized hemispheric solidarity and shared democratic values. The key to both of the films is that they were colorful and generic enough to appeal to audiences on both sides of the equator. Donald Duck is the draw of the films, as the character’s shorts could be easily repurposed to audiences with a simple retranslation. This was the prevailing view of Disney toward much of the wartime production, beyond the few educational films; Shale explains that “since most of the Disney-CIAA films were made in the later stages of the war, this ideological shift suggests that as American military strength grew and an Allied victory appeared inevitable the need for propaganda diminished.”28 As the mood grew more hopeful in America, the cinematic output became more optimistic, and Disney shifted production with an eye toward the end of the war. Disney had produced roughly a sixth of war-related cartoons in 1943, but only a tenth in 1944, and only a single war-related cartoon in 1945. While overall production of war-related cartoons decreased as the conflict wore on (see Table  3.1), Disney was a step ahead of competition in terms of overall production, as well as content. Walt Disney remarked in an interview that “we don’t use The Mouse or The Duck in the training films. Occasionally, we put in a bit of humor…but humor is dangerous because the films have to be seen over and over again by the same people—and if a gag has been

 Shale, Joins Up, 46.  Shale, Joins Up, 61.

27 28

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Table 3.1  Wartime animated productions (based on Shull and Wilt’s data) Release year 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945

Disney War Cartoons 1 4 11 4 1

Total Disney productions 18 19 13 12 10

Non-Disney War Cartoons 23 66 67 42 25

Total animated productions 163 158 120 119 80

seen once, it’s gone and becomes dull.”29 There was a division between the comedic work and the education, a clear separation of audiences, with an entertainer’s eye toward his perceived audiences. Saludos Amigos contained documentary information, as Fantasia had before it, but the emphasis was more directly on the silly cartoons within. The brand was inextricably linked to Walt Disney himself, and he was happy to play the role of showman and cultural diplomat. He recognized that his own persona was part of his brand’s appeal (something that his television work would lean upon a decade later), and found that Latin Americans appreciated having the famous man physically there as much as his films. Reporting during the South America trip, future ambassador John Hay Whitney wrote, “Walt Disney is far more successful as an enterprise and as a person than we could have dreamed. His public demeanor is flawless. He is unruffled by adulation and pressure—just signs every autograph and keeps smiling.”30 Disney was a consummate businessman, and possessed a personal warmth and friendliness that helped create a public persona that was useful to the cause of the United States. Walt Disney was inextricably linked to his characters in a way that no other animation studio was, and could parlay his celebrity into even greater works. Still, Disney was not always comfortable in his role; while he appears to have held a positive relationship with the government, Barrier quotes Disney as explaining, a decade later, “some of those people, when they got a uniform on, it was like pinning a badge on somebody…they just couldn’t hold it.”31 Disney’s disinterest in dealing with the bureaucracy of politics 29  Mary Braggiotti, “Mickey Mouse’s Dearest Friend.” New York Post Daily Magazine and Comic Section, 30 June 1944. 30  John Hay Whitney, Alstock to Nelson A. Rockefeller, memorandum, “Report of John Hay Whitney from Rio de Janerio, August 29, 1941,” 8 September 1941, RAC. 31  Barrier, Animated Man, 185.

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and diplomacy might explain why he did not play a larger direct role in post-war propaganda efforts; though his films and comics would flood foreign shores, it was more of a purely financial calculus, with no further efforts like The Three Caballeros or Der Fuhrer’s Face. Still, he would have other roles to play, and arguably demonstrated the potential of his products, though Walt Disney’s attention would turn to other frontiers after the war’s conclusion. Walt Disney recognized that World War II was not a permanent state of affairs, and the studio’s work reflected this philosophy in a number of ways. Shale remarks: “Disney simply felt it was not in his best long-term interests to create films whose appeal rested heavily on a war which everyone hoped would not last very long. Therefore, most of the films which did use a military setting kept the plot vague enough so that the situation could apply to postwar military life as well.”32 Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros were contracted as propaganda pieces, but were meant to function in a larger context. There was no reference of fascism, war, or the diplomatic war then unfolding in South America. Rather, the films presented an optimistic view of the Americas, emphasizing cultural similarities, and inviting their viewers to make up their own minds. Amy Spellacy contends that “[The Three Caballeros] blurs virtual travel and actual travel by having the books come alive with three-dimensional, pop-up pages and live action photos and movie segments, promoting the idea that everyone can share in Donald’s experiences…The Three Caballeros maps the region in terms of U.S. desires, substituting the women of Latin America for the resources coveted and claimed in the maps.”33 Spellacy’s view is emblematic of much of the scholarship around Disney, but makes broad assumptions about the motives of Walt Disney. The films are simplistic in their cultural perspective, and reliant on stereotypes at times, but were intended for consumption by a foreign audience, and the studio made every attempt to make them palatable to those audiences.34 While the films would be exhibited in the United States, their box office success was considered  Shale, Joins Up, 90.  Spellacy, 58. 34  Notably, the Disney+ edition contains the disclaimer that “This program includes negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures. These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together. Disney is committed to creating stories with inspirational and aspirational themes that reflect the rich diversity of the human experience around the globe.” 32 33

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secondary to the effects they had on international relations: the films were tools to reaffirm the ideals of the Good Neighbor policy, soft propaganda under Disney’s soft veneer. This idea was hammered home in a memo written by former Disney animator Robert Carr in January 1942, that would later appear in Politics in July 1945. Carr argues in support of Disney’s work in South America, demonstrating a clear understanding of the diplomacy involved, and calls for a more expansive effort. Carr speaks to the power of animation and symbols, explaining that “we need whole glossary of new characters to express today’s new conceptions—characters to take their place alongside such familiar and effective simplifications as Uncle Sam…these anthropomorphic symbols have always been great comfort to the common man, for they create in him a secure feeling that he understands the rather complex values being asked to give his life to defend. Hence the high importance of symbols in morale-building, and the crucial importance of cartooning as a source of symbols.”35 He recognizes the possibility of animation to reach a mass audience, and predicts its potential just as McCay did decades earlier. Carr further underscores a crucial aspect of Disney’s propaganda efforts, quoting Walt Disney as saying: “it seems to me that whenever possible, the South Americans ought to be asked what they want, and how they would like it made.”36 Carr understood Disney’s soft approach to South America, one which entailed a process closer to cultural hybridity than imperialism, emphasizing the positive aspects of pan-American friendship. This was an effort to counter German overtures and the possibility that Axis propaganda would portray America as an imperialist power.37 This obfuscated the generally one-sided position of American power within the hemispheric order, rewriting the relationships that had been often held more by strength of arms and geographic convenience than shared cultural values. There are certainly questions whether Walt Disney’s first duty was to his country or to his pocketbook. Either way, this output was not about selling an American ideal, or even acknowledging past behavior, but finding common ground and reinforcing the shared humanity. Carr further calls for these aspects to be enacted within domestic propaganda, to “hammer away at the fact that Germany’s reserves are about gone, that Japan 35  Robert Carr, “Ideas for More Walt Disney Films for South American Release” (Politics, July 1945), 211–213. 36  Carr, “Walt Disney Films,” 212. 37  Leonard and Bratzel, Latin America, 9–10.

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has few left, and Italy none. While essentially a simplified visual lesson in demography, underlying this film would be a warm feeling of inter-­racial friendship and solidarity, aimed at counteracting the Axis propaganda about Uncle Sam’s racial prejudices.”38 Carr recognized, as Walt Disney did, that the war would end, and perhaps soon. There was value in producing cartoons that could be exhibited outside of the context of the war, and more significantly, the markets that would reopen as hostilities ceased. Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros became indicative of the Duck’s wartime role, and proof of his power as a tool of diplomacy.

The Darker Side of Propaganda The propaganda efforts of wartime  Hollywood at large ran the gamut from simple conservation tales to documentaries on the conditions in the military to outright attacks on entire nations or races. Films had certainly played a role as escapist entertainment during the depths of the Depression, but the existential threat to democracy posed by the war meant that the films being produced were more intensely patriotic. Karla Rae Fuller writes that “the distinction that can be made during the war years is that the purpose and objective of these values appeared to be simpler and clear-cut as well as strongly essential to the morale and defense of the nation. As a result, many films made during World War II not only provided escapist entertainment but also reflected the national beliefs and expectations of the time, no doubt influenced in part by heightened government involvement.”39 There was a sense of patriotism infused into the productions regardless of whether they touched on the war effort, particularly in cartoon shorts. This patriotism had a dark side, however, that found purchase within animation. Cartoons became a breeding ground for America’s darkest impulses, particularly the virulent strain of racism directed toward the Japanese. Shull and Wilt write that “the cinematic vilification of the Japanese…was most egregious in American cartoons…the wickedly smiling, usually craven, buck-toothed, glasses-wearing caricatures were most often simply crude examples of racial stereotyping…neither the German nor the Italian people were so stigmatized in American cartoons.”40  Carr, 212.  Fuller, Hollywood Goes Oriental, 128. 40  Shull and Wilt, Doing Their Bit, 33–34. 38 39

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Animation allows for the creation of essentially any image imaginable, and the World War II work that Winsor McCay had done two decades earlier was taken to a new extreme, as the cartoons tended to respond to a basic, visceral level to the war and America’s enemies, just as McCay had. While McCay’s German submarine crew was depicted as underhanded (albeit mostly offscreen) villains, the portrayal pales in comparison to the treatment of belligerent nations in World War II, particularly the Japanese. Deep-seated racial attitudes, especially on the West Coast, singled out Asians broadly (Japanese, along with several other nationalities, had been banned from immigration to the United States under the Immigration Act of 1924), and the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor inspired new depths of racism and unbounded rage. The tentative stabs at mild propaganda like Saludos Amigos quickly gave way to darker impulses of the American psyche, and would serve to reinforce existing stereotypes and perhaps generate new ones. Nazis in modern popular culture are portrayed as unrepentant monsters (no one would doubt that Indiana Jones is doing the right thing when he guns down half a dozen brown-shirted soldiers), but as the war opened, the full scope of the Holocaust was as yet obscured, leaving the Japanese as the obvious villains of the war, at least to American eyes. This dovetailed with the American perception of Imperial Japan as the aggressors in the war; public outcry over the invasion of China had halted American exports of crucial war material to the island nation, which was part of what prompted the attack on Pearl Harbor in the first place (an invasion of the American-held Philippines occurred in tandem, an effort to seize the key resources). The deep-seated racism found “justification” with Pearl Harbor, and the veiled subtext of period films very quickly became text. The lead-time for cartoons in this period meant that there were very few shorts in production related to the war effort as America joined and would not be for several months. A quirk of timing meant that Disney would be among the first to release a propaganda film after the start of hostilities, with the Donald Duck-starring The New Spirit (1942) released in January. It had been commissioned the previous year by the Treasury Department, intended to cushion the blow of a coming tax hike, and did not feature any direct reference to the war itself. More significant was Donald Gets Drafted (1942), released in May, which was Disney’s first proper war-time cartoon. Scripted by Carl Barks, it was a comical tale of Donald Duck joining the service, proving generally ineffective at the endeavor as he is wont to do, and ending up worse for wear, an archetypal

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Donald Duck short. The short takes on a much more patriotic tone compared to previous Donald cartoons, though the duck is kept his clumsy but well-meaning self. Barks’s anti-war leanings shine through: there is no idealization of the training or service, but rather a comical portrayal of some of the real-life conditions of boot camp. Barks explained “I had seen one generation of young men march off to war—World War I—and I was stupid enough to think that I wanted to get into it, but I was just a little too young…when I saw how little we had accomplished with World War I, I thought, why in the devil kill off another whole generation of young men to accomplish the same result?”41 The following release The Spirit of ’43 (1943) works to cajole viewers into paying their income taxes, a spiritual sequel to The New Spirit, which saw Donald’s gleefully paying his income taxes. Here, Donald ponders whether to pay his quarterly income tax (with the high tax rate blamed on the Axis), with a zoot-suited young duck promising a good time while a Scottishaccented older duck proposes thrift and paying of the tax. While the short is fairly unmemorable compared to Disney’s other propaganda shorts (it is effectively a remake of the Canadian shorts from a year previous), the spendthrift older duck might be the proto-Uncle Scrooge. Furthermore, the funloving duck embodies certain aspects of Gladstone Gander, Donald’s happy-go-lucky cousin, and the short is an ur-example of the conflicts of Donald’s character in the comics. The writing for the short is occasionally credited to Carl Barks, and though this may be apocryphal (he retired from the studio in the same period), it does sketch out the relationships that will develop during his tenure. Films like this helped secure the idea of Donald as the everyman, a stand-in for the average American, one who is patriotic, but somewhat unwilling to actually follow through on their duty. The best known of the Donald Duck propaganda shorts is Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943), perhaps the best-known of all wartime shorts.42 This is well-­ remembered precisely because it is potentially combustible, insofar as it deals with dark matters of fascist life in a comic, which is not to say unserious, vein. Disney effectively buried it in the vault, but the image of Donald Duck as a Nazi remained the subject of myth and rumor in a pre-internet 41  Michael Barrier, “Carl Barks on His Life and Career,” Carl Barks Conversations, ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 53. 42  The release year of Der Fuehrer’s Face is murky; officially, it was released 1 January 1943, though won the Oscar for Animated Short Film in March of the same year, which meant it would have been shown at select theaters earlier, at least in theory.

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era, as it was well-documented in the historical record due to its Oscar win  and  the titular theme song by Oliver Wallace, made famous by the Spike Jones single released ahead of the short. It remains one of the more controversial of Disney’s wartime work due to its portrayal of Donald as a Nazi (or, rather, as an overworked German citizen, though the public imagination makes assumptions about its content). Shull and Wilt note that “this was one of the few cartoons that focused on Hitler’s Germany, rather than Hitler as the invader of Europe and enemy of democracy. Almost all of the humor devolves from Donald Duck’s sad life under the Nazi regime…it is somewhat unusual for a propaganda short to concentrate almost entirely on the internal affairs of the enemy nation.”43 While the events are played for comedy, it never condemns the citizens of Germany, and perhaps even sympathizes with them through the everyman Donald, who has no joy as a veritable cog in the machine of German industry, his very energy sapped by life under the regime that demands constant allegiance (forced to “heil” every framed portrait of Hitler that passes by on the assembly line) and constant production (working forty-­ eight hours a day). This is the same Donald, a put-upon figure in his normal life, placed among the German people, where he suffers much as he does in any other cartoon. The people of Germany are portrayed as victims of Hitler, the same as the rest of the world: the Nazi officers are the objects of caricature and mockery, including an unfortunate rendition of Hirohito, possessing yellow skin, buck teeth, and a stereotypical speech pattern. This was not Disney’s only animated short to comment on life under the Third Reich that year. The less comedic counterpoint to Der Fuehrer’s Face of Disney’s efforts was Education for Death (1943), an adaptation of Gregor Zimer’s 1941 book. It stands out among many of the other propaganda films of the time in portraying the life of a German youth as he grows to adulthood, with a sense of empathy. Hans the boy that will grow into a soldier is not portrayed as an unrepentant monster, but as an innocent lead astray over years by the insidious apparatus of the German state, a process portrayed with a great deal of sympathy. It is a tragedy that the boy will have his youthful spirit slowly crushed, and eventually be sent to his death in war, a process that is no fault of his own. Like Donald in Der Fuehrer’s Face, Hans is trapped within an oppressive regime, simply trying to get by; what occurs is a tragedy. The cartoon is bleaker and more serious than most of the other propaganda shorts of the period, emphasizing the tragedy of the  Shull and Wilt, Doing Their Bit, 46.

43

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situation, though features a few slapstick moments. Outside of a few interludes, the short possessed a documentary quality, creating a grim reality that tried to portray Nazi Germany as a real place, a twisted counterpoint to Der Fuehrer’s Face. Other notable shorts of the period include Reason and Emotion (1943), which follows a similar albeit more comedic route, arguing that the German people were seduced by Hitler through fear and sympathy. Disney’s shorts put the onus on Hitler and the Nazis as aggressors, with the German citizens largely faceless (young Hans melts away into a column of soldiers near the film’s conclusion), and represent an alternative perspective to other cartoons of the period.44 This less demonizing treatment helped Disney secure a position within the hearts and minds of the occupied populations, though they were not immune to that same racism. The dominant mode of much of the wartime animation was naked racism against the Japanese, owing to both the nature of the sneak attack as well as the deep-seated prejudice of Americans against Asians.45 Shull and Wilt find an economic reason for this, arguing that: no production company would deliberately alienate a potential segment of its audience by attacking an entire race or religion. Unpleasant as some movie stereotypes may be, they seem to have been included out of ignorance or laziness, rather than as part of a master plan to malign a certain group. One of the few exceptions to this rule, however, is the anti-Japanese bias in the popular media of 1942–43, cartoons very much included.46

Propaganda portrayed the belligerent Axis powers as inhuman monsters to a degree, but the Japanese were targeted with vitriol and outright racism. For instance, Nicole Fuller discusses “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips demonstrates how caricature in an animated cartoon can facilitate a host of wellworn racial clichés and concepts about the Japanese as well as the Orient as a whole.”47 The short features Bugs overcoming hordes of 44  Disney’s feature Bambi (1942) has been read as a parable on Jewish oppression in Europe; while the themes are stronger in Felix Salter’s original 1928 novel, the larger themes of “Man as danger” might be read as commentary on the horrors of war and genocide, though the full extent of the Holocaust would not be understood by the American public until well after Bambi’s release. 45  It seems possible that racial animus toward Asians, formerly projected on the Chinese, shifted toward the Japanese, particularly as the Chinese began to prove valuable allies in the Pacific. 46  Shull and Wilt, Doing Their Bit, 41. 47  Fuller, Hollywood Goes Oriental, 140.

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buck-­toothed, yellow-skinned antagonists, violently destroying the racist caricatures. This was hardly an exception: Warner’s Tokio Jokio (1943) portrayed a Japanese newsreel with those same caricatures, emphasizing Japanese ineptitude in all things war related; Famous Studios (formerly Fleischer Studios) produced You’re A Sap, Mr. Jap (1942) wherein Popeye single-­handedly sinks a Japanese battleship, crewed by the usual assortment of stereotypes. Disney avoided the same degree of outright racism that other studios engaged in with their cartoons, with the only Disney short to prominently feature Japanese caricatures Commando Duck (1943), though the Japanese appeared only as eyes hidden in bushes.48 After 1943, during with the Battle of Midway and the invasion of Italy seemed to signal a turning point in the war, the preponderance of racist propaganda films largely dried up. While Disney eschewed the more intense (and racist) propaganda of its rival studios, not all of their propaganda films were lighthearted and optimistic. Steps were taken not to offend allied nations, as Shale notes “Ward Kimball, who worked on [Chicken Little], recalls another late change: the fox used the word ‘fascism,’ but…the word was changed to ‘totalitarianism.’ He objected to this extra work as well as the reasoning behind the compromising change: ‘In other words, if we called him Fascist, we should also kind of make it sound like we’re condemning Russia too.’”49 Walt Disney created cartoons not purely for an American audience: the business relied on foreign audiences as much as domestic, even in wartime, and there was an effort to keep the content even-handed. He exercised a close control over the cartoons produced, though it is conjecture to claim this was for business reasons just as it would be to find a humanitarian motivation, though likely worked to ensure that the cartoons were more palatable beyond American boundaries in lean war years. Through this effort, Donald Duck remained relatively untainted by his role in wartime propaganda: while Der Fuehrer’s Face retained some recognition  as outlined above, Commando Duck was effectively erased from public consciousness by the company, along with most of the propaganda shorts until a collected home video re-release in 2004.

 Shale, Joins Up, 94.  Shale, 65.

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Merchandising, Merchandising Adjacent to the more visible wartime production, Donald Duck had also secured a key pop cultural position. Shale notes that “comic books and comic strips continued right through the war, and approximately 50 Disney children’s books were published between 1941 and 1945.”50 Disney’s relatively slow theatrical output was made up for with his prodigious production of printed media. Even as Walt Disney’s attention was on the features and keeping the studio financially solvent, his brother Roy Disney pursued merchandising, bringing in advertiser Herman Kamen to help sell the merchandise. The merchandising empire had developed quickly, from “the royalty statement for 1930…amounted to only $63” to “$35  million of sales in Disney merchandise the United States and an equal amount overseas” by 1934, though suffered during the war years along with the larger Disney enterprise.51 Despite the credit often given to the government projects of Disney, merchandise played a key role in keeping the company afloat, and loomed large as foreign markets reopened in the post-war years. Disney ended the war with the resources, distribution, and manpower to stage a successful comeback; the lean war years bloomed into relative success, the studio recovering through the exhibition of its growing catalogue, with audiences hungry for fresh content. Merchandise followed the movies, and comics in particular became a key component of Disney’s global reach due to their low cost and relatively simple translation. These works were linked to the larger Disney enterprise: featuring Disney’s popular characters, drawn and written by current and former Disney employees. Significantly, each comic bore the name of Walt Disney alone, implying him as the sole creator, a stamp of approval for the discerning consumer be they child or adult.52 The production of this material was increasingly contracted out to outside companies, as Walt Disney micromanaging was increasingly focused on film and television, including Western Publishing in America and Egmont Publishing in Europe. The creators of these works were generally viewed to be interchangeable, works for hire that fit the basic designs of characters. The comics were an afterthought: comics were at the time viewed as disposable entertainments for children, and hardly a serious consideration for Disney.  Shull, 87.  Gabler, Walt Disney, 196–197. 52  This practice was common among comics in general during the period: only major figures like Will Eisner had the clout to sign the comics with their own names. 50 51

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While the cartoons were produced under the watchful eye of Walt Disney, and thus reflected his views and philosophies, the comics had much more limited guidance, beyond some basic rules. This allowed writers and artists, often former studio men, the relative freedom to adapt the studios characters into new settings and stories that simply were not possible where time and money were on the line. The Disney empire was growing quickly, and comics were just one far-flung outpost, which created a space that would develop in unique ways under the pen of Carl Barks, “The Good Duck Artist.”

References Barrier, J. Michael. “Carl Barks on His Life and Career.” Carl Barks Conversations. Ed. Donald Ault, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003, 50–68. Barrier, Michael. The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007. Barrier, Michael. Funny Books: The Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. Braggiotti, Mary. “Mickey Mouse’s Dearest Friend.” New York Post Daily Magazine and Comic Section, 30 June 1944. Burton-Carvajal, Julianne. “‘Surprise Package’: Looking Southward with Disney.” Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom. Ed. Eric Smoodin, New York: Routledge, 1994, 131–147. Carr, Robert. “Ideas for More Walt Disney Films for South American Release.” Politics, July 1945. 211–213. Gabler, Neal. Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. New York: Knopf, 2006. Grover, Ron. The Disney Touch: How a Daring Management Team Revived A Business Empire. Homewood, IL: Business One Irwin, 1991. Kimball, Ward. “The Wonderful World of Walt Disney.” You Must Remember This, ed. Walter Wanger, New York: G.P. Putnam, 1975. Leonard, Thomas and John Bratzel. Latin America During World War II. Landham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2007. Roosevelt, Franklin D. “Executive Order 8840 Establishing the Office of Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs,” July 30, 1941. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T.  Woolley, The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge, 2016. Shale, Richard. Donald Duck Joins Up: Walt Disney Studio During World War II. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981.

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Shull, Michael, and David Wilt. Doing Their Bit: Wartime American Animated Short Films, 1939–1945. McFarland, 2004. Spellacy, Amy. “Mapping the Metaphor of the Good Neighbor: Geography, Globalism, and Pan-Americanism during the 1940s,” American Studies, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Summer 2006), 39–66. “The New Pictures, Jan. 25, 1943.” Time, 25 Jan. 1943. Tunstall, Jeremy. The Media Are American. New  York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Whitney, John Hay, Alstock to Nelson A. Rockefeller, memorandum, “Report of John Hay Whitney from Rio de Janerio, August 29, 1941,” 8 September 1941, RAC.

CHAPTER 4

“The Buckaroo of the Badlands”: Carl Barks Remembering the Frontier

Carl Barks is the most prolific writer and artist of the Duck comics to date. Growing up among the vestiges of the American frontier, he left an indelible mark on the history of Donald Duck. If Walt Disney was responsible for the Duck’s genesis and entry into public consciousness, Barks is responsible for securing the character’s popularity worldwide, giving him an identity beyond what was allowed in the shorts. His individualistic conservatism, a strain of American exceptionalism formed in the echoes of the frontier that had closed a few short years before Barks’s birth, informed his comics work, cementing his version of Donald Duck within the popular imagination of the readers of Disney comics. The invisible hand of Walt Disney was not involved in the hiring of Carl Barks to write the comics, just as he was not involved in any way by that point in the production of the comics  that bore his name on the covers. In Barks’s reckoning: “after I left the studio, I never met Walt face to face again…I don’t think the Disney studio ever even read my comic book stories. I would turn my stories into Western, and Western supposedly sent them over to the Disney studio for checking, but I know there were times when I was very close to their deadline they didn’t have time.”1 Barks’s work exists in conversation with the work produced by Disney 1

 Barrier, et al., “A Conversation with Carl Barks,” Carl Barks Conversations, 21.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. C. Bryan, Creation, Translation, and Adaptation in Donald Duck Comics, Palgrave Fan Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73636-1_4

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Studios, but was given the freedom to tell the stories he wanted to, and developed a world around Donald Duck that resonated with audiences down through the ages. The content of the comics flowed much more directly from Carl Barks than from Disney; the basic guidelines may have been laid out by the company, but Barks understood that his comics were meant for a younger audience, and thus was more careful about what he wrote. He explains that “they didn’t censor very often…I got in trouble in about the second or third story I wrote for them. I had Donald as being a lifeguard, and I had this lovely duck woman-I sure got told off about that…the art editor at the publisher made me spend a few hours…just flattening the breasts of this gal.”2 There were never any directives for elements he needed to include, only occasional hackles raised at things deemed inappropriate for the youthful audience of the stories. Barks wrote for an American audience, largely unaware of the worldwide appeal of the characters, yet was able to imbue his characters with a certain resonance. He explains that “my stories were just about every day American life. I don’t think that life in Norway, Germany, Italy…was like that. However, they understood; it rang a bell with them. The stories are very popular in those countries because they reflect common human experiences…the human condition was an international thing, but the method of presenting it was American.”3 He somehow captured something universal within the human condition that brought readers to the comics and secured many of them into life-­long fans. The Duck comics were not popular because they were American: if it was the case (that children were reading them simply because of their origin), Mickey Mouse better embodied the Walt Disney Company. Donald Duck and the Duck Family captured the imaginations of the readers.4 While certain elements were in line with the larger Disney focus of the period (the comics tended to be pro-capitalism, though not as unabashedly so as Dorfman and Mattelart argue), Barks’s style is not hardline propaganda for America, or even the softer propaganda of Saludos Amigos 2  Gottfried Heinwein, “Conversation with Carl Barks,” Carl Barks: Conversations, Ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 151. 3  Bruce Hamilton, “Carl Barks Interview,” Carl Barks: Conversations, Ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 138. 4  Barks realizes that the characters themselves had greater depths: “Scrooge is an excessive example of the possibilities of our lifestyle. But Donald and the kids, Gladstone, and Gyro all have their counterparts in the American people. You can read about them just about every day in the news.” Hamilton, 138.

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and The Three Caballeros.5 Barks seems unaware that there even was a larger market for his comics outside of America, or even that his work had reached the huge audience in the United States.6 He simply kept on drawing and writing the comics, maintaining a steady pace of production over the course of some twenty or so years, only learning late in life how significant his work truly was.

Carl Barks as a Creator Carl Barks was born in 1901, a few months before his eventual employer Walt Disney, and like Disney, spent his youth on what remained of the frontier. Disney’s youth in small town Missouri was echoed in Barks’s childhood on an Oregon homestead, though the transformation of the American landscape had already reached parts of the Midwest. Whereas Walt Disney had access to basic amenities (electricity, running water), Barks lived a rural life, including riding to school in a wagon for several years, and he did not even attend high school.7 Moreover, the young Barks encountered remnants of the West that was; he recalls that “real cowboys would come in those outfits…my brother and I, we just worshipped those fellows. And oh, what vulgar-talking men they were!”8 Barks contends that they shared few stories of their work, though a few anecdotes slip through in interviews. He came of age in this space, and it was a significant influence on his work; he noted “I have a love for the Old West, the wide-­ open spaces. I can remember when I myself was a young boy with plenty of room to roam around in, with a gun to shoot and horses to ride. It was  Barks explained of his occasional forays into anti-war messaging in an interview that “I get mad like everybody else at the stupid things people are doing in different parts of the world, but what could I do about it? …I realized what people were objecting to in that war…it was something I couldn’t do anything about, and I tried to make fun of those wars in Siambodia and such places. In ‘The Treasure of Marco Polo’ I tried to turn things back, to make people think of the better times people had before they got so damn mad that they were fighting all the time.” Donald Ault, Bruce Hamilton, John Ronan, and Nicky Wright. “Living the Stories: The Carl Barks Genius,” Carl Barks: Conversations, Ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 213–214. 6  Later in life, he did take note, commenting that “I always had the impression that the German readers best understood my humor, in contrast to the Italians, for example, where the spirit of my stories was apparently lost in translation…the Italians, they really butchered my stories.” Heinwein, 141. 7  Malcolm Willits, Don Thompson, and Maggie Thompson. “The Duck Man.” in The Duckburg Times, No. 10/11 (27 March 1981), 3–4. 8  Barrier, “Life and Career,” 55. 5

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part of the formation of my character, I guess.”9 Even his home of Merrill, Oregon had a brush with history; Barks remarked “the last of the Indian wars was fought there in 1880s, something like that, which was close to where I’d lived.”10 Despite his lack of formal education, Barks was nevertheless intrigued by history, and elements of the American West filtered into his work in the decades to come. Barks pursued drawing first, a skill he mostly taught himself (his formal art education amounted to a total of four correspondence lessons), drifting from Oregon to San Francisco to Minneapolis. He drew for various newspapers in this period, most notably the adult-oriented Calgary Eye-­Opener, where he drew racy comics. Facing difficulty achieving long-term success in comics, Barks found work as an in-betweener at Walt Disney Studios in 1934, creating the drawings that went between the key animation, giving cartoons their sense of movement. His talents seemed better suited to writing, particularly in Donald Duck cartoons, and he transferred to the story department in 1937. The entry of Carl Barks into comics writing is relatively straightforward: after working his way from in-betweener to joke writer, Barks helped write and draw a Disney comic entitled “Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold” (1942) with fellow animators Bob Karp and Jack Hannah. Barks remained there until 1942, when he quit for health reasons, taking up work as a chicken farmer in the Inland Empire. When financial difficulty loomed, he contacted Western Publishing (who at the time handled the comics publishing for Disney) looking for additional work he could do from home. He was hired and began to craft a series of comics featuring Donald Duck, slowly creating an expansive world around the character.11 While his initial output was relatively slow, he would soon become the most prodigious writer of Donald Duck comics, utilizing the freedom he was granted  to create a fully realized world. By the time he retired in 1966, Barks had produced some seven hundred stories across his career, including the stories that introduced Uncle Scrooge McDuck. His glory came during his retirement, after his identity was uncovered by a few enterprising fans, and his artistic output during the period, particularly his famed oil portraits of the famous Ducks, ensured financial stability in his twilight years, living comfortably to 99 years old. 9  Donald Ault, Thomas Andrae, and Stephen Gong, “An Interview with Carl Barks, Duckburg’s True Founding Father,” Carl Barks: Conversations (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 104. 10  Barrier, “Life and Career,” 56. 11  Willits, et al., 12.

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This attention to storytelling and authenticity—verisimilitude—speaks to the popularity of Carl Barks. While some of the appeal of the cartoon Donald Duck resulted from his temper and everyman persona (with assistance from the Walt Disney’s marketing acumen), the Barks run of the Ducks seem to have a power all their own, greater than even Disney’s erstwhile mascot Mickey Mouse, at least in comics. The Donald Duck of these stories digs deeper into his everyman nature, making him more relatable, and as the 1950s dawned, the character only became more popular. Whereas Mickey was even-tempered and friendly, Donald was prone to bursts of anger, powered by pure frustration with the world at large. Barks’s rendition of Donald and his extended family (generally his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, his Uncle Scrooge McDuck, and cousin Gladstone Gander) are often out of sorts with the pace of modern life: the bustling life of the coastal metropolis Duckburg only occasionally stands as the setting for the stories. More often, they head into the wilderness, in pursuit of lost treasure, merit badges, or simply a few moments of peace and quiet (though those are rarely found). These allow for narratives of adventure and exploration, tapping into themes of wish-fulfillment: after all, what kid would not want to take an afternoon off to search for buried gold or investigate a weird old castle? Though presented in a new format (the comic book), the themes, and the format of the adventure-style travel stories, reflecting the evolution of travel literature, albeit written by a man who never left the continental United States. Carl Barks’s versions of characters, while drawn from the Disney originals, were rewritten to better suit his needs. Collectively, these characters became well-rounded and developed individuals in his stories. For Donald Duck, Barks explains that he “broadened his character out very much. Instead of just making him a quarrelsome little guy out of him, I made a sympathetic character. He was sometimes a villain, and he was often a real good guy and at all times he was just a blundering person like the average human being.”12 Donald was already eclipsing Mickey as Disney’s most popular character, and the comics served to solidify that, making his comical bouts of rage (much rarer in the comics than the cartoons) into a spectrum of human emotion. While they were not purely Barks creations, he expanded Donald’s nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, from simply “mischievous little guys who were always in conflict with Donald” to “smart 12  Edward Summer, “Of Ducks and Men: Carl Barks Interviewed” (in Carl Barks: Conversations (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003)), 83.

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little guys once in a while, and very clumsy little guys at other times,” to keep things fresh and reflecting his personal philosophies.13 Barks soon began to add his own creations to the cast: Gladstone Gander, Donald’s lazy yet incredibly lucky cousin, first appeared in 1948, the criminal Beagle Boys in 1951, the absent-minded inventor Gyro Gearloose in 1952, and myriad other significant figures introduced over the years. But his most significant contribution would come in 1947, with Uncle Scrooge McDuck. As with the other characters created by Carl Barks, Scrooge was meant to fill a role in a story: “Christmas on Bear Mountain” (1947).14 Barks decided to incorporate a rich uncle who would drive the tale, as the owner of a mountainside cabin where Donald and the nephews would spend the holiday. He further elaborated on this with the uncle deciding to test Donald’s bravery, which lead to the plot involving a bear costume, an actual bear, and a lost bear cub. Barks’s writing process echoed his style from his days in the studio: creating a scene or writing a few gags, and then forming the story around it. His art was in turn formed by his story; for “Christmas on Bear Mountain,” Barks explains that “I began to think of the great Dickens Christmas story about Scrooge…I just was just thief enough to steal some of the idea and have a rich uncle for Donald. I guess the fact that he was rich was the thing that triggered all further developments—as to just how rich and the showing of his wealth.”15 There are dozens of characters created by Carl Barks to drive the action of a single story, but Scrooge proved enduring. Scrooge McDuck was a means to an end, a variation on the classic version of Ebenezer Scrooge, who would discover the power of love that would redeem him at the end of the story. The character was intended be one-off, but had value in later plots: “I found that that was quite a fascinating subject—just piles of money would appeal to a lot of people. And I just gradually made him richer and richer…those things just grew like building brick walls: you just lay one brick on top of another, and finally you’ve got the whole thing built.”16 Scrooge’s wealth became a plot device, a means to an end, sending the characters beyond the confines of Duckburg and its immediate environs. A story like “Lost in the Andes”  Summer, “Of Ducks and Men,” 83.  Carl Barks, “Christmas on Bear Mountain,” Donald Duck Four Color #178 (Dell Comics, December 1947). 15  Ault, et al., “Founding Father,” 94. 16  Ault, et al., “Founding Father,” 94–95. 13 14

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(Four Color Comics #223, April 1949) required set-up to explain why Donald and his kin might adjourn to South America for an adventure; Scrooge allowed him to bypass these mental hoops and allowed Barks to expand the world. Barks was fastidious in his planning and emphasized continuity and cohesion in his work: “everything would be carefully planned out by the conclusion; events would be telegraphed, sequences carefully laid out for maximum impact, all leading toward a carefully constructed conclusion when all of the pieces came tumbling together.”17 It took five years of tinkering from Scrooge’s introduction before he got his own title, starting with “Only A Poor Old Man.” From his first starring role, Scrooge McDuck possessed more nuance than his early appearances. While he was certainly greedy and money-­ hungry, he was not defined by his lust for wealth. In “Only A Poor Old Man” (1952), he explains to Donald that “there is no greater comfort than in having a fortune like mine!”18 The money allows, at least in theory, a sense of security, but also served as a status symbol; Michael Barrier elaborates “Scrooge had the kind of fantastic wealth a child could understand, and he hoarded that money in what amounted to a gigantic piggy bank. A child with a lot of cash might want to spend it on toys, but for Scrooge, his money itself was an enormous toy.”19 In the hands of Carl Barks, money is a plot device, a MacGuffin to be stolen to prod Scrooge to action, or a prompt for an adventure in pursuit of some great, lost treasure. There is something significant in “Only A Poor Old Man” that grants Scrooge a modicum of depth. He explains that “all this money means something to me! Every coin in here has a story!” elaborating on earning his fortune in the Klondike and the Old West through hard work and perseverance, concluding that “you’d love your money, too, boys, if you got it the way I did—by thinking harder than the other guy—by jumping a little quicker…”20 Scrooge is an incurable nostalgic in many ways, a mix of Barks’s conservatism and Walt Disney’s Arcadian youth, and this frames a bootstraps mentality that undergirds his personality. He is an old man out of his time, but one who never gives up his spirit of adventure, who is eternally optimistic as to the power of hard work and  Summer, “Of Ducks and Men,” 84–85.  Carl Barks, “Only A Poor Old Man,” Donald Duck Four Color #386/Uncle Scrooge #1 (Dell Comics, March 1952), 3. 19  Michael Barrier “The World’s Richest Duck.” MichaelBarrier.com. 2008. http:// michaelbarrier.com/Essays/Scrooge/WorldsRichestDuck.html. Accessed 20 August 2016. 20  Barks, “Only A Poor Old Man” (Uncle Scrooge #1), 8–9. 17 18

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determination, and who will live out his winter years carrying on. Thomas Andrae argues that “Scrooge’s popularity stemmed from the way the character negotiated tensions within the American dream in the postwar era. Americans have had a basic, almost spiritual, commitment to the principles of free enterprise, self-reliance, and individualism of the Protestant ethic.”21 This individualistic spirit inspires the roving adventures that Barks will create, a consistent aspect of the character that would be explored more fully by Barks’s successors, particularly Don Rosa. The introduction of Scrooge McDuck marked a sea change in the Duck comics. While Donald certainly had adventures, he was largely contained to Duckburg and its surrounding environs, a rough composite of northern California and Minnesota befitting Barks’s experience. With Uncle Scrooge, there was room for grander adventures, with stories taking place in exotic locales ranging from the Andes to the Klondike to Australia, even into outer space on occasion. The Scrooge stories, while not devoid of slapstick and other silliness, shifted away from the broad comedy of the Donald comics and became something more in line with the adventure serials of Barks’s youth. Crucially, these globetrotting escapades were imbued with a strong undercurrent of reality: they often took place in real-­ world locales, albeit with a few fictionalized elements, and Barks strove for a great attention to accuracy. Don Rosa recalls “When I was a kid, I figured Kalgoorlie was just a gag funnybook name…but true to form, Barks didn’t insult his readers, young or old, with made up nonsense. Kalgoorlie was indeed the site of one the late 19th century gold rushes.”22 This verisimilitude should be recognized as a hallmark of good authorship and artistry, a clear reminder that Barks took his work very seriously. For him, it was not simply cheap child’s fare, but careful artistic endeavor to be carefully worked. Barks drew inspiration from his own youth in Oregon but also copied pictures out of National Geographic and similar magazines. Barks explained that “I just sort of built up a background on places like Australia from a few old pulp magazines I had read stories in…most reference material for my scripts came from National Geographic and Encyclopedia Britannica. Art references from four file drawers of clippings, plus numerous art and drawing books.”23 His panoramas, including the full-page spread featured in “Lost in the Andes,” became a hallmark of his  Andrae, 188.  Don Rosa, “Son of the Sun,” Uncle Scrooge #291 (1987). 23  Willits, et al., “The Duck Man,” 10. 21 22

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style, and the real-world inspirations lent a depth and richness to the drawings that did not appear in the works of the other Duck artists of the era. Barks’s reckoning of nature is not one purely of its beauty and mystique; he recognizes that it is a place of great danger and misfortune to the unprepared, recalling Jack London and other authors of his youth. While the stories featured epic journeys, the scale remained constrained: the adventures were episodic and disconnected, with the same locations rarely being revisited, creating an expansive world that nevertheless lacked development, compared to other comics like Hergé’s Tintin (another comic featuring a Western character traveling to exotic locales, often running afoul of modern post-colonial sensibilities) or the then-nascent universe of Marvel’s Stan Lee. Barks engaged with the continuity in a given story, but was not seriously concerned with the larger questions of geography or family lineage, occasionally laying contradictions to his own canon. When he finally did sketch out a family tree long after retirement, there were gaps and holes to be filled by other fans (including Don Rosa). His characters were simple, but had hidden depths that Barks was never particularly interested in exploring, though others were.

The Philosophy of Carl Barks Examining Carl Barks’s comics offers some further sense of his beliefs through his characters’ actions. Scrooge is, nominally, a good person, though Barks finds him far from perfect, explaining that “The Beagle Boys and Flintheart Glomgold—they were people I had no sympathy with, and I loved to use them in stories in order to humiliate them, frustrate them…I gave Uncle Scrooge a redeeming personality. He can be mean to a certain point, but then he relents and becomes a good guy.”24 Scrooge, like his villains, is an egotistical capitalist, but he possessed a heart, particularly with regard to his great-nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Scrooge is imperfect: borderline villainous at times, but never quite crossing the line into rank immorality. A significant element of Barks’s Scrooge is that he is not always successful in his efforts, but does well in aggregate, his hard work and consistent effort paying off over time.25 There is a sense that this is the central lesson that Scrooge wishes to pass on to Donald and, by 24  Naiman, Michael, “Reluctant Cult Hero: Carl Barks,” In Carl Barks: Conversations, Ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 159. 25  Andrae, 189.

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extension, the lesson that Barks hopes to impart to his readers. Scrooge himself would not always live up to high moral ideals, but there was a sense that Barks recognized this as the way the world works. Barks explained “the thing that is most important about my comics is this: I told it like it is. I told the kids that the bad guys have a little bit of good in them, and the good guys have a lot of bad in them, and that you just couldn’t depend on anything much, that nothing was going to always turn out roses…it was the way life goes. I didn’t disguise anything or make things look rosy.”26 Scrooge is emblematic of how Barks treats his audience: he never talks down to them and trusts them comprehend the world around them. Dorfman and Mattelart are correct that Uncle Scrooge is a capitalist, and perhaps not an ideal role model, but they do not comprehend that Barks did not write him as an aspirational goal for his audience. Nor do they consider that North American readers might have understood Scrooge in the context of Calvinist/Puritan ethos linking grace and money, rather than a Liberation Theology conception of rapacity-through-­ wealth. Barks’s Scrooge strikes a more nuanced figure than they could understand from reading a handful of translated comics, and might equally be cited as a symbol of the problems of capitalism. He is greedy, nearly beyond reason (he is generally ranked as the richest duck in the world within the stories, and yet refuses to spend any more of his wealth than is strictly necessary), seeking out ever greater treasures, and attempting to permanently secure his wealth within a (mostly) impregnable vault; he seems to be a caricature of a capitalist banker, one who would rather possess his money than spend it. And yet, there is a good heart beneath that gruff exterior: Scrooge seems to genuinely care about his family members, and will readily sacrifice any treasure to save their lives, but also works to engender within them lessons about hard work paying off. Dorfman and Mattelart argue that “why does Donald look for work? In order to get money for his summer vacation, to pay the final installment on his television set (which he apparently does a thousand times, for he has to do it afresh in each new episode), or to buy a present (generally for Daisy or Scrooge)…Donald doesn’t really need to work, and the proof is that any money he does manage to make always goes towards buying the superfluous.”27 They misunderstand the role of wealth in this world: not as a means to power, but a symbol of shared experience, at least within the 26  Donald Ault, “Telling It Like It Is” (in Carl Barks: Conversations (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003)), 44. 27  Dorfman and Mattelart, 70–71.

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Duck Family. The lost relic regained from hidden jungle temples has no tangible worth in itself; rather, it is the physical manifestation of shared familial memories. Scrooge’s wealth serves as a symbol of a long-lived life, an accounting of experiences and adventures. This does present a rosier view of capitalism than the Marxist scholars might prefer, but it is the experience of the work-effort in these stories that generate value, not the objects themselves. There are examples of an anti-capitalist streak running through the stories, moreover. Thomas Andrae, a biographer of Barks, places “The Magic Hourglass” (Donald Duck Four Color #291, September 1950) as an early satire of capitalist themes within Barks’s work.28 He notes that the story “warns of disastrous consequences that follow when our most cherished wish—the desire for unlimited wealth and power—is granted…it satirizes the ironies and contradictions that accompanied America’s most powerful and wealthiest nation in the postwar period.”29 The story is a fairly straightforward tale: Scrooge tosses away a seemingly inaccurate (and worthless) hourglass, which his nephews acquire, and learn that it is apparently a good luck charm that ensured Scrooge’s fortune. While the story is a fairly typical adventure yarn that sees the plot device exchanged hands between the central characters and a few one-off antagonists, what makes it stand out is the ending: Andrae finds it a representation of “Barks’s humanistic philosophy, to thrive and be truly happy, we must overcome the egocentric desires and learn to treat others with tolerance and generosity. As Scrooge’s punishment for his egoism, the ending inverts the positions of the [nephews] and Scrooge and invokes a form of class revenge.”30 Scrooge, though finally reclaiming his hourglass once and for all, is forced not only to sail home in a damaged ship that Scrooge had earlier given to Donald, but to also pay for his nephews’ accommodations aboard a luxury cruise. To Dorfman and Mattelart, this would be posited as a temporary shift in power; whatever gains the nephews have made, the status will become quo in the next story. However, this is a crucial story in the development of Scrooge, both within the comics themselves and as Barks writes him.31 Scrooge’s development as a character is not a straightforward path 28  Carl Barks, “The Magic Hourglass,” Donald Duck Four Color #291 (Dell Comics, September 1950). 29  Andrae, 144. 30  Andrae, 149. 31  Barks explained of the story in an interview that “I get mad like everybody else at the stupid things people are doing in different parts of the world, but what could I do about

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like a character in a novel, but there are noticeable shifts and changes within the character over time that add up to something; Don Rosa’s The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck stand testament to the evolution of Scrooge’s character, at least within Barks’s stories.32 There is another possible reading of the relationship of Donald and Scrooge that offers a different, if still perhaps Marxist, perspective on the message of the Donald Duck comics. It is clear that the power dynamics between Donald and Scrooge are uneven; Dorfman and Mattelart take this to be a piece of propaganda directed toward convincing youths to obey patriarchal power structures. However, the relationship may be a more direct reflection of Barks’s relationship with Walt Disney, a quasi-­ autobiographical work that reflects Barks’s experiences as a long-time employee of Disney (both directly and indirectly). Barks himself, much like his character Donald, has nothing but kind words for Walt Disney, though these quotes indicate some equivalency to Scrooge: [Walt Disney] was the sort of dreamer who came up with these quick and brilliant ideas and who had the aggressiveness to carry them out…Disney’s genius and aggressiveness provided jobs for guys like me. I didn’t have the aggressiveness to ever produce a strip of my own. Disney gave me a stage to perform my little vaudeville act…he was a millionaire for just a few moments until he could find some place to dump it all and get into debt again.33

For Barks, Walt Disney strikes a figure similar to Scrooge: a man never content to rest on his laurels, always seeking out the next big thing. Barks praises Disney throughout various interviews, consistently explaining that he remains eternally grateful for the opportunities provided by the job Disney hired him to do. Authorial intent is largely ignored within Dorfman it? …I realized what people were objecting to in that war…it was something I couldn’t do anything about, and I tried to make fun of those wars in Siambodia and such places. In ‘The Treasure of Marco Polo’ I tried to turn things back, to make people think of the better times people had before they got so damn mad that they were fighting all the time.” Ault, Hamilton, Ronan, and White, “Living the Stories,” 213–214. 32  While there are other examples of Barks taking on more difficult topics, they are somewhat limited in number; he explained in an interview that “I was a little afraid to draw or write any stories that might get publishers in trouble with the government or tread on some politician’s toes…anything that gets published under the Disney name in a foreign country is accepted as part of American foreign policy, I imagine, by people who read it.” Willits and Thompson, 14. 33  Carl Barks, Uncle Scrooge (New York: Abbeville Press, 1979), 29–30.

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and Mattelart’s thesis (beyond crediting Disney the company with authorship of the comics), and they miss a crucial possibility with this work: that it could be a biographical parable of one man working within the Disney enterprise, loyal to a fault to “Uncle” Walt. There is little indication that Barks ever  intentionally made these connections himself; David Kunzle draws some relation (at least insofar as reading Barks’s career in Marxist terms), though Barks disagreed with that reading as well when asked about it.34 Still, there seems to be some connection between the happy-­ go-­lucky, generally poor Donald, and the workman Barks, who never seems to have put a bad word about his boss to paper, though perhaps harbored some deeper resentments. A key illustration of Barks’s appeal occurs in “Lost in the Andes” (Four Color Comics #223, April 1949). Invited to join a museum expedition to South America in search of square eggs, Donald Duck and his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie wind up as the only members left standing after a bout of food poisoning. After an attempt to purchase the square eggs from the locals, the group heads off into a nearby mist-covered valley following their only lead. As they reach the edge of the valley and crest the ridge, a great expanse opens before them, an ancient city hidden in the mountains, resembling Machu Picchu. It is a sight to behold, offering a full scope of the stone city couched within the mountains of South America, detailed and colorful to a degree that a reader might find surprising in a Disney comic.35 The panorama does not linger long; soon Donald and his nephews make their way into the city, and toward a conclusion to their adventure. But that singular image is a powerful one that would echo through the ages. “Lost in the Andes” captures a spirit of exploration, though Barks never traveled outside the United States during his working life. Like children worldwide who were curious about the wider world, he relied on National Geographic to inspire exotic locales that remained true to life, as well as his own Arcadian youth lived on the frontier. It should be noted that National Geographic is broadly characterized by scholarship as problematic; Lisa K. Vanderlinden explains that “in order to appeal to its audience, National Geographic’s cultural displays were laced with American ideologies and Western discourses and presented highly stylized representations of

 Barrier, “Carl Barks and His Ducks,” 75.  Carl Barks, “Lost in the Andes,” Four Color Comics #223 (Dell Comics, April 1949), 18.

34 35

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Otherness.”36 National Geographic repackaged foreign cultures for a middle-­ class, American audience (though it certainly had a larger reach  than Donald Duck comics), and Barks in turn appropriated that content for an even broader audience, albeit without any particular malice. The magazine gave Barks access to a wider world that he would not otherwise have reached as a middle-aged man with an eighth-grade education living in the mid-century Inland Empire. Carl Barks strove for authenticity in the depiction of historical sites and natural wonders, an attention to detail that entranced audiences, and was a key component in the development of a foreign audience for the Duck comics. It echoes the approach undertaken in Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros, albeit without a state propagandistic intent, by situating the Ducks in a close facsimile with the real world. In effect, Barks created a series of travelogues in his comics that allowed readers the world over to visit interesting, real places, achieving the same ends as did a magazine like National Geographic, albeit with cartoon ducks as tour guides. These stories were a step removed from the larger Disney media empire, freed from Walt Disney’s control, and provide an interesting counterpoint to many depictions of American history in that era. The comics that played upon the Old West subverted the dominant framing of the cowboy movies of the 1950s, creating a more grounded, dusty, lived-in reality than the two-­ fisted tales of cowboy heroics (or even Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett trilogy from the early 1950s). While these sources of inspiration might reinforce readings that the comics and Barks himself are boosters of American cultural imperialism, there are more subversive aspects to Barks’s work. His Western-tinged stories explore the scattered remnants of a once vibrant American frontier, in an age when the West was glorified as a symbol for the American spirit, but these stories took a different tack.

Carl Barks and Frontier Theory The Western as a genre dominated post-war American culture, though comics were more diffuse. The superheroes that had been so significant in the invention of the comic book had been displaced by other genres: Bradford Wright explains that “the majority of comic books published in the early 1950s were devoted to funny animals, romance, and innocuous 36  Lisa K, Vanderlinden. “Picturing Difference: Classroom Explorations of Otherness through National Geographic Images.” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, Vol. 18, No. 2, Teaching Material Culture (Fall 2007/Winter 2008), 31.

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adventure stories, but an increasing minority indulged tastes for controversial and provocative subject matter.”37 Western comics were never quite as dominant as the Western was in other media, but still featured heavily in the comic books of the day. These comics were not immune to the larger issues of post-war culture; Tom Engelhardt explains “the western, which in the 1950s achieved a dominant position on the small screen at home as well [as the movie theater] remained a particularly white genre (even though one-quarter or more of 19th  century cowboys had been black).”38 The Old West featured in the comics was often drawn from the cowboys in other media; William Savage locates half a dozen long-running cowboy comics featuring the likes of Tom Mix and Gene Autry, most running from the mid-1940s until the late 1950s, in keeping with the larger cowboy fad of the period.39 These figures had an additional function, however. Savage goes on to explain that comic-book cowboys could address contemporary social problems because of the anachronistic nature of their existence. They went on horseback and camped out at night and had to do with rather primitive Indians, but there was no historical context. They rode the mid-twentieth-century West, among cars and trucks and planes and speedboats and all manner of technological wonders, suggesting that the mainstream meandered freely through the outback and that western social issues were merely American social issues writ rural.40

The operative point is that these figures were unstuck from their alleged point of origin, instead dealing with the more salient issues of the day (particularly drug dealing). This is the context in which Carl Barks is writing, offering a different view of the West. Fredrick Jackson Turner famously intoned the “closing of a great historic moment” during the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893.41 Drawing from census data, Turner contended that the spirit of settlement and progress would no longer spread wide, raising concerns about the  Wright, Comic Book Nation, 155.  Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 34. 39  William Savage, Commies, Cowboys, and Jungle Queens: Comic Books and America, 1945–1954 (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1990), 67. 40  Savage, Commies, Cowboys, 69. 41  Fredrick Jackson Turner. The Frontier in American History (Malabar, FL: Robert E. Kreiger Publishing, 1985), 1. 37 38

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future development of American identity. Lynn Harter contends that “the mythic image that anchors the frontier thesis is that of the frontiersman, a heroic character who ventured forth into uncharted territory, supposedly independent of others’ symbolic and material resources, to win a decisive victory against all odds.”42 The loss was more of possibility than of any physical space; 1893 was the same year that introduced the world to the Ferris wheel, spray paint, alternating current, and brownies, and would hardly mark the end of the frontier in popular imagination. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid still roamed, the Klondike gold rush was still a few years away, the Nome and Fairbanks gold rushes in the following years, and the Indian Wars still saw skirmishes into the new century. The romanticization of the Wild West had begun well before this moment, evidenced by William “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West show, first of which was performed in 1883, and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, wherein the title character’s promise “to light out for the territory” at the novel’s conclusion, as well as popularity dime novels more generally. Carl Barks positions Uncle Scrooge within this space, a fixture of the Old West, a response to the loss of the frontier. The frontier is an amorphous thing, as much a state of being as a physical space. The borders were at best temporary and arbitrary, pushed ever outward by successive generations of traders, miners, farmers, and ranchers that inexorably transformed the landscape and destroyed or drove out the native inhabitants. These migrations occurred at various points in history, and from various directions, be it mountain men traveling south along the Rocky Mountains from Canada, prospectors taking the long boat ride from New York to San Francisco, various waves of immigration from nearly every continent. Turner’s conception of the frontier posits it as a space that has a way of removing the European-ness of its settlers, engendering a unique American character informed by the wide-open spaces, lack of history (at least in the traditional, European sense), harshness of survival, and interactions with Native Americans. Scrooge McDuck retains his ancestral roots, but is rendered American (and hyper-capitalist) though his time spent in the space. Turner posits that this space allowed for the flowering of both capitalism and democracy: “the frontier is productive of individualism…it produces antipathy of control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as representative of 42  Lynn Harter, “Masculinity(s), the Agrarian Frontier Myth, and Cooperative Ways of Organizing,” in Journal of Applied Communication Research 32 (2004), 91.

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oppression.”43 While the worth of an individual and the entitlement to the fruits of one’s own labors did not spring forth from the American character (after all, there are over two dozen mentions of tax collectors in the New Testament alone), it was adopted as an intrinsic aspect of the Western settler. The nature of the dispersed territorial governments and limited federal oversight reconstituted the myths of the creation of America, that the country’s very origin was inexorably linked to the oppressions of Old Europe alone, and that westward expansion constituted an extension of America’s founding character. It is a space where men are men, challenging the forces of nature; Harter argues “the masculine subjectivity embodied by the frontiersman is one characterized primarily by isolation and independence. The frontier narrative functions as a textual guide that directs the formation of not only individual identities (e.g., the farmer as the lone hero) but also organizational form (e.g., the proclivity for structures that privilege individualism).”44 This myth was refined and simplified over time, bent to a dozen different political causes, whitewashed over the course of generations. Turner’s scholarship is a relic, a crucial foundation of the study of American culture, but one that reflects the prevailing cultural notions of what the frontier was. Richard Slotkin contends that Turner’s approach is essentially ‘nostalgic.’ By dwelling on the naive perfection of the pre-modern frontier past, Turner implies a critique of the corruption of the present. The Frontier of the past appears as a place in which, once upon a time, the political and social life of a European people was transformed, morally regenerated, and given a distinctively democratic direction.45

Thus, Turner’s approach understands the West as an end result, as though a switch is flipped with the close of the frontier, and the hierarchy of power that results is almost predestined. Slotkin recognizes the faults of Turner, which would come into play within the character of Uncle Scrooge, albeit for a very different audience. Similarly, David Nye argues to “ask most Americans how the first settlers lived and they will talk about log cabins. It was not so, but later generations superimposed this vision on all of the  Turner, Frontier, 30.  Harter, “Agrarian Frontier,” 93. 45  Richard Slotkin. Gunfighter Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 34–35. 43 44

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American past.”46 These visions of the past have little relation to the reality of life in historical settings, but nevertheless inform perceptions of the country’s history and contemporary interactions with that same history. Turner’s conception of the West was simplistic, but no more than the westerns and other popular culture texts that followed. Carl Barks’s Old West-set work reflects a sort of revisionist history, but one more keenly aware of the rough reality, with swindling bankers and inclement weather a greater threat than bank robbers or Cherokee raiders (indeed, Barks’s work possessed a more sympathetic view of Native Americans than many other publications at the time). His Scrooge is closer to reality by virtue of Barks having lived in the twilight of the Old West, and Scrooge is very much a creature of wide-open spaces and fruitful endeavor. The relation between history and authenticity in his work is key to understanding his creative process, and this gave his readers a new viewpoint of the history, even if they would not have recognized as closer to real history. Also key is the presentation of an alternative version of the American West to wide and diverse audiences, as posited by myth-symbol with Barks playing with the notions of what the West was.47 He stood in opposition to prevailing notions of the homogenized West of the mid-­ century, though interrogating the myths in different fashions, utilizing images within his comic books to make arguments about the realities within the West.48 Carl Barks played upon national myths while nevertheless subverting their weight and meaning, attempting to recreate a true version of the Old West, or at least truer than contemporary pop culture  David Nye, America As Second Creation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 46.  Bruce Kuklick’s “Myth and Symbol in American Studies” expands on the work of Henry Nash Smith and Leo Marx, arguing that the scholar should endeavor to understand how certain concepts were viewed in order to better contextualize their place within American history, with an eye toward the individual and beyond the view of the intellectual. William Goetzmann’s West of the Imagination focuses on the imagery of the Old West, particularly the traditional paintings that helped to solidify the American “understanding” of what the West was. Both emphasize the use of images in the creation of cultural memories about history, relevant here in interpreting the versions put forward by Barks and Rosa. 48  Richard Slotkin states that “for most Americans—to the perpetual dismay of westerners—the West became a landscape known through, and completely identified with, the fictions created about it. Indeed, once that mythic space was well established in the various genres of mass culture, the fictive or mythic West became the scene in which new acts of mythogenesis could occur—in effect displacing both the real contemporary region and historical Frontier as factors in shaping the on-going discourse of cultural history.” Slotkin. Gunfighter Nation, 61–62. 46 47

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versions, work that would eventually be used as a foundation by Don Rosa decades later. Carl Barks’s version of the American West is harder-edged than contemporary comics and Western films (his career in comics ran from the early 1940s to the mid-1960s, coinciding with the dominance of the Western in popular culture). His stories were couched in a sense of reality; this proved a helpful touchstone for reaching European and other audiences, as Tunstall explains: “this framing allowed Europeans have a long tradition of thinking of America in terms of geographical and social mobility, of the United States as a land in which the unreal might become real. Both English and German wrote about the American West long before the first cowboy films.”49 Barks draws heavily from historical sources; Scrooge’s story is more akin to something like William Breckenridge’s Helldorado than John Ford’s Stagecoach, and mediates elements of the revision Westerns that became common in the interregnum between Barks and his eventual successor Don Rosa.50 Barks drew upon National Geographic to represent a verdant and surprisingly realistic representation of the real world, just with ducks and dogs in place of humans, tying the history of Scrooge into real historic events when possible. Andrew Lendacky writes “[Barks] actually did research, utilizing a file of old National Geographic magazines to ensure an authentic look for the physical environment he recreated as the backdrop to the Duck’s adventures.”51 While the physical environments possessed some authenticity, the problems of National Geographic, particularly its portrayal of non-whites as Other, were present in the Barks comics.52 The portrayal of the American West did hew closer to the historical reality, though issues of problematic representations occasionally cropped up in the more international Barks stories. Lendacky continues that “Barks, although a native of the Northwest, apparently had an  Tunstall, Media Are American, 82.  William M. Breakenridge, Helldorado: Bringing Law to the Mesquite (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1992). Stagecoach, directed by John Ford (1939; Beverly Hills: United Artists, 2010). 51  Andrew Lendacky, “The Carl Barks Stories and Racial and Cultural Stereotyping,” Barks Collector No. 16, 8. 52  Chris York, discussing the role of Native Americans in Western comics, notes “it has been long established that the reduction of cultures into one-dimensional caricatures make their dismissal both ideologically and physically a much easier task for the dominant culture.” Chris York, “Beyond the Frontier: Turok, Son of Stone and the Native American in Cold War America,” in Comic Books and the Cold War (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 179. 49 50

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affinity for the Southwest, if one can judge by the number of stories he has written that have the Southwest or South of the Border physical settings.”53 Barks was born in 1901, little more than a generation removed from the reality, and his youth spent on a cattle ranch (with the attendant encounters with actual cowboys) likely influenced the creation of a more grounded vision of the West.

Carl Barks and the Sheriff of Bullet Valley The West and the frontier always loomed in the Carl Barks canon. His work is the recreation of the frontier of his imagination, a space that still existed within living memory, one that had changed little in spite of Turner’s proclamation, one that he had lived.54 Electrification would not reach the rural areas of Pacific Northwest until after World War I, and life had continued in much the same fashion as it had for several generations. Barks’s experience would not have been far removed from someone like Laura Ingalls Wilder, and his vision of the West was couched in that hardscrabble reality.55 This upbringing engendered in Barks a certain distrust of the modern world and technology, as Thomas Andrae explains: “Barks’s conservatism and critical stands toward modernity inform many of the cartoons on which he worked…anxieties about a loss of masculine authority and control, a dread of the feminine, and fears of technological progress.”56 Barks’s work naturally hearkened back to frontier mentalities, the same concepts that Turner had posited, though it remained out of step with many of the prevailing notions appearing in the mainstream Western narratives of the era. While Barks avoided overt politics, it was still present in his work, and Andrae continues “at the same time, Barks was a staunch individualist, and the cartoons also express an antiauthoritarian ethic exemplified in the 53  Andrew Lendacky, “The Carl Barks Stories and Racial and Cultural Stereotyping,” The Barks Collector No. 16, 9–10. 54  Barks’s parents were both born a few years before the outbreak of the Civil War in Missouri, with his father heading to California on the back of a freight train in 1880s, before arriving in Oregon to take advantage of the Homestead Act. 55  Amy Singer’s examination of the portrayal of economic inequality in Little House on the Prairie echoes the discussions of Barks here, and perhaps finds common ground with the two texts. Amy Singer, “Little Girls on the Prairie and the Possibility of Subversive Reading” (Girlhood Studies, New York, Vol. 8, Iss. 2 (Summer 2015): 4–20). 56  Andrae, Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book, 31.

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nephews’ struggle for freedom against Donald, and Barks’s satire of war propaganda and military discipline.”57 Barks’s playful sensibilities belied certain deeply held values that undergirded the comics, and while his work embodied certain frontier ideals, it went beyond simple politics. He created dichotomies between the pastoral ideals of rural life and the rush of urban life, but often underlined the faults of both.58 His conclusions more often were that people were alike all over, that small town folks and primitive tribes were potentially just as greedy as big city capitalists, though there was a marked preference for the simple life in his comics.59 The excursions in Barks’s stories often visited pre-modern spaces—lost South American tribes or old ghost towns—but even these spaces were grounded in realism, with the remaining often more self-aware than other period portrayals. Despite his reliance on National Geographic, Barks largely avoided real-world individuals and groups, though elements of the occasional lost tribes did reflect elements of the real world. Inhabitants of Barks’s frontier were no more noble or honest than the city dwellers, reflecting a certain idea that people are alike all over, avoiding more stereotypical framing like the “noble savage.” This is not to proclaim that Barks was a progressive crusader against colonialism, just that he avoids the more problematic stereotypes common to the other Western and adventure comics of the era. There is also an element of humor to Carl Barks’s Western-themed stories that set them apart from other, more serious Western comics of the period. He keenly understood the sense of boredom found on the frontier, and his stories foresaw a stranger vision of the West. Barks was not alone in locating a sense of humor in the West, but might have been ahead  Andrae, 31–32.  John Wills explains the rise of Disney’s emphasis on the natural world: “The rise of Disnature is important as it corresponds to the fall of real nature in our lives. Tied to the demographic shift away from farms and toward the metropolis, the demise of daily interaction with the ‘great outdoors’ left an experiential void in the twentieth century.” Wills, Disney Culture, 114. This process plays out in Barks’s work as well as more mainstream Disney fare, though it tends to reflect the philosophy of Carl Barks more than that of Walt Disney. 59  This was a common theme among Barks stories; Peter Schilling Jr. remarks of the Donald Duck story “Lost in the Andes” that “Donald represents that heroic dream—that some happy accident will come along when we least expect it, and send us on a journey. Donald has no illusions that he’s not going to make any money…he presses forward for the thrill of adventure.” Peter Schilling Jr., Carl Barks’ Duck: Average American (Minneapolis: Uncivilized Books, 2014). 57 58

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of his time. Beyond a few scattered comedy duos (Laurel and Hardy with Way Out West (1937) and Abbott and Costello with Ride ‘Em Cowboy (1942)), there was little in the vein of what Barks was writing in this period.60 There was a bumper crop of Western comedies starting in the mid-­1960s (including F-Troop (1965–1967), Cat Ballou (1965), Trinity is My Name (1970)) that fit Barks’s comedic sensibilities, produced a decade or more after the height of his work. “The Sheriff of Bullet Valley” (Four Color #199, 1948) finds Donald Duck taking up the job of sheriff’s deputy in a rural town, playing upon the tropes of the western. Donald’s adventures in the story are entirely informed by his awareness of the rules and narratives of western films, which naturally drives much of the story’s plot. Barks is self-aware of the tropes of the Western genre, and that those tropes no longer exist within modernity. He opens with “gone now are the outlaws, the stage robbers, the cow thieves! Gone, too, the grim-lipped sheriffs that hunted them down! All that remains of the Old Wild West is its legends!”61 This story is one couched in reality: Donald’s efforts to challenge modern cattle rustlers entails the use of hand grenades and mobile x-ray projectors, though he views through the lens of the classic Western, casting himself in the role of the hero. Barks takes the opportunity to poke fun at the silliness of many of the pop cultural expectations of frontier life, but infused with a sense of loss. Much of the plot is driven by Donald’s assumption that the Western films of which he is fond are true to life. Donald’s genre savviness proves dangerous, as in an early scene when he is tricked out of his horse by the local cattle rustlers (who burn their brand into the animal while he is distracted), and he assumes that the sheriff is the actual villain, thinking “Maybe he wanted me to get killed! I begin to smell a plot! There was a mix-up like this in the picture ‘Fagin’s Fangs’! Horace Mustang jailed hundreds of innocent men before he discovered the leader of the rustlers was his kindly old grandmother!”62 Donald views the events of the story through the lens of genre, assuming that the West resembles his steady diet of cowboy movies. In a later instance, he arrests an innocent rancher 60  An exception is the Jimmy Stewart Western Destry Rides Again (1939), that had the same mix of slapstick and misunderstanding that Barks often utilized. Consider that Barks mentioned a fondness for Western films on several occasions, it is plausible that this film would have influenced his work in significant ways. 61  Barks, “The Sheriff of Bullet Valley,” Four Color #199, 3. 62  Barks, “Bullet Valley,” 8.

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after he surmises (incorrectly) a dastardly plot. Donald explains “Old Diamond has 300 thin steers in the pasture! He hides ‘em in a canyon then steal 300 fat steers from the Double X to put in their place…clever old guy! But I saw the same trick in the picture ‘Shuddering Saddles’!”63 His popular culture knowledge overrides common sense, which is coupled with his overwhelming stubbornness, creating most of the conflict in the story. Even during the final confrontation with the villainous Blacksnake, Donald laments “all I have to do is put my guns on him and take him in! This is so easy it’s not even fun!”64 This leads directly to a moment when Donald drops his guard, when Blacksnake claims “nobody but a coward would do a trick like that! Put your guns back in their holsters and draw even—like a brave man should!”65 Once more, Donald’s awareness of genre conventions is nearly the death of him, as he responds “I’m no coward! Rimfire Remington always does this in his pictures!”66 Donald is then immediately shot several times by the villain. Barks’s West is a dangerous space, and one that does not play by the rules of the Western as a genre. Donald’s inability to see “Bullet Valley” as anything other than a Western creates no end of difficulty for the innocents in the story, and draws out the conflict much longer than it logically should have taken. Thomas Andrae argues that “Barks’s story is not just an elegiac tale about the passing of the West but a moral fable that concerns the redemption of frontier values in the modern era…the way in which Western films inculcate a confusion between myth and reality becomes a central premise of the story.”67 Donald’s ultimate triumph in the story is the result of his stubbornness and dumb luck, while the functionality of the tropes of the Western is questioned in the modern setting. Andrae continues “Barks satirized the mythic images of Westerns by showing the gap between fantasy and reality in Donald’s continued failure to live out these images…though the media have distorted the images of the cowboy, they can still provide a worthwhile ethic if fans consciously and creatively reinterpret rather than passively consume the images.”68 Donald’s success occurs when he finally breaks from the Western cinema that informs much of his behavior in the story; Donald states, after finally  Barks, “Bullet Valley,” 13.  Barks, “Bullet Valley,” 29. 65  Barks, “Bullet Valley,” 29. 66  Barks, “Bullet Valley,” 29. 67  Andrae, 80–81. 68  Andrae, 81–82. 63 64

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capturing Blacksnake, that “it’s not the way Rimfire Remington would do it, but it’s way more fun!”69 Donald Duck becomes a tool to interrogate the myths of the West: Carl Barks had known real cowboys in his day, had grown up on the frontier, and recognized too well the gulf between the shining history and the muddy reality. Geoffrey Blum explains “something of a frontiersman himself, Barks was concerned with the fate of old-timers who had helped build [frontier towns].”70 Donald’s many failed efforts to capture the criminal underscores the limits of frontier ideal that had taken hold in the post-war era, but echoed also the loss of the true frontier in favor of a facsimile that little resembled the rough and dangerous life lived on the fringes of civilization. Donald Duck in “Bullet Valley” is presented as a tourist, a day-­ tripper without any reckoning of the reality of frontier life, to the degree that he disrupts the proper investigation into the cattle rustlers. He is not equipped to survive in the frontier space, and would likely have died on multiple occasions were it not for his oversized sheriff’s badge and intervention of his nephews (who prove slightly more genre savvy, perhaps better able to recognize the inaccuracies portrayed in Western cinema). Donald is perhaps indicative of others who pine for a West that never truly was; Barks knew the dangers and difficulties of frontier life, and was keenly aware that the people who wished for a return to frontier values likely had no idea of what life on the frontier fully entailed.

Scrooge McDuck as the Frontiersman Scrooge McDuck might be Barks’s most vibrant and well-realized creation. An unrepentant capitalist, he embodies more than just unrestrained greed, reflecting the spirit of American competitiveness in all endeavors. A figure in the mold of the 19th century Robber Barons, to the degree that fellow Scotsman Andrew Carnegie likely served as an inspiration (it is no accident that one of Scrooge’s rivals is named John Rockerduck, a direct reference to Carnegie’s rival John Rockefeller), though with slightly more humanity than other depictions of the archetype. Scrooge is the very embodiment of the traits that Turner outlined decades earlier: “coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness…that masterful  Barks, “Bullet Valley,” 33.   Geoffrey Blum. “Dawson: Imagination’s Doorway.” Walt Disney Giant No. 1, September 1995, 29. 69 70

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grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism…these are the traits of the frontier.”71 Scrooge further encompasses the bootstraps myth, infused with image of the lone hero on the frontier, and immigrant who arrives in America only to travel ever westward, though the chronology is a bit skewed; Barks was never concerned with keeping details straight from story to story. Scattered details of Scrooge’s backstory across dozens of different issues, usually as a setup for the narrative. Details emerged over time: Scrooge was a prospector, a rancher, an explorer, quick references in the background or in service of a given story but a common thread was his role as a frontiersman. Barks’s only full-­ length story set in Scrooge’s youth detailed his time as a riverboat captain on the Mississippi, and was featured in a special digest entitled “Uncle Scrooge Goes To Disneyland” in 1957. Scrooge’s history and personality nevertheless developed out of these fragments: he never tarried in a city for long, instead seeking out wide-open spaces that promised untold riches to the brave and hardy. While Scrooge’s fortune has several origin stories, the most resilient is the acquisition of a fortune during the Alaskan gold rush. This allowed his success is the result of supreme effort, achieved only by himself, wealth physically produced from the land itself by hard labor. He seeks out a claim deep in the hinterlands, braving hostile weather and menacing loan sharks, producing a fortune from Klondike gold. Scrooge’s success reflects a certain frontier ideal of individualism, allowing Scrooge to remain clean of the more negative aspects of 19th century wealth acquisition, avoiding the more problematic aspects of unrestrained capitalism. This avoided the sticky problems of the exploitation of labor, though Dorfman and Mattelart accused him of mistreating his family members to the same end.72 Andrae argues that “[Barks] narrates his stories as if they are real events yet simultaneously deconstructs the premises on which they are based…the contradictions made apparent by these stories invite us to critically examine rather than passively consume the popular formulas, myths, and stereotypes he portrays.”73 Scrooge had achieved his wealth by being “tougher than the toughies and smarter than the smarties,” offering a simplistic worldview that replicated the same myths of the American West  Turner, Frontier in American History, 37.  Dorfman and Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck, 70–71. 73  Andrae, 78. 71 72

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that had been propagated for decades, albeit with a little more grit and mud. Blum elaborates that “the combination of rugged heroism, ragged lawlessness, and instant riches appeals to our national imagination…for those who came after, it became the portrait of a nation: noble at times, ugly at others, but undoubtedly America.”74 Scrooge becomes emblematic of the transformation of America’s frontier into something else, a process that would be more fully explored in the stories of Don Rosa. The work of Carl Barks was largely bereft of any continuity, though that was hardly uncommon for other comic books of the era. The status quo remained inviolable: even though Donald ended “The Sheriff of Bullet Valley” as the town’s new sheriff, it was never remarked upon or referenced again, and Scrooge’s incredible wealth always found its way back to his money bin even if it had been sunk to the bottom of a lake. The characters and their personalities were generally consistent (Scrooge softens a bit as the years wore on, a bit less world-weary with age), but there were no attempts to tell larger stories by the time of Barks’s retirement in 1966. The series went into decline, overshadowed by Silver Age superheroes that began to increasingly deal with real-world issues as the Bronze Age dawned, and while sparse reprints continued, it was not until the 1980s that new content began to be created once more.75 The most enduring of the new generation of artists was a middle-aged engineer, Don Rosa, who had grown up as a fan of the Barks stories, and found a niche as the successor to Barks legacy.

Carl Barks Goes Back North to the Frontier The themes of the frontier are on full display from the start of Barks’s run. The second Uncle Scrooge story was “Back to the Klondike” (Uncle Scrooge #2, January 1952), which explored the origins of Scrooge’s wealth for the first time.76 Scrooge, suffering from apparent memory loss, heads  Blum, “Dawson,” 26.  According to figures available through ComicChron, in 1960, the Duck comics published by Dell had sales figures averaging just over two million copies a month across two titles (Uncle Scrooge and Walt Disney Comics and Stories). By 1969, it had declined to 272,000 per month for Walt Disney Comics and Stories (data for Uncle Scrooge is unavailable for that year). “Comic Sales Figures for 1960,” ComicChron, accessed 25 August 2018, http://comichron.com/yearlycomicssales/postaldata/1960.html 76  Due to several cut pages, I utilized the restored Gladstone reprint from 1994, rather than the original story from 1953. The content exists in some printings of the story prior, and plays a key role in Don Rosa’s Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. 74 75

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up north with his nephews in pursuit of a forgotten cache of gold at his old prospecting claim. Immediately upon their arrival, Scrooge laments “my, how this country has gone soft! But I’m not soft! …certainly not soft enough to buy a ticket when I can walk for free!”77 He plays upon certain ideas of frontier toughness, and laments the softness of the generations that followed, particularly his nephew Donald (a running theme in the Barks stories). Scrooge himself does more than talk the talk, recounting of a barroom brawl: “it was a fight to be proud of! I was like a buzzsaw! Men fell in like rows of dominos!”78 He is strong both spiritually and physically, a perfect vision of the frontier ideal, a capitalist who created his wealth out of the earth itself by his own two hands. Scrooge verges on outright villainy throughout the story, antagonizing his one-time love interest, aged dance-hall entertainer/rogue Glittering Goldie, even threatening to take her last remaining valuables over a long-ago debt. The finale comes down to a race to dig up gold, in the fashion of many of Barks stories, where Goldie proves victorious. However, it quickly becomes apparent to Donald that his Uncle Scrooge “rigged the race so Goldie would find his cache!”79 Moments like this serve to soften Scrooge’s character, even as the story itself serves as an elegy for the prospectors of old. “Back to the Klondike” allowed for Barks to wax poetic about the lost frontier as well. Barks remarked of the story: “nostalgia about the gold rush country and the old dance-hall girls had a lot to do with my thinking on that story. There were still some dance-hall girls alive and around and they’d get a write-up in the paper once in a while. I had tried to make Goldie a believable person because I thought that people were interested in what became of these girls.”80 Barks recalled the West-that-was, knew its inhabitants, and sought to bring life to that reality, honoring those who had been there. Goldie in “Back to the Klondike” is long past her glory days, living out of a battered shack in the wilderness, carrying on the best she can; while not a direct reference to any one person, she embodies the hardscrabble living for those last pioneers. While the story sees her better off thanks to the uncommonly generous actions of Scrooge, Barks

77  Carl Barks, “Back to the Klondike” (Four Color #456/Uncle Scrooge #2, March 1953), 10. 78  Barks, “Klondike,” 16. 79  Barks, “Klondike,” 34. 80  Carl Barks, Uncle Scrooge McDuck (Berkeley: Celestial Arts, 1987), 64.

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nevertheless reckons with the remnants of the Old West: broken dreams and broken bodies, the promise of the frontier long closed. The dimensions of Scrooge’s character are seen in the story “North of the Yukon” (Uncle Scrooge #59, July 1965). Scrooge is forced to travel back to Alaska to settle a lawsuit over a loan-shark’s debt, forced to retrieve a crucial document from the wilderness, similar to the earlier “Back to the Klondike.” When a local explains “nobody uses dog teams these days! Everybody flies!” Scrooge responds “in weather like this, only dogs can take you where you have to go!”81 Scrooge’s trust in the dogs (and respect for nature in general) drive much of the story, echoing themes played upon in the stories of Jack London, in keeping with Scrooge’s general distrust of technology and modernity. In particular, his respect for the aging sled dog champion Barko informs his character in the story, as Scrooge’s respect for the old dog is remarked upon several times in the story: “nobody’s spoken so respectfully to the old dog in years!”82 Eventually, Scrooge finds himself on an ice flow, the loan receipt (the MacGuffin representing his whole fortune) on one side, and his aging sled dog Barko on the other. Realizing he can only save one, Scrooge helps the dog, leaving the receipt to be captured by the villain, nominally trading the fortune for the life of an anonymous pooch. explaining “I can’t let you drown, old boy! That would be welching on my debt to you!”83 Fate intervenes as it must, and the story ends with Scrooge’s fortune (relatively) safe once more, but the audience is given a deeper sense of the old duck’s character. This story serves as a reminder that Scrooge is not the heartless capitalist that he is often made out to be. The frontier is a key part of the story as well. Writer Geoffrey Blum explains “Barko, like Scrooge, was a frontiersman, an emblem of the tough but honest way of life with which Barks had long identified. Scrooge is the artist’s reclusive nature, Barko is more outgoing, but when the chips are down, they pull together. ‘North of the Yukon’ presents us with two faces of an aging champion who still has what it takes to beat modern courts, cons, and media campaigns.”84 Scrooge’s hidden nature is put on prominent display in this story: given the choice, he would give up his fortunes  Carl Barks, “North of the Yukon” (Uncle Scrooge #59, Sept. 1965), 13.  Barks, “Yukon,” 14. 83  Barks, “Yukon,” 23. 84  Geoffrey Blum, “The Barko Factor,” Uncle Scrooge Adventures in Color, No. 50 (July 1998), 27. 81 82

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for the life of another. He is not purely a greedy plutocrat, but a frontier adventurer who values experiences and companionship more than his incredible wealth. The story itself hammers home these points: the impetus for the adventure is an allegedly paid debt coming back to haunt Scrooge through court action, prompting an Alaskan adventure to retrieve some missing evidence to prove Scrooge’s side. He must rely on his own abilities in the wilderness, proving to himself (and the audience) that he is still worthy of his vast wealth, while also demonstrating his occasional muted empathy. “North of the Yukon” demonstrates Scrooge’s morality in returning the aging Barko’s loyalty with his own, in spite of the potential costs to himself (though being a Barks story, the fortune is saved by the intervention of a deus ex machina). For as much power as Scrooge possesses in the civilized world, he is a highly moral being that acts to rescue those in need. Moreover, he demonstrates himself as a duck who recognizes (and upholds) the bond of civilization and nature, not forgetting the social contract he had with Barko when he called upon him to pull the sled. This taps into some deep-seated human need to protect the animals that serve us, but also marks Scrooge as a man worthy of his command of nature, one who can appreciate its splendor, handle its dangers, and tap its riches without utterly destroying the environment.85 Generally, Barks’s interest in Scrooge as a character was limited: the old duck was a means to an end, the same as Donald and the nephews. “North of the Yukon” was the rare Barks story that focused almost entirely on Scrooge, with the others acting largely as observers in his adventure. On the ice floes, it falls Scrooge alone to make the decision, and suffer the consequences. Notably, this was among the last stories Barks wrote before his retirement (chronologically speaking, there were another fifty stories published after this one, due to his talent for staying well ahead of schedule), demonstrating the small ways in which the character had grown under his pen; it would fall to Don Rosa to grow Scrooge’s character beyond this initial seedling.

Carl Barks at the End of an Era Carl Barks retired in 1966. By that point, there was greater competition in the American  comics market; while the Comics Code hurt comics sales starting in the mid-1950s, the restrictions it entailed eventually resulted in  Andrae, 183–186.

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a flowering of creativity. Dell Comics, along with other “funny animal” comics publishers like Harvey Comics, filled the newsstand spaces once occupied by EC Comics and other small publishers, but the success proved temporary. DC Comics began reviving defunct superheroes from the 1940s, beginning with the Flash in 1954, which served to breathe new life into their output, building upon the popularity of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. Marvel Comics took a little longer to find its footing, experimenting with horror and romance in the 1950s before creating a new line of superheroes, beginning with the Fantastic Four in 1962. Marvel grew quickly, fostering a talented bench of their own creators, pushing DC to crowding out non-superhero comics on American newsstands. Donald Duck remained kid’s stuff, the domain of children, while a reader of Superman might graduate to the more serious Justice League or Spider-Man; there were far more opportunities for growing the readership with superheroes than there were with funny animals, of creating deeper narratives within the comics. Funny animals did continue to develop and challenge readers, with newspaper comics in particular continuing to evolve and adapt (Walt Kelly’s Pogo was exemplar of the fine work being done in the period), but the comic books lacked the staying power of their peers. The business was changing, with creators like Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, and Jack Kirby becoming recognized figures in their own right. Carl Barks was over twenty years older than these luminaries, and geographically distant  from a center of culture like New  York City (where both DC and Marvel were based) on his farm in California. Barks was unfailingly polite and pleasant, but lacked a certain vitality that someone like Stan Lee possessed. Lee positioned himself as a sort of cultural ambassador for comic books, and his characters like Spider-Man, The Hulk, and The Fantastic Four loom large in the 1960s zeitgeist. He appeared on college campuses to give lectures, used the back page of Marvel’s comics as a ur-Twitter, responding to fan letters and excitedly previewing upcoming storylines and characters. Lee serves as a useful example of one of the ways that comics were growing a more permanent fandom. Stan Lee played a similar role to the one that Walt Disney had played in the 1950s, as a spokesman for a brand that spoke to the audience from the perspective of a creator, with all of the excitement that that entails. Western Publishing lacked any figurehead on the level of Lee, and did not appear to have much interest in cultivating one. The role creators have in growing fan communities should not be overlooked, and Barks played a key role in the development of a fandom.

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The identification of Carl Barks is a crucial part of the fanlore, and the subject of some mild disagreement. Western Publishing’s policy was to leave the names of creators off of their various comic properties, in the grand tradition of dime novels and juvenile literature. The justification was that the children should feel that these stories were being authored by Walt Disney himself, much as Nancy Drew novels were credited to Carolyn Keene. Of course, the actual reasons were likely more pragmatic; it was, after all, cheaper to pay creators when they could be easily and anonymously replaced. Carl Barks was not the only writer and artist employed on the Disney comics, nor was he only the former Disney animator, but he was prolific in his output, credited with some seven hundred stories (as artist, writer, and often both) across a roughly thirty-year career. Quantity alone does not explain this devotion to Barks; his work was recognizable enough that he acquired a reputation as “The Good Duck Artist” even before his identity was uncovered by a pair of diligent fans.

Finding Carl Barks Malcolm Willits’s tale of locating Carl Barks speaks to the tenacity of the American fan community in the early period. Willits was a fan of comics very nearly from the beginning, remarking of Barks’s comics that “here was something new in a children’s comic book—character’s almost adult-­ like in their demeanor with artwork that could grace National Geographic.”86 There was a recognition of Barks and his talents from the beginning, with Willits recognizing a brief hiatus in 1950 that had become an aspect of the lore around “The Good Duck Artist” among the fans. Willits, working as an Army secretary in 1957, hit upon the idea of trying to suss out Barks’s identity after previous, more direct correspondence had failed. Having previously worked on a science fiction fanzine that had since folded, he “wrote to the Disney studio informing that I’d like to do an article for DESTINY on their Donald Duck comic book artist.”87 The decision to contact the studio proved fortuitous, as Dell and Western tended to obscure the identities of their artists, including Carl Barks.88 With the address and identity of Barks in hand, Willits became 86  Malcolm Willits, “How I Breached the Barks Blockade!”, The Duckburg Times no. 10/11, 4–9. 87  Willits, “Barks Blockade!” 5. 88  Willits, “Barks Blockade!” 5.

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overwhelmed by his work, and kept the information to himself, for over two years. Malcolm Willits struck up a correspondence with fellow Barks fan John Spicer, using the information to help him to “have the honor of being the first fan to write [Barks],” writing to Barks himself a few weeks after.89 John Spicer would subsequently be “the first of many fans to make a personal Mecca of the Barks’ address,” with Willits himself visiting several times, and conducting the first interview with Barks that helped to unmask him to the larger fan community.90 These actions were not the start of the Barks fan community; “The Good Duck Artist” was already a figure of myth by the time that Willits wrote his letter, and his correspondence with John Spicer clearly marked both as fans. There were certainly other collectors at this point (The Society of the First Dime was active by 1962), but the creation of a community came in this moment with these communications. Barks provided a locus for the readers of the Duck comics, and it is no accident that Willits references Barks’s home as a Mecca, a site for fan pilgrimage in the same way that Monument Valley is for fans of John Ford’s Westerns. Barks, for his part, seems to have been quite accommodating of fans, with occasional frictions. This enduring popularity provided a valuable sideline for the retired Barks; when he was asked to paint a portrait for a fan, based on the old comics. One led to another, until 1976, when Disney put a stop to it. His wife, artist Garé Barks, explains that “Disney had good reasons for it…somebody had made an illegal reproduction of one of Carl’s paintings and sold it, and that was too much for Disney, because that would have kept happening.”91 Disney quietly allowed Barks to resume his painting a few years later, and even signed off on a coffee table book of the Barks portraits. These portraits proved to be the spark that helped jumpstart the revival of the Duck comics, which will be discussed in further detail in Chap. 6. Carl Barks continued to work well into his 90s, painting oil portraits of his Ducks, even writing two final stories for the European market. He and Gare moved from California to Oregon in 1983, roughly one hundred miles from where he had grown up, and lived happily until her death in

 Willits, “Barks Blockade!” 5–6.  Willits, “Barks Blockade!” 7. 91  Klaus Stryz, “An Interview with Carl and Gáre Barks,” Carl Barks: Conversations, Ed. Donald Ault (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 118. 89 90

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March 1993.92 In September 1993, at the age of 93, Carl Barks attended his first convention, the Second Annual Disneyana Convention, held in Anaheim. From there, he attended other events, in spite of his age, even leaving the United States for the first time in his life to visit Europe  in 1994. Carl Barks died in 2000, with outpouring that included a special issue of The Comics Journal devoted to luminaries eulogizing him, running over forty pages with dozens of fans and fellow creators offering remembrances, including luminaries like R.  Crumb, Terry Moore, and Trina Robbins; Crumb wrote “Barks’ stories sustained me and my brother Charles throughout our childhoods, and I still read them for pleasure and inspiration.”93 Art Spiegelman, quoted in the New York Times obituary, speaks to the power of Barks: “I’ve loved Carl Barks’s work since those days of long-lost innocence when I assumed that the duck stories were all written and drawn by Walt Disney himself. As far as I was concerned, they were Walt’s best work, done on lunch breaks, when he wasn’t making animated cartoons or hosting his weekly TV show. Before that, I just believed the ducks were somehow real, and now, as an adult, I’ve reverted to my first opinion: the ducks ARE real.”94 The influence of Carl Barks did not end with his passing, just as it did not with his retirement decades earlier, but is instead tapped into by creators and fans alike to repurpose to new ends, in ways that he could not have dreamed when he was writing the Ducks.

References Andrae, Thomas. Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2006. Ault, Donald, Bruce Hamilton, John Ronan, and Nicky Wright. “Living the Stories: The Carl Barks Genius.” Carl Barks: Conversations. Ed. Donald Ault. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. 210–214. Ault, Donald, Thomas Andrae, and Stephen Gong, “An Interview with Carl Barks, Duckburg’s True Founding Father.” Carl Barks: Conversations. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. 91–108.  Andrae, 275.  R.  Crumb, “Carl Barks: 1901–2000,” The Comics Journal (Issue #227, September 2000), 44. 94  Michael Pollak, “Carl Barks, Father of Scrooge McDuck, Is Dead at 99,” The New York Times, 26 August 2000. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/26/nyregion/carl-barksfather-of-scrooge-mcduck-is-dead-at-99.html 92 93

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Ault, Donald. “Telling It Like It Is.” Carl Barks: Conversations. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. 37–49. Barks, Carl. Uncle Scrooge. New York: Abbeville Press. 1979. Barks, Carl. Uncle Scrooge McDuck: His Life and Times. Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 1987. Barks, Carl. “Christmas on Bear Mountain.” Donald Duck Four Color #178. Dell Comics, December 1947. Barks, Carl. “The Sheriff of Bullet Valley.” Donald Duck #199. Dell Comics, October 1948. Barks, Carl. “Lost in the Andes.” Donald Duck Four Color #223. Dell Comics, April 1949. Barks, Carl. “The Magic Hourglass.” Donald Duck Four Color #291. Dell Comics, September 1950. Barks, Carl. “Only A Poor Old Man.” Donald Duck Four Color #386/Uncle Scrooge #1. Dell Comics, March 1952. Barks, Carl. “Back to the Klondike.” Donald Duck Four Color #456/Uncle Scrooge #2. Dell Comics, March 1953. Barks, Carl. “North of the Yukon.” Uncle Scrooge #59. Western Publishing, July 1965. Barrier, J. Michael, Glenn Bray, Bob Foster, and Bill Spicer. “A Conversation with Carl Barks.” Carl Barks: Conversations, edited by Donald Ault, 19–25. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Barrier, J. Michael. “Carl Barks on His Life and Career.” Carl Barks Conversations. Ed. Donald Ault, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003, 50–68. Barrier, Michael. “The World’s Richest Duck.” MichaelBarrier.com. 2008. http:// michaelbarrier.com/Essays/Scrooge/WorldsRichestDuck.html. Accessed 20 August 2016. Blum, Geoffrey. “Dawson: Imagination’s Doorway.” Walt Disney Giant No. 1, Gladstone Comics, September 1995. 26–29. Blum, Geoffrey. “The Barko Factor.” Uncle Scrooge Adventures in Color, No. 50, Gladstone Comics, July 7, 1998. 27. Breakenridge, William M. Helldorado: Bringing Law to the Mesquite. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1992. Crumb, R. “Carl Barks: 1901–2000.” The Comics Journal, Issue #227, September 2000, 38–81. Dorfman, Ariel and Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic Book. New York: International General, 1991. Engelhardt, Tom. The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. Goetzmann, William. West of the Imagination. New York: W.W. Norton. 1986.

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Hamilton, Bruce. “Carl Barks Interview.” Carl Barks: Conversations. Ed. Donald Ault. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. 137–139. Harter, Lynn. “Masculinity(s), the Agrarian Frontier Myth, and Cooperative Ways of Organizing: Contradictions and Tensions in the Experience and the Enactment of Democracy.” Journal of Applied Communication Research 32, 2004. 31–53. Heinwein, Gottfried. “Conversation with Carl Barks.” Carl Barks: Conversations. Ed. Donald Ault. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. 140–154. Kuklick, Bruce. “Myth and Symbol in American Studies.” American Quarterly, Vol. XXIV, 1972. Lendacky, Andrew. “The Carl Barks Stories and Racial and Cultural Stereotyping.” The Barks Collector No. 16, 6–22. Naiman, Michael. “Reluctant Cult Hero: Carl Barks.” Carl Barks: Conversations. Ed. Donald Ault. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. 155–160. Nye, David. America As Second Creation: Technology Narratives and New Beginnings. MIT Press, 2003. Rosa, Don. “Son of the Sun.” Uncle Scrooge #219, July 1987. Savage, William. Commies, Cowboys, and Jungle Queens: Comic Books and America, 1945–1954. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1990. Schilling Jr., Peter. Carl Barks’ Duck: Average American. Minneapolis: Uncivilized Books, 2014. Singer, Amy. “Little Girls on the Prairie and the Possibility of Subversive Reading.” Girlhood Studies, New York, Vol. 8, Iss. 2 (Summer 2015), 4–20. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-century America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Stagecoach, directed by John Ford (1939; Beverly Hills: United Artists, 2010). Stryz, Klaus. “An Interview with Carl and Gáre Barks.” Carl Barks: Conversations. Ed. Donald Ault. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. 109–119. Summer, Edward. “Of Ducks and Men: Carl Barks Interviewed.” Carl Barks: Conversations. Ed. Donald Ault. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. 80–90. Tunstall, Jeremy. The Media Are American. New  York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Turner, Fredrick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. Robert E.  Kreiger Publishing, 1985. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New  York: Dover Publications, 1994. Vanderlinden, Lisa K. “Picturing Difference: Classroom Explorations of Otherness Through National Geographic Images.” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall 2007/Winter 2008), 26–46. Wills, John. Disney Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017.

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Willits, Malcolm, Don Thompson, and Maggie Thompson. “The Duck Man.” The Duckburg Times, No. 10/11. 27 March 1981. Willits, Malcolm. “How I Breached the Barks Blockade!” The Duckburg Times No. 10/11. 27 March 1981. 4–9. York, Chris. “Beyond the Frontier: Turok, Son of Stone and the Native American in Cold War America.” Comic Books and the Cold War. Ed. Chris York and Rafiel York. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. Zanotto, Piero. “Scrooge McDuck, Most Sensational of Misers.” Uncle Scrooge. New York: Abbeville Press. 1979. 7–13.

CHAPTER 5

“The Good Duck Translator”: Erika Fuchs and the Exporting of Donald Duck

Disney was one of the first cultural products to enter the post-World War II Germany; the militarized, de-Nazification efforts of the occupation, succeeded by the Adenauer Era, created a fertile space for American culture to flourish, while staking a pro-American position in the larger cultural diplomacy of the early Cold War. The editor Erika Fuchs was single-handedly responsible for the written content of these comics in Germany for several decades, allowing her readers to consume them not as exotic foreign media but as familiar storybooks. Her translations are especially notable for subtly shifting and changing the written words to suit the German audience, and reflect a significant case for the consideration of translation studies. This chapter examines what I term “the Fuchs Effect,” wherein the translation functions more as an adaptation of the work, changing the meaning to a significant degree and effectively Germanizing Donald Duck for a receptive audience. Fuchs notably incorporated a large degree of German cultural references into her work, many quite obscure, that played a crucial role in the enduring popularity of the comics in Germany (and speak to the comics’ enduring power as anti-totalitarian texts). The modern state of Donald Duck fandom in Germany reflects the end result of a process of negotiation that reconsiders media imports within an existing cultural context. Donald Duck by 1945 had served as the figurehead of Disney’s war-­time propaganda shorts and had been transformed into an ambassador in South © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. C. Bryan, Creation, Translation, and Adaptation in Donald Duck Comics, Palgrave Fan Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73636-1_5

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America, with his popularity hitting an all-time high. He had firmly eclipsed Mickey Mouse in the minds of audiences, and the newly reopened markets of Europe and the rest of the world offered fertile ground for Disney’s advance with the Duck at the forefront. Stateside, the studio had weathered the lean war years successfully, and was in the process of carving out a larger niche within the comics market, even as Walt Disney’s gaze turned toward television and theme parks. The Disney kingdom weathered the winds of the Great Depression and World War II, and emerged a small but growing empire. Demand for Disney’s products had been high in Europe in the prewar years, and the studio had increasingly come to rely on foreign box office when the war erupted, and this left a place for Disney in the cultural memory of the time before the Nazi occupation and total war.

Cultural Exchange and the Occupation of Germany There was a great deal of disagreement among the Allies on how to handle an occupied Germany even before the end of the war. The disagreements were much deeper than those of the West and the Soviets, with France preferring a permanently weakened Germany, for instance, and there were  even some disagreements within the upper echelons of the United States government  around re-arming Germany as a  staging ground in a possible war with the Soviet Union. Negotiations eventually resulted in a democratic-capitalist Bundesrepublik, the Republic of Germany formed out of West Germany, while the German People’s Republic was created out of East Germany, each becoming buffers against possible aggression by the Warsaw Pact and NATO respectively. During the first years, post-­war West Germany fell under military control, particularly the protocols of JCS 1067. The document outlined the occupation that would effectively run West Germany for the next four years, outlining the structure of the military governance and the limits of German autonomy. Much of the text was focused on control of the economy and disarmament, but German culture itself was seen as a significant matter. It outlines the de-­Nazification protocols as “dissolving the Nazi Party, its formations, affiliated associations and supervised organizations, and all Nazi public institutions which were set up as instruments of Party domination, and prohibiting their revival in any form.”1 The process extends beyond politics and toward the erasure of a decade of fascist dominance of Germany soceity writ large, to the degree   Joint Chiefs of Staff. Directive to Commander-in-Chief of United States Forces of Occupation Regarding the Military Government of Germany: JCS 1067. 6.a. 1

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that “you will prohibit the propagation in any form of Nazi, militaristic or pan-German doctrines. … no German parades, military or political, civilian or sports, shall be permitted by you.”2 The overwhelming dominance of the fascist government had invaded all aspects of life and culture, which rendered these commandments even more complicated. Any reminders of the period were carefully erased, though there were efforts to maintain German cultural history at large; the first part concludes with a small note: “Arts and Archives: … you will make all reasonable efforts to preserve historical archives, museums, libraries and works of art.”3 Many of those spaces would remain closed for years afterward, as Germans focused on economic rebuilding after the events of World War II. Kellerman sums up the feeling: “JCS 1067 was a stern reminder to Germans that they had lost the war, had surrendered unconditionally, and had to bear the consequences.”4 The German educational system was effectively shut down under JCS 1067, as it was viewed as an aspect of state power, exacerbated further by issues with everything from limited supplies of  surviving textbooks to a dearth of trained teachers without ties to the Nazi party.5 There were fears that the younger generations might already be corrupted; Tent sums up the belief that “the older generation had at least been raised at a time before the Nazis could stifle truth, humanity, and religion. By contrast, the youth had been reared in a national cult of violence, intense nationalism, and hatred in schools, in the Hitler youth organizations…”6 The initial efforts of reeducation focused on undoing the damage of the prior decade, though the efforts were often ham-fisted and uncoordinated.7 The initial efforts at educational reform bordered on anarchy at times, with different organizations seeking different outcomes, often without input from the native Germans. However, the State Department came to  JCS 1067, 9.b,c.  JCS 1067, 15. 4  Kellerman, Cultural Relations, 18. 5  James Tent, Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American-Occupied Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 42–43. 6  Tent, Mission, 55. 7  These gaps in education might have allowed for greater penetration of Western popular culture; Stephan explains that “younger readers, looking for alternatives to the depressing German literature set in the ruins of war, and wanting to be different from their conservative and only superficially denazified parents and teachers, were attracted to the easy-to-read style of American literature, its suspensefully told stories, its generally optimistic view of the future, and its freedom from a weighty cultural past.” Alexander Stephan. “A Special German Case of Cultural Americanization.” In The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 76. 2 3

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increasingly displace the military in control of the occupation; Large explains “concrete directives for cultural and educational exchanges and for extensive aid programs emerged only at the end of 1946 … by the end of 1947, when the Cold War came more sharply into focus, an awareness dawned that cultural assistance and exchange programs were valuable components…”8 The demobilization of Allied armies in the later 1940s necessitated a shift in control away from military control, though the State Department ensured that it had control over the media to a large degree as the Cold War began to. Film is the most direct use of popular culture in the denazification/antiCommunist efforts, discussed at length by Jennifer Fay in Theaters of Occupation. American films played a significant role in the immediate aftermath of the war, but were increasingly displaced by a resurgent German film industry, which tended to avoid the propagandistic elements of American releases, the dominant genre becoming the Heimatfilm or “homeland film.”9 American films continued to be shown in cinemas, but the nostalgic Heimatfilm, which emphasized the simple, rural life, typically including straightforward romances accentuated with shots of sweeping vistas of the German heartland.10 These films were counterparts to American westerns of the same period, albeit with less violent content, and the simple stories appealed to the same feelings that made the western a dominant genre in roughly the same period (the 1940s to the 1970s). Television would have a similar detrimental effect upon German movie-going as it had on Americans, with regular television broadcasts beginning in 1952.11 Radio was a more complicated matter. Jeremy Tunstall notes that “the Americans sought also to avoid the centralized radio system under Postal Ministry control that Hitler had so easily taken over in 1933. The Americans (and the French in their zone) had deliberately organized radio 8  Large, David Clay. Germans to the Front: West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 254–255. 9  Johannes Von Moltke. No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 82. 10  Heide Fehrenbach frames the concerns of Germans with the shape of a post-Nazi national identity rather than fears of American cultural imperialism. Heide Fehrenbach, “Persistent myths of Americanization: German Reconstruction and the Renationalization of Postwar Cinema, 1945–1965,” in Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan (New York: Berghahn, 2000), 81–108. 11  The model for German television more closely resembled the British model of state-run television, compared to more localized newspapers and radio as favored by the Americans.

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at the Land (regional government) level and then embedded it into the power structure.”12 The effect was to create a diffuse media market, akin to the American system, despite occasional efforts of the Adenauer government to gain control. There was also creation of Radio Free Europe (based in Munich) in 1949 also reflected an extension of the goals of JCS 1067. The broadcasts were targeted at Soviet satellite states, funded semi-­ secretly by the CIA and State Department, engaging in similar efforts to what had taken place at the close of war in West Germany.13 The key is that this process was multifaceted and multimedia, though would the guidance from the State Department and United States military became less direct as the occupation wound down. The continued presence of U.S. military bases on German soil, over two hundred at the height of the Cold War, would continue to serve as sites of cultural exchange, including the arrival of comic books. Newspapers followed a similar approach; in the pre-Nazi Era, the German press had been generally disorganized, with hundreds of local papers aimed at various political parties and narrow interests, eventually supplanted by state control of information. The American occupiers sought a system similar to the media ecosystem that had developed in the United States: independent, private entities providing news and entertainment, with limited government oversight and control. Tunstall elaborates that: The Americans in particular had insisted upon writing the ‘regionalized and free’ media framework into the new federal state—making it impossible to unscramble the media without unscrambling the entire Federal Constitution. But the Adenauer government wanted to commence this unscrambling process … the Western international [news] agencies … provided not merely a strong Anglo-American news presence but in some years provided much of the effective political opposition to the Adenauer government.14

Certain rights were constitutionally mandated, guaranteeing freedom of the press and reporting in both broadcast and film, and emphatically declaring there shall be no censorship (“Eine Zensur findet nicht statt”). The Constitution did allow for some laws to be passed, particularly for the protection of children (“Diese Rechte finden ihre Schranken in den  Tunstall, The Media Are American, 158.  Tunstall, 226–227. 14  Tunstall, 158. 12 13

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Vorschriften der allgemeinen Gesetze, den gesetzlichen Bestimmungen zum Schutze der Jugend…”), but it provided fertile ground for comic books to flourish, even at a moment when they were being restricted in America. Comics provide the exception in the media landscape of West Germany. While other German  media industries—film, radio, print, television— would develop homegrown production as the occupation wound down, comics did not create an industry. There has always been a market for comics in Germany, generally on at newsstands in the same manner that they were distributed in the United States in the mid-century, but there is a dearth of native artists and writers, even in modern day. The vast majority of products released are translations of foreign releases, often through larger European publishers (Egmont, for instance), and most of the recent German-created comics releases grew out of the former East Germany, featuring a style that has more in common with comics from former Soviet bloc countries than those hailing from Western Europe. The occupation set the stage for the development of modern media in Germany, including comic books, and the fact that Germany did not develop a homegrown comics industry is a key point that will be addressed in this chapter. Cultural contacts between occupying servicemen and the native population are well-documented, if lacking the officiality of the diplomatic efforts. Large notes that “the famous injunction against ‘fraternization’ with German civilians, for example, proved difficult to enforce when those civilians … went out of their way to welcome the GIs,” and that these relationships went both ways: “one soldier told Stars and Stripes ‘Hell, these people are cleaner and a damned sight friendlier than the French. They’re our kind of people.’”15 There were certain cultural connections: the influence of the culture of German immigrants was keenly felt ­throughout the Midwest and Pennsylvania, and would have remained recognizable to some of the American soldiers. These young men were the first line of contact for many Germans, and these soldiers little resembled the murderous pillagers promised by Nazi propaganda. These soldiers brought cigarettes, chocolate bars, and comic books, which they readily shared with the populace. Stephan explains that “young Germans quickly identified with the unauthoritarian behavior of the victors … German youth were the gate of entry for American popular culture, whose

 Large, Germans To the Front, 19.

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triumphal march into the country has been going on ever since.”16 The German youth were the first line of contact between the Americans and the rest of German society, the primary consumers of American popular culture, the most amenable to the messages contained within those works. Comics, with their cheap disposability, emphasis on easily understood pictures, and bright colors, were a natural point of contact between German audiences and American culture. While the French maintained a certain antagonism toward the defeated Germany, the British view was that “Germany ought to be anchored to the West but only in a nonmilitary way. London saw integration, moreover, not just as means of deterring possible Communist aggression, but also as a safeguard against any independent inclinations on the part of a new West German state.”17 Like the British, the United States became increasingly open to integrating Germany into the West, as President Truman grew wary of the threat of Soviet Russia. The election of Konrad Adenauer as Chancellor of Germany granted the United States a useful (if crafty) ally at the opening of the Cold War. Adenauer was dubbed by his opponents “chancellor of the Allies” due to his distinctly pro-Western leanings.18 Peter Merkl notes that Adenauer emphasized the integration of West Germany into the Western democratic/capitalist community during his tenure, through means ranging from religious, economic, and military.19 His political opponents preferred closer relations with East Germany, hoping to negotiate some agreement of neutrality from the United States and Soviet Union, but Adenauer believed the best future for Germany lay in aligning more closely with the West. This integration was aided by four years of military occupation and the Marshall Plan, but there was a voluntary (if at times grudging) undercurrent of support to these efforts. Merkl contends that Adenauer Era Germany was unique among similarly developed nations in its willingness to engage with the difficult aspects of its recent past, with Adenauer exemplifying a certain desire to make things right.20 The chancellor’s anti-Nazi past (he had been persecuted and imprisoned several times by the Nazis) as well as his deep-rooted  Stephan, “Special Case,” 79.  Stephan, 74. 18  Stephan, 61. 19  Peter H. Merkl, “The German Search for Identity.” In Developments in West German Politics. Ed. Gordon Smith, William E. Paterson, and Peter H. Merkl (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), p. 9. 20  Merkl, “Identity,” 16–17. 16 17

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Catholicism made him acceptable to Western leaders, who might have otherwise left West Germany a pariah state. Adenauer’s approach was to embrace the democratic, international community, in spite of their past efforts to keep Germany on the periphery, and his energies and political capital were focused to that end.

Konrad Adenauer Joins the West For their part, the German people tended to view the United States favorably; Deutsch and Edinger found that “in June 1952 … about three-fifths of Germans interviewed in polls felt that the United States was well disposed toward cooperation with Germany; in 1952, only 29 per cent made the same assumption about England, and only 12 per cent about France.”21 There was a clear willingness to embrace the United States specifically over the Allies at large, and a distrust of the Soviets after the brutal war in the East. Deutsch and Edinger found that “to questions requiring a decision between ‘East’ and ‘West,’ or between cooperation with the United States and cooperation with Russia, more than three-fifths of persons interviewed between 1950 and 1954 answered consistently in favor of cooperation with the United States.”22 Even as the United States began to relax its grip and withdraw its occupying forces (although hundreds of thousands of soldiers remained stationed at the several hundred military installations thereafter), the clear preference for the Americans remained. The German people embraced the West in a number of ways. The process was complicated by the cultural history of Germany, particularly the stratification of culture by class, that differed from American traditions. Stephan writes that “in the United States, unlike Germany, the boundary between high and popular culture had been blurred since the 19th century, making it difficult to define what constituted high culture in America. And since high culture in the United States, like popular culture, is subject to the laws of the marketplace, Americans had a hard time communicating with Germans who were used to a system of state-subsidized culture.”23 This process was more complicated than it appeared: American culture still 21  Karl W.  Deutsch and Lewis J.  Edinger, Germany Rejoins the Powers: Mass Opinion, Interest Groups, and Elites in Contemporary German Foreign Policy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959), 21. 22  Deutsch and Edlinger, 21. 23  Stephan, “Special Case,” 75.

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possessed degrees of separation, but they were more a function of the market and the self-sorting democratic instinct than a grand plan. Lawrence Levine notes of opera and symphonies that “since neither paternalistic royalty nor a paternalistic government was available for the support of symphonic music or any aspect of expressive culture, it is hardly surprising … that the alternative source of paternalistic capitalism sought not only as a means of funds but as a model of organization as well.”24 The efforts in Germany represented a strange sort of subversion of this model, with the United States and other occupying governments determining what culture the Germans would be exposed to regardless of social class, with efforts consisting of what would be termed lowbrow: film, music, and comic books. The efforts of the occupation were not simply about exposing the Germans to American culture, but also framing Americans in a positive light. Levine’s definitions that “cultural categories as highbrow and lowbrow were hardly meant to be neutral descriptive terms; they were openly associated with and designed to preserve, nurture, and extend the cultural history and values of a particular group of people in a historical context” are relevant here, as it informs the efforts to impart American values to the Germans on a national scale.25 In this context, the texts themselves mattered less in their meaning: the more accessible “lowbrow” texts could perform the necessary work of cultural diplomacy and represent American class equality, especially since American “highbrow” culture tended to be constrained to specific spaces.26 These formal efforts of cultural i­ ntegration were broad in scope but did not last past the occupation, fading away with shifts in American domestic politics and Germans choosing to integrate into democracy on their own. Stephan writes that “the official U.S. operation to control Germany’s culture peaked in the early 1950s. A decade later, it became clear that the ‘battle for the hearts and minds’ of West Germans had for the most part been won despite occasional setbacks, and 24  Lawrence W.  Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1988), 132. 25  Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow, 222–223. 26  “This was by no means an absolute monopoly. The symphony hall, opera house, and the museum were never declared off-limits to anyone … these cultural products had to be accepted on the terms proffered by those who controlled the cultural institutions … the taste that now prevailed was that one segment of the social and economic spectrum which convinced itself and the nation at large that its way of seeing, understanding, and appreciating music, theater, and art was the only legitimate one.” Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow, 230–231.

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American cultural policy began to relax its grip.”27 There was a sense of wariness in this period, that Germany might snap back to militant fascism (or worse, communism), but the cultural exchange that was encouraged both official channels and unofficial spaces firmly positioned West Germany as a staunch ally of democratic capitalism. This preference played out in the political policies of the new German Federal Republic under Adenauer’s long reign. Patrick Jackson frames the Adenauer policies under the auspices of Occidentalism and Western civilization. He argues that “Germany—at least, the part of Germany covered by the western zones of occupation—was determined to be essentially part of ‘the West.’ On this basis, Germany could be closely integrated into Europe as one part of ‘Western Civilization’ and form part of an anti-­ Soviet civilizational bloc.”28 The political maneuverings that comprised the winding down of the occupation ended up being less about whether to align with the Soviet Union or the West, but to what degree Germany would integrate with Western Europe and the United States. Jackson notes that “Adenauer, who regularly deployed explicitly Occidentalism language in his public statements … as he had been advocating a policy of closely integrating Germany into ‘Western Civilization’ since immediately after the Second World War.”29 Adenauer was one man, but he charted a cultural course that the rest of West Germany would follow. Konrad Adenauer’s election to the chancellorship possessed little mandate; Konrad Kellen famously recalled that “[Adenauer] was chosen by a majority of one vote—his own.”30 At 73, he was viewed as a placeholder, a figurehead to steady the ship of state before the next generation asserted control, but he remained chancellor for fourteen years, shaping the ­development of modern Germany in crucial ways. His longevity allowed him to bridge key points of German history: his effective work as mayor of Cologne, his long-time opposition to Communism, even his dismissals as mayor of Cologne both during the Nazi regime and by the occupying British positioned him as a staunch defender of the German people.31 His  Stephan, “Special Case,” 73.  Patrick Jackson. Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West (University of Michigan Press, 2006), 157. 29  Jackson, Civilizing, 181. 30  Konrad Kellen, “Adenauer at 90” (Foreign Affairs, Vol. 44, No. 2), 273. 31  Schwarz, Hans-Peter. Konrad Adenauer: A German Politician and Statesman in a Period of War, Revolution and Reconstruction. Vol. 1: From the German Empire to the Federal Republic, 1876–1952 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995), 321–323. 27 28

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commitment to his Catholic faith formed the bulwark under which the Christian Democratic Union was formed, and helped solidify a sense of identity in the turbulent times. Most significant was the development of the idea that Germany was not alone; Jackson remarks: “Adenauer utilized Occidentalism to defuse notions of a separate German path (a Sonderweg).”32 Ideas of either unification with East Germany (nominally as a neutral buffer between Eastern and Western Europe, although that Stalin plausibly had designs on expanding his sphere of influence further west) were quickly rejected, as was the notion that Germany would return to its imperial glory. Adenauer, through foreign and domestic policies, brought Germany into alignment with the West in a variety of crucial aspects.33 This openness to the West is often framed within an economic or political equation, but these aspects inform the culture in crucial ways. This is not to say that Adenauer’s Germany was entirely united; Kurt Schumacher’s Socialist Party sought a more direct and speedier reunification, sometimes accusing Adenauer of intentionally sabotaging negotiations with the Soviets.34 These ideas grew from the same patriotism and nationalism practiced by Adenauer, who was warier of Stalin’s entreaties and saw Germany’s economic future outside of its own borders with Western capitalism, rather than as a buffer between superpowers. These frictions remain today, with continued debates over Germany’s role as de facto leader of the European Union and questions over whether it should focus efforts inward or to the world at large, and at the time kept the door open for American cultural exchange.

 Jackson, Civilizing, 182.  Stephan explains in greater detail that “historians later downplayed the notion of a ‘zero hour’ because it tended to mask the social and cultural continuity of German life that went on more or less intact after 1945 despite the denazification programs. This view overlooks the fact that Germany (albeit against its will) was given the opportunity to fundamentally change direction, to turn away from its brief and unhappy history as an expanding nation-­ state, its disastrous project to ‘go it alone,’ and a social structure that was deeply rooted in the nineteenth century—and what was more important, to move toward integration into Europe as it began coming together, first economically, then politically, and now perhaps culturally as well.” Stephan, Special Case, 75. 34  Large, Germans To the Front, 61. 32 33

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Cultural Diplomacy and the Duck The process of the German Westernization laid bare many of the frictions between class and culture that were deeply ingrained. Stephan notes that “both in the educated middle class and among German intellectuals, deeply rooted prejudices closed minds to cultural expressions from the United States, on the grounds that they were poor copies of European originals or that they compromised the standards of high culture by their commercialism and the fact that they were geared to appeal to the mass market.”35 The cultural elites tended to regard the West with suspicion (those that had remained in the country had, at the very least, been tolerant of Nazi values that opposed the alleged multiculturalism of American democracy), and it is the case that many in the country across the class spectrum were distrustful of a foreign occupation. There was an effort toward locating common ground between the two nations, a process haphazard at times but ultimately found common ground.36 American foreign policy emphasized a mix of free-market capitalism and liberal democracy since the turn of the century, including the Roosevelt administration’s efforts in South America. As with the Good Neighbor policy, the United States sought to emphasize relationships, existing and potential, framing the West at large as a bastion against threats from the outside. The methods in Germany differed from the South American efforts: this case involved a military occupation of a hostile power, and the locals did not have a great deal of agency in determining which messages they were exposed to, but the effort still reflected a deployment of soft power. To this end, the State Department enacted various programs within a cultural diplomacy framework. Henry J. Kellerman, a lawyer who worked for the State Department in the post-war years, authored a monograph entitled Cultural Relations—Instruments of Foreign Policy U.S.  German Exchange—1945–54  as an in-depth account of the roles of the State Department in reforming German society. Kellerman emphasizes the  Stephan, Special Case, 75.  Jackson notes that “even if the American occupying forces wanted to impose their views on German political elites, it is unlikely that policies based on those views would have been socially sustainable in the absence of a common language that occupiers and occupied could speak. That there was such a language—drawing on the commonplace of ‘Western Civilization’—is an important part of the story, providing the context within which particular details about state/market balances and electoral laws could be worked out.” Jackson, Civilizing, 206. 35 36

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cultural and educational programs enacted under the aegis of the State Department, covering the specific individuals and policies that were debated and put into place. He offers a sense of the broader history of departmental operations, explaining that the “Division of Cultural Relations was established in the Department of State in 1938 to initiate the U.S. Government’s new venture in cultural relations … it was also emphasized from the beginning that the program was essentially long-­range, and nonpolitical in purpose. Its basic goal was to promote mutual understanding.”37 This functioned as an extension of the Marshall Plan, emphasizing shared culture of the Americans and Germans, particularly as the Cold War began to take shape. Legislation further secured the role of the State Department at the forefront of cultural diplomacy as well as political diplomacy. Kellerman explains that “by casting the government itself in the role of sponsor, it was clearly suggested that greater encouragement of private initiative as the major government task was required, and this called for strong government leadership. Cultural relations had to become a permanent, securely funded function of the government.”38 The State Department faced a similar moment to the one that arose when they called upon Disney to assist with South America. The European situation was faced with far more forceful messaging from the Soviet Union than the Germans had overtures to South America during the war, and the United States found itself forced to challenge the intensive Soviet propaganda. There was not a direct effort to secure Disney’s involvement within these diplomatic efforts, as there had been for the State Department’s efforts in South America, and Walt Disney himself was more focused on rebuilding his company in the post-war years than doing his patriotic duty. However, Disney’s properties were ready to reenter the war-torn markets of Europe, and the State Department’s larger efforts created an opportunity for those efforts. With the end of the war, the day-to-day struggles of the Walt Disney Company were soon at an end: the markets reopened, its characters more popular than ever, and consumer spending up after years of rationing. Walt Disney turned his attentions toward new animated features, the possibility of a theme park (modeled in part on the 1940 World’s Fair, itself echoing the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition), and the emerging technology of television. The scaled-down productions of the war years, including The Three Caballeros and Saludos Amigos, gave way to large-scale  Kellerman. Cultural Relations, 5.  Kellerman, Cultural Relations, 8.

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animated features of the studio: Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), and Lady and the Tramp (1955) were all released within the first half of the 1950s, and with the exception of Alice, were massive box office successes both domestically and worldwide. Walt Disney parlayed the brand into a global powerhouse, positioned at a moment when America too was reaching its zenith, and the idea that the two should be linked might have appeared almost obvious to some, including powerful Hollywood producer Walter Wanger. Many Hollywood luminaries had served the war effort in various capacities, ranging from creating propaganda to war bond drives, and there was a strong contingent of Hollywood producers within the Office of War Information. Disney’s work for the federal government was well remembered, particularly within the entertainment industry. Walter Wanger, President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences during the war years, argued that: The motion-picture industry has been the nearest thing to Senator Benton’s conception of a Marshall Plan for ideas. 1. We have world-wide acceptance. People everywhere like our subjects; they admire our technique; and they certainly like our stars … 2. No one has ever been able to say that Hollywood did not want talent because it was English, French, Italian, German or Russian … 3. We have large groups of foreign experts who watch our productions in preparation and in production and then check them when completed to see that nothing in them will offend foreign nations … 4. We maintain a huge distributing organization throughout the world, manned by experts who watch the reactions to our films daily, who see how the people respond to the features and to the newsreels. They know what the audiences applaud and what they boo … 5. We have developed personalities who are received with enthusiasm nearly everywhere … 6. We have done a great service in not only selling America but also American products.39

Wanger’s lengthy call to action summarizes the prevailing view of the power of Hollywood at that moment in history: the preeminent source of film entertainment for much of the world, with American exports forming the majority of the films exhibited within a variety of countries, countries that were seen as potential allies in the context of the coming Cold War.

39  Walter Wanger, “Donald Duck and Diplomacy,” The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1950): 444–446.

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Wanger implies that American private industry can perform the same function it did during the war years, circumventing the need for government control by working in conjunction with the overall shared goals of America. He reckons that Hollywood’s marketing and distribution machine, already humming along in the blossoming post-war boom, could succeed where the State Department fell short, and the effort would pay for itself handily. Wanger’s argument is couched in the idea that Hollywood is best left to its own devices, that direct messages would be interpreted by the population as propaganda, and that a softer touch is needed. He concludes with a call to action: “Hollywood will be recognized as the logical capital of the Marshall Plan for ideas—Hollywood, with its array of statesmen and humanitarians like Walt Disney, John Ford, Ethel Barrymore, Bob Hope, Darryl Zanuck, Al Capp, Irving Berlin and Milton Caniff—Donald Duck as World Diplomat!”40 It is unclear whether Wanger’s article ever reached the upper echelons of power, either the Secretary of State or Walt Disney himself, though it fits the larger post-war efforts toward the realignment of German culture. The State Department had already been utilizing Hollywood to suit its ends in occupied Europe. Fay explains that “at the State Department’s request [Nintochka] made its controversial Italian debut during the 1948 national election. In occupied Germany that same year Nintochka was the U.S. government’s antidote to communism and Soviet anti-American propaganda.”41 Wanger’s call to action may simply have reflected what was already occurring, with American diplomats utilizing the power of the American entertainment industry. He cautions against direct government control, pointing out that “the public … is not interested in the messages per se; and if we are to send messages—whose message are we to send? If there is sufficient interest in a controversial subject, or if a book, play, or original story is dramatically presented and appeals to the public, it becomes entertainment; the unsuccessful ones are propaganda.”42 The surviving German movie studios had been effectively frozen out from production work, due to their collaborations with the Nazis, and movie theaters were encouraged to show the films the occupying forces preferred. This process occurred in all aspects of culture; even the most innocuous  Wanger, “Diplomacy,” 452.  Jennifer Fay, Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 85. 42  Wanger, “Donald Duck and Diplomacy,” 448. 40 41

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homegrown entertainments, like the use of Richard Wagner’s symphonies, inspired suspicion of deep-seated loyalty to the previous regimes, like the use of Richard Wagner’s symphonies. The imported media was carefully selected for maximum effect: it was meant to sell the very idea of America, particularly as the Cold War threatened to boil over. Jennifer Fay cites a diplomatic cable that explained: “it has become our task to seek out the points which make the American system appear good, sound, and the best possible of all systems … few things are more controversial than the capitalistic system. It is not official policy to ‘sell’ the capitalistic system under which this country prospered, but … it should be our task to emphasize the good points of capitalism wherever possible.”43 The work of the State Department was quickly expanding from the efforts toward stronger cultural engagement (and counteracting any fascist thought that still persisted), especially as communism was  becoming viewed as  an existential threat. There were concerns that the shattered Germany might fall easily to communism: after all, Italy’s second largest party after the 1948 elections was the Communist Party, and Eastern Europe had fallen entirely under Soviet domination. There was a marked shift in the tone of propaganda efforts as the decade closed, becoming more diffuse as the American entertainment industry sought to reenter the markets of a recovering Germany. In this moment, Disney began to carve footholds out.

Saludos Amigos and Three Caballeros Revisited Walt Disney’s work as part of the South American diplomatic campaign had saved the company from bankruptcy, and positioned him as a more powerful figure in Hollywood. The company’s efforts, born out of equal parts patriotism and business acumen, were easily adapted to the post-war period as popular entertainment. Thus, Disney possessed a surplus of material that was easily exported, even as their overall wartime production lagging behind other studios. There were no films produced in the style of Saludos Amigos or The Three Caballeros (though it almost certainly was considered), because there was no need to tailor films specifically to German (or French, or Italian, or Japanese) audiences: just translate and export the backlog of shorts and features that had been unavailable during the war years. Even then, translation was not strictly necessary for a  Wanger, 87.

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character like Donald Duck or Goofy, who relied on simple slapstick humor, and could be exhibited as a package with whatever else was available. The framework of Disney’s distribution deals is key to the company’s worldwide success, and the approach was put into practice here. Disney creates licensing agreements with local publishers to distribute, translate, even produce original work, with limited corporate oversight.44 Individual publishers are better able to gauge demand, had easier access to infrastructure and local distribution networks, and had a better grasp on what would and would not sell in a given region.45 Even in America, Disney’s characters were licensed to third parties, with Dell Comics handling the characters during their mid-20th century heyday. The mid-century Disney was not a monolithic multimedia conglomerate, but an animation studio with a sideline in merchandise. Disney’s cartoons avoided the use of offensive racial stereotypes that appeared in rival studios’ cartoons, with the exception of Commando Duck and incidental caricatures in a few other cartoons.46 Disney’s inoffensiveness was useful to the American foreign policy, providing a tool of cultural exchange, even if the man himself was uninvolved with policy and decision-­ making. Jennifer Fay explains as “in the first years, its directives were to strip Germans of their war-making capacity by demilitarizing the culture, deindustrializing the economy, and de-Nazifying the population.”47 The cultural aspects were especially well-suited to Disney’s creations; Walter Wanger’s call for Donald Duck to serve as “World Diplomat” echoed existing initiatives.48 Disney could go places that the United States was less able to, and reach audiences in a different fashion that other elements of the Hollywood media apparatus. 44  Carl Barks explains that his comics were published “most always, exactly as I sent them … anything that gets published under the Disney name in a foreign country is accepted as part of the American foreign policy, I imagine, by people who read it…” Willits, Thompson, and Thompson. “The Duck Man.” 45  This is a key issue of Dorfman and Mattelart’s thesis, as they assumed that the content was entirely dictated by Disney, when it was subject to the whims of conservative Chilean publishers. 46  Most of Disney’s war-centric work disappeared into the vault, out of public view; even the Oscar-winning “Der Fuehrer’s Face” quietly disappeared from the public eye for nearly fifty years. 47  Jennifer Fay, Theaters of Occupation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 83. 48  Fay, 452.

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Disney Comics and the Power of Donald Duck The war years had seen Donald Duck emerge as the worldwide face of Disney. Donald’s characteristic anger and discomfort with the modern world had marked him as a sort of everyman for audiences, and though Mickey Mouse would remain the nominal figurehead of the Disney enterprise, Donald made for a more relatable character.49 The Disney comic books, introduced to occupied populations by American G.I.s, were more significant than even the films: they were durable, were re-readable, and could be traded with others in exchange for new stories. This was a moment ripe for something fresh: Konrad Kellen explains “the Germans seemed finished—materially, morally, philosophically and, shame upon shame, culturally. Personal living conditions and standards during the immediate postwar years had defied belief: emaciated children stealing a piece of bread or a lump of coal; without food huddled together through long winters in icy rooms with broken windows.”50 As cities slowly rebuilt infrastructure, comics were there. Easily shared, full of vibrant colors, easily to read, they offered momentary escape from the drudgery of bleak existence, a hopeful image that looked to future possibilities, and was far removed from the Nazi past. Disney’s comics had increased in popularity in America in the same time period, as comic book genres expanded out from the simple superheroes and funny animal stories into science fiction, westerns, horror, romance, and myriad other niche genres, before collapsing inward with Comics Code censorship. Disney’s comics were part “funny animal” genre of the 1930s: short gag strips that typically run for a single page (an outgrowth of newspaper comics), typically bundled together, with multiple characters and jokes, so named for their reliance on animal characters.51 The Disney comics differed from other funny animal comics by featuring longer narratives of adventure and fantasy, with occasionally elements of 49  Neal Gabler argues that “Donald Duck seemed to offer audiences both a vicarious liberation from the conventional behavior and morality to which they had to subscribe to in their own lives and which the Duck clearly transgressed … at a time when the entire world seemed to be roiling in anger and violence.” Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (New York: Knopf, 2006), 202. 50  Kellen, “Adenauer at 90,” 275–276. 51  Michael Barrier’s Funnybooks offers an in-depth history of how these comics evolved, from the earliest collected strips, through the rise of licensed characters like Popeye and the Loony Toons, and the heights of Walt Kelly’s Pogo and Carl Barks’s Donald Duck.

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continuity, mixing in the occasional one-page gag strip. These comics were written by Americans, and intended to appeal to American audiences, but the elements of adventure meant they would appeal to audiences outside of the United States in a way that Superman or Captain America (with all of their patriotic/nationalistic imagery) could not. Disney comics contained considerably less violent content than the comic book genre at large, marking them as less objectionable compared to the alternatives; even the mildest superhero stories still entailed some element of violence, something that became more pronounced as Marvel came to dominate the marketplace during the 1960s.52 What violence occurred in Disney’s comics held little weight: it was slapstick at best, not rough-and-­ tumble, and thus less likely to run afoul of censorship efforts.53 Dell Comics had targeted younger audiences with its comics, and this lack of objectionable material made them readily adaptable into a variety of markets regardless of local censorship efforts. Disney’s benign reputation allowed them easy entry into a German publishing industry gutted by the ravages of war. The Disney name held a certain cachet of nostalgia for German audiences, as Snow White was among the last non-German films exhibited there, with Joseph Goebbels famously praising the film lavishly. The Disney name on the comics ensured a market share and a degree of continuity: the authorship, a joint effort between Fuchs and Barks by the time it reached German newsstands, was cleanly credited to the man responsible for the beloved cartoons. The publication of the comics coincided with the ascendency of Konrad Adenauer to the Chancellorship of Germany. Fay explains the crucial shift: “the initial effort was simply to ensure that Nazism, and its attendant militarization and nationalism, would not return to the country … the German population seemed eager to follow along with the program, where the first years reeducation emphasized America’s 52  A moral panic over the violent and gory images in comic books, culminating a Senate investigation, resulted in an effort to restrict the content of comics under the publisher-­ supported Comics Code Authority in 1954. Dell, which produced much of the Disney comics in America, ignored the Comics Code Authority, and did not suffer any consequences, though they were eventually undone by the resurgent superhero comics of the 1960s and 1970s. Bradford Wright, Comic Book Nation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 53  Indeed, Dell Comics simply ignored the approval framework of the Comics Code, opting to distribute their comics without any delay. Whether owing to the cultural cachet of Disney or the lack of objectionable content, the Comics Code made no effort to intervene.

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melting pot democracy as the ethical contrast to Nazism, beginning in 1947 the contest was now between American democratic capitalism and Soviet communism.”54 The shift, from broad-based anti-racism and de-­ Nazification to a more stridently anti-Communist focus, fit nicely into Carl Barks’s worldview, reflecting his personal leanings, though he had no knowledge that his work was being reproduced outside of America. Furthermore, crucially, this shift in propaganda coincided with the creation of Barks’s (and thus Disney’s) most potent symbol of American capitalism: Uncle Scrooge McDuck. These comics were being published concurrently with Adenauer’s efforts to further Westernize and modernize Germany, entrenching free market capitalism and cooperation as a bulwark against Communism.55 Konrad Kellen goes so far as to explain “[Adenauer] was devoted to free enterprise without being an imperialist. He was an autocrat, yet willing to establish and submit to some controls over the executive branch of the government. He was a believer in European unity without believing in German hegemony, or a socialized Europe.”56 In this setting, Scrooge’s positive portrayal as a capitalist figure who succeeded through hard work and his own labor would have made potent symbol within the resurgent German Republic. Furthermore, Carl Barks’s depictions of the adventures of Scrooge were exciting if generally episodic: expeditions to recover lost treasure (“The Golden Helmet”), wilderness adventures couched in history (“Seven Cities of Cibola”), complicated defenses of Scrooge’s vault (“Only A Poor Old Man”).57 A key aspect of the appeal seems to be Barks’s couching the exotic locales within reality, drawn from the pages of National Geographic, offering a window to the wider world (in particular, his South America-set stories are well-regarded for their sweeping vistas). An unlikely popular figure, Scrooge McDuck nevertheless proved incredibly popular despite being an irascible old man. Barks’s stories formed the raw materials, but regional variations and editorial decisions influenced the translations of Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. Local editors decided on which stories to translate and how to  Fay, Theaters, 83.  Jeffery Herf. Divided Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 268–271. 56  Kellen, “Adenauer At 90,” 278. 57  While the status quo of Scrooge’s wealth was maintained with each story, there were hints of history and character, typically short flashbacks and references to prior adventures. These were eventually crafted into Don Rosa’s extensive and meticulously researched The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. 54 55

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translate the text, often reaching different end points. Italy, for instance, developed its own voice very early: the popularity of Donald Duck comics outstripped the existing American material, forcing publishers to bring in local talent to satiate demand, including Guido Martina and Romano Scarpa in Italy. From there, the Italian artists began to change the characters in small ways, particularly in terms of more overt violence.58 Germany was more resistant to the import of American comics; linguist Susan Bernofsky writes that “in the years following World War II, American influence in the newly formed Federal Republic was strong, but German cultural institutions were hesitant to sanction one U.S. import: the comic book. A law banning comics was proposed, and some American comics were eventually burned by school officials.”59 German comics faced a similar moral crisis as American comics did, though it was one more concerned with culture than violence, especially with regard to children.60 Despite this, the German audiences continued to read comics imported from aboard, and there were few efforts to develop local talent and styles to fill demand.61 Germany did not produce any prodigious creators on the level of Carl Barks or Guido Martina (or Belgium’s Hergé, Willy Vandersteen, and Peyo or France’s Albert Uderzo) within the German comics industry. German readers seemed quite content with the imported comics, owing to one person: the “rock star” translator of German comics, Dr. Erika Fuchs.

The Good Duck Translator Johanna Theodolinde Erika Petri was born 7 December 1906 in Rostock, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, growing up in Belgard, Pomerania. She was the first girl admitted to the Belgard Boy’s Gymnasium (a grammar school) 58  The Italian comics were more violent than the American originals, more on the level of American superhero comics of the 1960s than Dell’s originals, culminating with Donald Duck becoming the Batman-esque superhero Paperinik. 59  Susan Bernofsky, “Why Donald Duck Is the Jerry Lewis of Germany” (The Wall Street Journal, 23 May 2009). 60  There may also have been elements of opposition to Disney itself. Europeans in general have had occasional issues with Disney, most visible during the opening of Disneyland Paris. John Wills traces this to the idea that “Europeans gradually came to fear the Disneyfication of home and the rewriting of folk stories … Disneyfication seemed much the same as Cocacolanization or McDonaldization: the selling of the American Dream in a can, burger box, or caricature made little practical difference to European consumers.” Wills, Disney Culture, 59. 61  Horst, Sentimentalitäten, 60.

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at 14, completing her studies five years later.62 From there, she studied art history at several institutions across Europe, completing her degree in 1932 with a dissertation on 18th century German sculptor Johann Michael Feuchtmayer, graduating summa cum laude. Shortly after completing her studies, she married industrial engineer Günter Fuchs, moved to Schwarzenbach an der Saale in Bavaria, had two sons, Thomas and Nikolaus, largely settling into a domestic role, occasionally assisting her husband with technical writing. The destruction of World War II largely avoided Schwarzenbach an der Saale, though the slow recovery of the German economy created some difficulties for the family. As with Carl Barks, Erika Fuchs found her calling later in life. The lean post-war years prompted Fuchs to seek employment, and she became a translator, owing to her studies in London, initially finding work translating American magazines like Reader’s Digest after hearing a call for applications over the radio.63 In 1951, she would be hired as the chief editor for the newly created Ehapa Publishing House (a division of Gutenberghus, which would eventually be renamed Egmont), responsible specifically for Micky Maus and there began to make a permanent mark on German culture. These translations went far beyond the expectations of children’s comics; just as Carl Barks put a great deal of artistic effort into his own art and writing, so too did Fuchs produce work that was beyond what was strictly necessary. Just as Barks took the simple character of Donald Duck and created a family, adventures, and a whole world around him, Fuchs deepened the characters through her writing, refining the work that Carl Barks had done. Bernofsky notes that “her interpretations of the comic books often quote (and misquote) from the great classics of German literature, sometimes even inserting political subtexts into the duck tales. Dr. Fuchs both thickens and deepens Mr. Barks’s often sparse dialogues, and the hilariousness of the result may explain why Donald Duck remains the most popular children’s comic in Germany to this day.”64 If Barks’s great work was making Donald Duck relatable and human (at least as much as a duck can be), Fuchs’s great work was making Donald Duck German. The linguistic influence of Erika Fuchs went beyond character names and into the very language of sound itself. Onomatopoeia is a crucial element of style in American comics: the “biffs” and “pows” lend weight and  Bohn, Das Erika Fuchs Buch, 13.  Horst, Sentimentalitäten, 29–32. 64  Bernofsky, “Jerry Lewis.” 62 63

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movement to the action and underline the slapstick comedy. Fuchs developed the use of onomatopoeia further in her translations; her sounds effects were more than just straightforward translations (something like “buzz buzz” in English becomes “summ summ” in German), but often involved adding words where none had existed previously. There is an aesthetic angle to this: poetry read in a typical English pattern might not be recognizable or enjoyable to a non-English speaker, even if the words themselves were carefully translated. A minor touch like rendering the sound effects into aural German allowed the Ducks to more easily penetrate the subconscious minds of their readers. Platthaus elaborates that “Fuchs developed the idea of supplementing the onomatopoeia typical of comics by giving thought processes legible form with ‘think, think,’ or a glance of the eye with ‘blink, blink.’ These examples set precedents … Erika Fuchs’s admirers introduced the term ‘Erikativ’ to denote this new grammatical form (punning on ‘genitive,’ ‘dative,’ etc.).”65 This attention to detail solidified the illusion that these comics were German, with even the tertiary sound effects fitting the rules of German grammar. This is one of Fuchs’s most significant contributions, influencing language in direct fashion that few others (let alone comic book writers) can claim. Erika Fuchs’s contributions went beyond inventing sound effects; she worked to include references to German writers and literature, owing perhaps to her advanced education. Eckhard Kuhn-Osius notes in one story that, after a shower, “[Donald Duck] exults, ‘How glorious nature shines for me! How cleanly all creatures radiate! Oh, it is a pleasure to be alive!’ Donald begins with Johan Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem ‘Manifest’, continues with an original statement, and ends with a quotation from the aristocratic humanist Ulrich von Hutten.”66 Fuchs created humor in the dichotomy between high and low culture, while legitimizing the comics in the eyes of the German public in a period of democratic cultural reform. An offhand reference to German poetry might read as an in-joke by a bored and overqualified translator, but here it functioned as part of the appeal.67 These changes meant that the comics more readily appealed to 65   Andreas Platthaus, “Comic Translators and Translations” (Deutschesprachige Comics, 2011). 66  Eckhard Kuhn-Osius, “Before They Were ‘Art’: (West) German Proto-Comics and Comics,” Novel Perspectives on German-Language Comics Studies: History, Pedagogy, Theory. Ed. Lynn M. Kutsch. Lexington Books, 2016. 67  Edwin Gentzler points out this is not a new phenomenon; “most translators…want to introduce a new idea or aesthetic form to culture. The revolutionary wat leader of the

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the adult population, and positioned Germany as the center of the nascent global Donald Duck fandom. Erika Fuchs recodes the texts to suit a German audience in ways that function both consciously and unconsciously upon readers. Carl Barks provides the art and story, but Fuchs gives everything power and context, translating the original script while also changing the meaning and placing the content within a cultural context that was otherwise missing in the writing. Ernst Horst finds that “Erika Fuchs is not about translation, but re-creation. This was something different.”68 She did not recast characters (Scrooge remains a miser, the nephews are mischievous), but made minor changes to their personalities and tone of the comics, making the events and dialogue more relatable to Germans. She started during the early Adenauer Era when German cultural history was viewed with a degree of suspicion, and anything that echoed nationalism was verboten, a dark reminder to the degree in which Nazism had infected all levels of culture and society. Fuchs’s work was subversive, recoding American media to incorporate references to German culture, using these comics to celebrate German cultural history in a space that was accessible to the youth and generally beyond the concern of political authorities. As per Gentzler, “a translated text enriches a reader in countless ways, to the point that it is absorbed into that person’s very being. Inasmuch, translation is one of the most revolutionary acts: bringing across an idea or form from another culture and offering the possibility to change people’s lives.”69 Her Donald Duck comics were introducing a history of art and culture to young ­audiences who otherwise had no inkling of Germany’s rich cultural history. This serves as a counterpoint to approaches to scholarship like Dorfman and Mattelart that regard American popular culture as propaganda for an end goal of cultural imperialism; Fuchs succeeded in taking control of the message and her audience followed and drew their own connections in time. Americas were not translating Locke, Rousseau, or Montaigne because they wanted scholars at Harvard to review favorably their translations in learned journals; no, they wanted to introduce new ideas regarding democratic systems and human rights into their culture that were not free and were still governed by European powers.” Edwin Gentzler, Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-Translation Studies (London, Routledge, 2017), 2. 68  Horst specifically uses the term “Neuschöpfung,” which roughly translates to “new creation.” In Horst’s estimation, these translations build entirely new meanings out of the text. Horst, Sentimentalitäten, 61. 69  Gentzler, Translation and Rewriting, 230.

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Erika Fuchs and Translation Studies The efforts of Erika Fuchs are best understood within the functionalist theory of translation. Susan Bassnett explains that: “a translator is free to reconfigure a text in accordance with the norms of that text type in the target language … translators may make any adjustments to the text that they deem inappropriate, even if this involves deleting or adding information to ensure that the message is clear.”70 As an editor, Fuchs had the advantage of limited oversight on her work; the Walt Disney Company was across the Atlantic and had limited interest in quality control over the fidelity of the translation work. Her concerns were in appealing to her German audience over faithfulness to Barks’s original words. Bassnett continues: “highlighting the purpose of a text means that the emphasis is on what that text does in the target culture, so attention is shifted away from the source … a functionalist approach is firmly inclined towards domestication. What counts is how successfully a text can function in the target culture.”71 Fuchs succeeds in making the Ducks German, not only in language, but in naming and in culture itself. The first step was to rename characters: Uncle Scrooge became Onkel Dagobert, while Huey, Dewey, and Louie became Tick, Trick, and Track, and even Gyro Gearloose became Daniel Düsentrieb; Donald Duck, for his part, retained his name.72 She shifts the text in a number of ways, often small; though the stories themselves retain the basic framework, but there are shifts in details and interactions sometimes as small as a single word added. Bassnett concludes: “what happens in translation is that a text is reconfigured in ­accordance with the demands of the target culture, and there are occasions when that reconfiguration conceals or distorts the source text or culture so as to meet the expectations of the target culture.”73 By the time the process is complete, Donald Duck and his relations have become Germanized; the young readers of these comics would accept them as they would any other children’s book, with little awareness that it was the  Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 2014), 84.  Bassnett, Translation Studies, 84–85. 72  Andreas Platthaus explains that “she invented her own German names for many figures, (Dagobert Duck for Scrooge McDuck, Panzerknacker—i.e. safecracker for Beagle Boys, Daniel Düsentrieb—i.e. jet engine—for Gyro Gearloose, frequently departed entirely from the originals, and included associations and puns that were not to be found in the American texts.” Platthaus, “Comic Translators and Translations.” 73  Platthaus, 86. 70 71

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product of a different country. This process of translation and reinterpretation occurred across Europe, with the Ducks taking on different cultural roles in different countries, though the focus here will be on Germany. An additional consideration is to treat the work as adaptation, utilizing the basic framework put forth by Linda Hutcheon and Siobahn O’Flynn.74 While the comics are adapted within the same medium, with Fuchs utilizing Barks’s original, the translation adds something new. Hutcheon and O’Flynn posit that “adapting can be a process of appropriation, of taking possession of another’s story, and filtering it, in a sense, through one’s own sensibility, interests, and talents. Therefore, adapters are first interpreters and then creators.”75 Fuchs filters the original stories through her interests, inflecting the stories with cultural and literary references inspired by her personal history. Her education and scholarly training in the capitals of Europe created awareness of a wider world, knowledge that she brought to bear in these comics. Hutcheon and O’Flynn argue that “we engage in time and space, within a particular society and a general culture. The contexts of creation and reception are material, public, and economic as much as they are cultural, personal, and aesthetic. This explains why, even in today’s globalized world, major shifts in the story’s context can change radically how the transposed story is interpreted, ideologically and literally.”76 Fuchs’s work foresees the modern transnational media environment as it would develop in the decades to come. While the medium (comics) does not change, the message does, albeit not always in immediately obvious ways. Just as Barks’s work spoke to the spaces and spirit of America, Fuchs’s engaged with the history and culture of Germany. Hugo Vandal-Sirois and Georges Bastin offer further framing of a theory of adaptation: “most professional translators face both cultural and linguistic obstacles in their work, and it would be erroneous to state that those who oppose the domesticating approach stick to word-for-word translations: an adaptation might well be an intrinsic part of a successful translation.”77 Fuchs was certainly keenly aware of who would read the stories, shifting language 74  Linda Hutcheon and Siobahn O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation (London: Routledge, 2013), 16. 75  Hutcheon and O’Flynn, A Theory, 18. 76  Hutcheon and O’Flynn, 28. 77  Hugo Vandal-Sirois and Georges L. Bastin, “Adaptation and Appropriation: Is There A Limit?,” in Translation, Adaptation and Transformation, ed. Lawrence Raw (London: Continuum, 2012), 23.

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and references to appeal to the German readership. The core meaning is maintained: she was fluent in English and perfectly capable of reading Barks’s original text, and worked to “improve” it, appealing to a wider audience than a straightforward word-for-word translation. Julie Sanders defines adaptation as an “attempt to make text ‘relevant’ or easily comprehensible to new audiences and readerships via the processes of proximation and updating. This might, for example, be aimed at engaging with youth audiences or, through translation in the broadest sense, linguistic and interpretative, in global intercultural contexts.”78 The narratives developed by Fuchs are changed in subtle, if crucial, ways, aimed at appealing to the German reader specifically.79 These choices served a crucial role in the reception of the comics helping the characters seem more familiar, more German, while keeping the basic language of the original. Young readers would be better able to see themselves in the characters, while adults might be a little more accepting of foreign comics populating their newsstands.80 The translation/adaptation work of Erika Fuchs works to recreate the comics for her new audience. Vandal-Sirois and Bastin note “successful adaptations allow (or even force) the target readers to discover the text in a way that suits its aim, ensures an optimal reception experience, or simply promotes the understanding of a specific message. Adaptations take place on the cultural or pragmatic levels at least as much as on the linguistic or textual level.”81 Earlier, I made the point that sound effects translated into German would reach the reader at a subconscious level (the onomatopoeic “Erikativ”). This same process occurs on a larger scale within the comic itself, to the same end result: the Germanization of the Ducks,  Julie Sanders, Appropriation and Adaptation, 23.  Azenha and Moreira outline the translation process for children’s literature specifically, which often tends more toward adaptation than functional translation. João Azenha and Marcelo Moreira. “Translation and Rewriting: Don’t Translators ‘Adapt’ When They ‘Translate’?” In Translation, Adaptation and Transformation, ed. Laurence Raw (London: Continuum, 2012). 67. 80  “If we view adaptation and translation as transformative acts involving individuals as well as the communities they inhabit…then it follow that any definition of either term would be perpetually subject to renegotiation. They are not untranslatable or unadaptable … but their meanings are fluid, subject to change in cross-cultural as well as monolingual contexts.” Laurence Raw, “Aligning Adaptation Studies with Translation Studies,” The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, Edited by Thomas Leitch (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2017), 502. 81  Vandal-Sirois and Bastin, “Adaptation and Appropriation,” 26. 78 79

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characterizing them not as foreign others, but as figures whom German readers can reflexively identify with. The American sounds and characteristics are subtly shifted to appeal to a German audience, a further result of the Fuchs Effect. The messages being relayed are dependent on the adapter, suiting their choices regardless of the original text. The Fuchs Effect is the point at which an adaptation is effectively appropriated by and adapted to a new cultural space. An educated German might identify Donald Duck as an American creation, but nevertheless recognizes the inherent Germanness of Fuchs’s creation on an intrinsic, subconscious level. Fuchs’s Ducks become emblematic of her German culture, and served as a space to maintain elements of German culture absent the Barks version. Moreover, she possessed a unique degree of agency, since the Disney enterprise lacked any corporate offices in Europe at the time, leaving the editorial decisions purely in the hands of Egmont Publishing. Azenha and Moreira explain that “the translator is now one of the links in the extensive chain of agents and acquires the role of an administrator, a manager of variables; moreover, the notion of authorship is diluted as there will be various agents taking part in the process … the agenda of the subject-­ translator shifts away from the source text (retrospective view), to the conditions of reception (prospective view).”82 The work is inexorably changed as it passes through many pairs of hands: the same process that created Donald Duck, that had adapted him to the pages of comics, occurred in the translation process. In the case of Fuchs (as well as Barks and Rosa), she was the last stop in the creative process, beholden to the original text, to editorial objectives, to economic necessity. There is a deeper question in adaptation and translation: that of faithfulness. Azenha and Moreira locate the answer between two concepts: “content and ideas, but also to the textual surface.”83 Translation prompts a loyalty to both, that every attempt must be made to reflect both the underlying concepts of the text as well as the written text itself. If we read Fuchs’s translations within a formal framework, her work is a failure. While it captures the general thrust of the adventures, it includes elements and references that not only were not in the source text  that also serve to change its meaning. If we approach the work as adaptation, Azenha and Moreira offer that “adapting, on the other hand, is to distance oneself  Azenha and Moreira, “Translation and Rewriting,” 62.  Azenha and Moreira, 62.

82 83

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from one of these dimensions or both: the semantics of content and ideas (for instance, when the story is transferred to another setting, when names or other topical elements are modified), and the textual surface (as when additions, suppressions, and reformulations are made).”84 This process allows the translations to function as adaptations: Fuchs retains some elements of content, but readily changes others. Azenha and Moreira continue: “each of these moves is subsequently given a direction: toward a source text, in the case of translation, or, in the case of adaptation, away from the source text so as to intuit other purposes to serve the target text, the conditions of its reception, the projected audience, or the medium into which the story will be transferred.”85 Fuchs can be understood to tilt the emphasis away from Barks’s original text, itself tilted away from the construction of the animated Donald Duck in small but crucial ways, to suit the requirements of the printed medium, instead tilting toward a new audience (and her own interests to an extent). The text is adjusted to appeal to the needs of German readers, to be rendered more familiar to the ones who will actually purchase the comics. Azenha and Moreira conclude that “translating and adapting are not such mutually exclusive categories, but complementary moments, inherent to the rewriting process, the process of producing sense in language through translation.”86 Fuchs’s translations are carefully considered and written: her efforts are on par with Don Rosa’s own adaptations of Carl Barks’s stories decades later, operating with far greater complexity than might be expected. Ilaria Meloni offers an in-depth examination of the content of the comics, echoing functionalist theory in her examination of Fuchs’s translations. She contends “Erika Fuchs’s concept of translation can be understood from her job as a German translator of the magazine. She draws on a long tradition of translation from Cicero to Umberto Eco … Fuchs considers the translation as an evolving communication exchange, with the translated work as an original product of the target culture.”87 In Meloni’s examination, Fuchs clearly comprehends how the translation is proceeding; there is no accident in how the words are transcribed, but a high degree of intent and a philosophy aimed toward appealing to her  Azenha and Moreira, 62.  Azenha and Moreira, 62. 86  Azenha and Moreira, 77. 87  Ilaria Meloni, Erika Fuchs´ Übertragung der Comicserie Micky Maus (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2013), 40. 84 85

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German readers. Meloni divides Fuchs’s translations into several different categories: word-for-word translation (“Wort-für-Wort-Übersetzung”), faithful translation (“Treue Übersetzung”), creative translation (“Kreative Übersetzung”), partly creative translation (“Teilkreative Übersetzung”), almost-free translation (“Fast freie Übersetzung”), and free translation (“Freie Übersetzung”).88 Laying it out this way, the translation work is understood on a spectrum, with Fuchs in ultimate control of the text. The translations tend toward the middle of the spectrum (the faithful and creative), and it reflects that the comic was put forth as a German work, not as an American production. Meloni observes that “the relationships of meaning and the pragmatic function of the dialogue could be quite different in the stories. Some of the stories could be translated literally, thanks to the illustrations, while others had to be rewritten.”89 Fuchs’s translations had to suit the art more than the text as written by Carl Barks, but still needed to maintain a degree of continuity. Meloni continues: “the pictures, which are part of the overall meaning of this text, represent the communication situation (design, gesture, mimic, and physical movement) and allow Erika Fuchs a certain degree of agency with translation.”90 There are more than just the spoken words to be considered within translation, with the overarching circumstances of a story playing into the effort (Meloni uses the term “Kommunikationssituation” or “communication situation”).91 The visual nature of the comics necessarily complicates the translation work, adding additional layers that a translator must remain cognizant of.92 Barks’s art in particular is richer and deeper than many of his contemporaries (hence his status as “The Good Duck Artist”) and Fuchs worked to pair her words to his fine art.

 Meloni, Übertragung, 44–45.  Meloni, 47. 90  Meloni, 47. 91  Meloni, 51. 92  Meloni finds that “some phrases, which are very frequent in the German books, belong to a group of translations in which the meaning of the original dialogues is partially changed. They are not strongly idiomatic terms, with a low visual impact, or terms that occur in a speech bubble as part of a larger sentence. In this case, they replace a fixed sentence of the original.” Meloni, Übertragung, 51. 88 89

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The Fuchs Effect Illustrated These translations could change relationships and characters in subtle ways. Barks’s Donald Duck is happy-go-lucky, always happy to help, despite suffering various indignities and (minor) injuries. His Uncle Scrooge takes advantage of him, but he is always willing to help the old man, out of familial loyalty and old-fashioned capitalism (he’s usually offered some modest sum for his assistance). Fuchs’s follows the same basic characterization, but has at times a harder edge; her Donald is more disillusioned and more direct in his complaints. To American audiences, this was as a minor editorial choice of little consequence, but it is important to understand what Fuchs was undertaking: the transformation of Donald’s “national character” into terms that render him a “non-foreign” figure for German audiences. He ceases to be an American duck, and becomes a German duck, even as his world contains American elements; this is of course the same reason behind translating “Duckburg” to “Entenhausen.”93 The German adaptation of non-German popular culture is a key illustration of the Fuchs Effect, though it occurs in other contexts beyond just comics. The Fuchs Effect can be witnessed in nearly every story to one degree or another, fitting Meloni’s framework on the “creative” or “free” side of the translation spectrum. As a case study, “Only A Poor Old Man”, published in America as Uncle Scrooge #1 (Four Color #386, April 1952). Carl Barks’s story was the first of many to feature Scrooge’s attempts to protect his fortune from the nefarious Beagle Boys, culminating in his fortune being temporarily buried at the bottom of a lake, causing him and his nephews no end of stress. The story concludes with Donald exclaiming “you may not know it, Uncle Scrooge, but your billions are a pain in the neck! You’re only a poor old man!”94 This outburst lends itself to the story’s title, a key moment in Scrooge’s characterization, and a play on words (that the richest duck in the world is poor if he must spend his free time worrying about his fortune). Fuchs follows the same script (though renamed the Beagle Boys “die Panzerknacker,” literally translated as “the Tank Breakers,” though it can also be understood as “the Safe-Breakers”), the same events leading to the same moment, with Donald storming off 93  Specifically, “enten” means “duck,” and “haus” means “house,” with “hausen” being a further pun, as a reference to a number German towns called “Hausen,” most located in Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg. 94  Carl Barks, Carl Barks Library Vol. 12 (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2012), 31.

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all the same. What differs is his dialogue: “Du kapierst es vielleicht nie, Onkel Dagobert, aber dein vieles Geld ist ein Alptraum fur andere Menshcen. Ich bedaure dich. Du bist ein armer reicher Mann.”95 Donald explains that Scrooge will “never get it” (“Du kapierst es vielleicht nie, Onkel Dagobert”), and that his money is a “problem for other men” (“dein vieles Geld ist ein Alptraum fur andere Menshcen”). Fuchs’s Donald is more combative and direct, taking issue at having to rescue his uncle’s fortune. He concludes explaining “I am sorry for you” (“Ich bedaure dich.”) and calls him “a poor rich man” (“Du bist ein armer reicher Mann”), notably harsher from Barks’s original text, and more specifically calling out Scrooge for his attitudes toward wealth. The changes were generally subtle like this: a worldlier Donald, a more selfish Scrooge, seemingly minor changes that nevertheless better appealed to the sensibilities of the German audience. Erika Fuchs’s translations held deeper significance still. Fuchs was an adult during World War II; moreover, she was an intellectual, well-­ acquainted with the cosmopolitan capitals of Europe. Her comics became a space at times to contextualize the history, for an audience who had not lived through the darkest years of Germany in history. “The Golden Helmet” (Walt Disney Four Color #408, July 1952) was a Barks adventure that found Donald and his nephews pursuing a lost artifact (the titular helmet), that seemed to possess anyone that lays hands on it, though that may simply be the efforts of a shady lawyer.96 Barks treats it as a fairly straightforward Duck adventure, couched in a certain degree of history and geography, the helmet more of a MacGuffin for the characters to fight over. Fuchs frames it differently; Bernofsky explains that in the translation, “each person who comes into contact with the helmet gets a ‘cold glitter’ in his eyes, infected by the ‘bacteria of power,’ and soon declares his intention to ‘seize power’ and exert his ‘claim to rule.’ Dr. Fuchs uses language that in German (‘die Macht ergreifen’; ‘Herrscheranspruch’) strongly recalls standard phrases used to describe Hitler’s ascent to power.”97 Fuchs invests these stories with a punch that the Barks original lacks, echoing Germany’s own recent history, speaking truth to power. This was hardly incidental; Bernofsky mentions in the same story that “the helmet itself, 95  Erika Fuchs, “Dagobert Duck—Der ‘arme alte Mann’” (Micky Maus Sonderheft 10, 1954), 34. 96  Carl Barks, Carl Barks Library Vol. 11 (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2012), 117. 97  Bernofsky, “Jerry Lewis.”

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which in German Donald describes as a masterpiece of ‘Teutonic goldsmithery,’ is anything but nationalistic in English: ‘Boys, isn’t this helmet a beauty?’ is all he says.”98 Fuchs finds a root of evil lurking at the base of this story, an opportunity to remind her young readers how easy it is to give into power. Significantly, while it is the adults that fall most easily under the spell of the helmet, even young Dewey feels wistful as the helmet sinks beneath the waves. Barks plotted and drew the story, but Fuchs finds a moral at the heart of the story, one that holds a lot more weight for a German audience than an American one, and imparts a lesson to her readership. Dr. Erika Fuchs retired from editing in 1988 after thirty-seven years of work, at the age of 81. While she did not have the active retirement that Carl Barks or Don Rosa would, Fuchs remained a fixture with the fandom and German culture at large. In summer 1994, a long-retired Carl Barks was invited by his fans to take a grand tour of Europe. Barks was 93 years old, nearly three decades retired from his duties as writer and artist of various Donald Duck comics for Disney, but accepted an offer to fly him to Europe to meet the fans who had made his works into an international phenomenon. By most accounts, he was unprepared for the massive outpouring of affection from his fans as he made his way from country to country, visiting conventions, art exhibits, and cultural sites. Within this tour, he visited Munich, where he met his counterpart, the 87-year-old Erika Fuchs. It was a pleasant visit, coffee followed by dinner, but for German fans it was an incredible moment, the coming together of the two great forces of Disney comics, marking a pivotal meeting of the minds. It has become a mythic moment: Barks would not return to Germany before his death in 2000, and Fuchs herself died in 2005, lending the meeting a great significance within the minds of the fans. For many, it was an echo of the work that brought Donald Duck to Germany, combining art and language to create a perfect version of the character able to cross transnational boundaries. There are no monuments (yet) to Carl Barks in America, but there is a small memorial plate that identifies Fuchs’s home in Schwarzenbach, commissioned by fans of her work upon her death in 2005. These fans, referring to themselves as the Donaldists, understood that her work has significant effects upon modern Germany during its formative, post-war years. Erika Fuchs was instrumental in the success of Donald Duck in  Bernofsky, “Jerry Lewis.”

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Germany, shepherding the character through the language barrier into the fertile open fields of post-war German society. Fuchs’s work raises a further question: at what point does Donald cease to be a purely American figure and become the hybrid? To his young readers, Donald would have seemed as German as they were, his character and stories echoing their own experiences. Even adults might be hard-pressed to read the comics as American propaganda, considering the pains that Fuchs took to reference German cultural history. The work that she undertook had an impact as deep and wide-ranging as the various directives of the military and the State Department. Within this space, the comics ceased to be productions of Walt Disney, becoming something more German, and it speaks to why Disney has staying power: not because it is a marching force of homogeneity, but because it is adaptable, and allows for meaning to be bent and shifted in order to better reflect the needs of its audience. Carl Barks is a niche figure in America: there are certainly fans of his comics, and the readership handily outdid superhero comics during the 1950s, but he was not a recognizable figure in the way someone like Stan Lee is. The American fan communities that existed were limited at best, subcultures within a larger comics readership. Erika Fuchs built something with her translations: she made Donald Duck German in the minds of the readers, and created a community that places her as highly (if not higher) than Carl Barks. In her hands, the comics became something more than their originals, gaining new meaning for a new audience. Fuchs’s work speaks to the potential of translations. The consumption of American culture with regard to Disney comics differs from the manner they are consumed domestically: Disney comics remain among the best-selling worldwide, while they are niche products in the American market, where present-day Uncle Scrooge releases average 300th place in the sales rankings. The success of Disney is not built on homogeneity; rather, the creative properties are adapted by translators, writers, artists, and consumers to take on new meanings, and the properties have grown beyond their American origins. The Donald Duck that exists in American comics is not quite the same as the one in foreign translations. Carl Barks provides the original content: the pictures and story, based on character designs from Walt Disney Studios. Erika Fuchs, with her translations, popularized in Germany as much as Barks’s original work, reoriented the character for an entirely unintended (at least by Barks) audience. Post-war Germany was a unique space in history, where a decade of nationalistic culture was carefully overwritten by occupying forces, and

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Disney’s entry into the market offers a sense of the power of adaptability and translation. Fuchs’s translations capture the impact of this cultural transformation, while playing a role within the process itself. The stories read by German youths as translated by Erika Fuchs in the mid-century were not quite the same as those of their American peers. The stories written by Carl Barks were not the same as those that came out of Disney Animation. The stories written by Don Rosa were not the same as those written by Barks. Each of the creators owed a debt to the work that came before, each built on something that had been done, and each contributed an interpretation of the source material that differed from others. Sanders states that “appropriation frequently affects a more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain.”99 The basic design of the characters remains the same, and the stories follow basic frameworks across translations, but the deeper work changes, both in the act of adaptation itself, and in the readership. Adenauer’s Germany saw the economy shifting to the free market, and greater alignment with the West (particularly America), and these comics helped bridge the gap.100 The context in which stories are read determines their meaning: Fuchs found a path between high and low culture, created comics that attained incredible success in the midst of the Adenauer Era.

References Azenha, João and Marcelo Moreira. “Translation and Rewriting: Don’t Translators ‘Adapt’ When They ‘Translate’?” Translation, Adaptation and Transformation. Ed. Laurence Raw. London: Continuum, 2012: 61–80. Barks, Carl. The Carl Barks Library, Vol. 12. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2012. Barrier, Michael. Funny Books: The Improbable Glories of the Best American Comic Books. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. Bassnett, Susan. Translation Studies: Fourth Edition. London: Routledge, 2014. Bernofsky, Susan. “Why Donald Duck Is the Jerry Lewis of Germany.” The Wall Street Journal, 23 May 2009. Bohn, Klaus. Das Erika-Fuchs-Buch: Disneys deutsche Übersetzerin von Donald Duck und Micky Maus: Ein modernes Mosaik [trans.: The Erika Fuchs Book: Disney’s German Translator of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, A Modern Mosaic), Lüneburg, Germany: Dreidreizehn, 1996.

 Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, 26.  Kellen, “Adenauer,” 277.

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Deutsch, Karl W. and Lewis J. Edinger. Germany Rejoins the Powers: Mass Opinion, Interest Groups, and Elites in Contemporary German Foreign Policy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959. Fay, Jennifer. Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Fehrenbach, Heide. “Persistent myths of Americanization: German Reconstruction and the Renationalization of Postwar Cinema, 1945–1965.” Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan, Edited by Heide Fehrenbach and Uta G. Poiger. New York: Berghahn, 2000. 81–108. Fuchs, Erika. “Dagobert Duck—Der ‘arme alte Mann’.” Micky Maus Sonderheft 10, 1954a. 3–34. Fuchs, Erika. “Donald Duck und der goldene Helm.” Micky Maus Sonderheft 18, 1954b. 3–34. Gabler, Neal. Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination. New York: Knopf, 2006. Gentzler, Edwin. Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-Translation Studies. London: Routledge, 2017. Herf, Jeffery. Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in Two Germanies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Horst, Ernst. Nur keine Sentimentalitäten: Wie Dr. Erika Fuchs Entenhausen nach Deutschland. Munich: Karl Blessing Verlag, 2010. Hutcheon, Linda and Siobahn O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge, 2013. Jackson, Patrick. Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Directive to Commander-in-Chief of United States Forces of Occupation Regarding the Military Government of Germany: JCS 1067. 10 May 1945. http://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/ga3-­450426.pdf Kellen, Konrad. “Adenauer at 90.” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 44, No. 2, Jan. 1966. 275–290. Kellerman, Henry J. Cultural Relations as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy: The Educational Exchange Program Between the United States and Germany1945–54. Department of State Publication, 1978. Kuhn-Osius, Eckhard. “Before They Were ‘Art’: (West) German Proto-Comics and Comics.” Novel Perspectives on German-Language Comics Studies: History, Pedagogy, Theory. Ed. Lynn M. Kutsch. Lexington Books, 2016. Large, David Clay. Germans To the Front: West German Rearmament in the Adenauer Era. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Harvard University Press, 1988.

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Meloni, Ilaria. Erika Fuchs’ Übertragung der Comicserie Micky Maus. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2013. Merkl, Peter H. “The German Search for Identity.” Developments in West German Politics. Edited by Gordon Smith, William E. Paterson, and Peter H. Merkl. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989, pp. 1–21. von Moltke, Johannes. No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Platthaus, Andreas. “‘Translations Have to Be Better than the Originals!’—Comic Translators and Translations.” Deutschesprachige Comics. 2011. Raw, Laurence. “Aligning Adaptation Studies with Translation Studies.” The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. Edited by Thomas Leitch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, 494–508. Schwarz, Hans-Peter. Konrad Adenauer: A German Politician and Statesman in a Period of War, Revolution and Reconstruction. Vol. 1: From the German Empire to the Federal Republic, 1876–1952. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995. Stephan, Alexander. “A Special German Case of Cultural Americanization.” The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945. New York: Berghahn Books, 2006: 69–88. Tent, James. Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American-­ Occupied Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Tunstall, Jeremy. The Media Are American. New  York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Vandal-Sirois, Hugo and Georges L.  Bastin. “Adaptation and Appropriation: Is There A Limit?” Translation, Adaptation and Transformation. Ed. Laurence Raw. London: Continuum, 2012: 21–41. Wanger, Walter. “Donald Duck and Diplomacy.” The Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1950), pp. 443–452. Willits, Malcolm, Don Thompson, and Maggie Thompson. “The Duck Man.” The Duckburg Times, No. 10/11. 27 March 1981. Wills, John. Disney Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2017. Wright, Bradford. Comic Book Nation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001.

CHAPTER 6

“Guardians of the Lost Library”: Developments of the Duck Fan Communities

Walt Disney’s sudden death in December 1966 marked the end of a cultural era. The company was shifting away from feature animation, buoyed by the success of Disneyland in California and television productions like Davy Crockett, with Walt Disney’s attention bouncing between the latest trends.1 It was a quirk of timing that Carl Barks had retired a few months earlier (he had turned 65 and was thus eligible for a Social Security pension), but the larger market forces that would sink Disney comics in America for a generation were already taking their toll. The decline of Disney comics in America was precipitous and unexpected. Dell Comics had once been the best-selling comics in America.2 An alternate version of this chapter focusing on fans and publishing in the 1980s will be published as “Always Another Rainbow: Fans, Comics Publishing, and the Return of Donald Duck.” The Other 1980s. Ed. Brian Cremins and Brannon Costello. Louisiana State University Press, 2021. 1  Though the Disney parks are largely outside the scope of this project, Sabrina Mittermeier’s A Cultural History of the Disneyland Theme Parks: Middle Class Kingdoms (Intellect Books, 2021) provides an excellent exploration of the park, with keen insights into transnational nature of the Disney enterprise and their conversation with class in various nations. 2  John Jackson Miller, “Uncle Scrooge—Only The Best-Seller of the 1960s.” ComicChron, 10 February 2012, https://comichron.com/blog/2012/02/10/uncle-scrooge-only-bestseller-of-1960s/.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. C. Bryan, Creation, Translation, and Adaptation in Donald Duck Comics, Palgrave Fan Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73636-1_6

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They handily filled the void left by the closing of EC Comics and other smaller publishers under the Comics Code. Donald Duck was their flagship character, dominating the market even in the face of superheroes at the start of the 1960s. The success, however, proved unsustainable. According to figures available through ComicChron, in 1960, the Duck comics published by Dell had sales figures averaging just over 2,000,000 copies a month across two titles (Uncle Scrooge and Walt Disney Comics and Stories), as shown on Table 6.1. By 1969, it had fallen to 272,000 per month for Walt Disney Comics and Stories, though data for Uncle Scrooge is as yet unavailable for that year.3 There is not a singular cause for this: Dell’s distribution was harmed by outside forces, increasing competition from Marvel and DC found increasing success with superheroes, and an ill-fated price increase on the comics from 10 to 15 cents.4 Western Table 6.1  Dell and Western Era Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck Sales Figures (based on Comi Chron’s data) Year

Uncle Scrooge average sales

Uncle Scrooge ranking

Walt Disney Comics and Stories average sales

WDCS ranking

Publisher

1960 1961 1962 1963

1,040,543 853,928 No Data 299,155

1 1 – 9

1,004,901 No Data No Data 446,000

2 – – 3

1964

336,380

7

456,425

3

1965

330,925

16

410,209

10

1966

297,516

22

346,250

14

1967

278,901

26

310,665

18

1968

280,901

26

No Data

–

1969

243,702

23

272,672

15

Dell Dell No Data Gold Key Gold Key Gold Key Gold Key Gold Key Gold Key Gold Key

 “Comic Sales Figures for 1960,” ComicChron, accessed 25 August 2020, http://comichron.com/yearlycomicssales/postaldata/1960.html. 4  Michael Barrier goes into further detail on the business decisions, but the larger shifts in audience tastes to superheroes meant that the various business decisions simply accelerated the inevitable. Barrier, Funnybooks, 334–338. 3

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Publishing, the long-time studio responsible for their creation, took over publishing the Disney comics using their Gold Key imprint.5 but was unable to maintain the sales, and was reduced to sporadic new material and reprints by the mid-1970s.6 That rise of superheroes, which had displaced Disney from the top of the charts, was accelerated by existing demographic trends, with Baby Boomer readers moving on to superheroes, increasingly looking to the more nuanced, relatable heroes like Spider-Man. As significant as the retirement of Carl Barks and death of Walt Disney were, the heyday of Dell Comics had passed, and the comics reading public was moving on. In a moment when Marvel and DC were developing new styles of storytelling and building upon the shared universes of their characters, Western Publishing was winding down production. Whereas Marvel and DC made celebrities out of their writers and artists, Western continued policies that kept their employees from receiving proper credit for their efforts. While the Adam West Batman television series and an animated Spider-Man brought new fans to the comics, Disney had effectively ceased production of the animated shorts that had made Donald a star, with the studio facing extended doldrums after the death of Walt Disney in 1965. The financial troubles of the Walt Disney Company in the period seem largely unrelated to the issues faced by Western, beyond each organization failing to adapt to a changing market, but the lack of fresh content, of new fans entering the community, meant that such a community would only shrink with time (Table 6.1). Western possessed a backlog of material; the last new Carl Barks script was published in 1973, a full seven years after his retirement, and reprints of the old stories (including authors other than Barks) continued under the Gold Key imprint until 1984, though the stories appear to have been arbitrarily chosen.7 The haphazard choices of stories were of little concern to the publisher, echoing a decades-old idea that reprinting old stories was fine, since kids quickly outgrew the comics, and any tertiary readers (servicemen, for instance) would be content with whatever cheap material was made available. There was no real collectors’ market for comic books at 5  Mark Evanier, “What Was the Relationship Between Dell Comics and Gold Key Comics?” News from ME, https://www.newsfromme.com/iaq/iaq07/. 6  Wright, 189. 7  Donald Ault, “Introduction,” Carl Barks Conversations (Jackson: MS, University Press of Mississippi, 2003), xxx.

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the time: the first San Diego Comic-Con was held in 1970, and the development of the direct market for comics in the mid-1970s saw the development of the comic book store, allowing for a more active collector community. While the mainstream Marvel and DC titles tended to dominate the collector community, there was a sizeable segment that found interest in the old Disney comics, which Carl Barks as a focal point.

Comics Collecting Communities Comics fan communities first organized in the 1950s, with readers exchanging letters and back issues at local meet-ups or through the postal service. There were certainly devoted comics readers since the days of Winsor McCay, but a convergence of events—dedicated comics conventions (Jerry Bails and Shel Dorf held the first comics-focused convention in Detroit in 1965), cheap printing techniques that allowed for the creation of fanzines (as well as underground comix), the rise of the comic book store (Gary Arlington founded the San Francisco Comic Book Company in 1968), institutional support of fan clubs (Stan Lee’s development of “The Merry Marching Marvel Society,” among his other efforts to build a fandom)—saw the development of assorted communities of comic book readers. While superheroes were ascendant throughout the 1960s (often dubbed “The Silver Age”), there existed other strains of comics fans: followers of the old EC Comics, readers of the countercultural underground comix, and Disney comics collectors as well. The experiences of fans in this period are difficult to research: fan interactions occurred on a very local or even personal level at fan clubs or correspondence, and records of these events are limited at best. Comic books themselves occasionally provide a forum for readers with a letters column, but this was not present in the various Disney comics of the period. Instead, the fan spaces that evolved were fanzines. Predating many of the major fanzines was another example of fan production, high school history teacher Jack L.  Chalker’s An Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck, published in 1974. The book purports to be a retelling of Uncle Scrooge’s personal history, delivered in a quasi-­ scholarly format (the footnotes do not actually reference anything, for instance), focusing on the stories of Carl Barks. Chalker divides his sources between “canonical,” “noncanonical Barks,” and “works by others” in the

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weight they are given within text.8 He outlines the canonical as Barksian works published in Uncle Scrooge magazine, and posits these as “obviously truth and the only major source used in this study.”9 This effort to develop a canon from the sprawling publication history of Uncle Scrooge represents an early, concerted effort to bring order to Disney’s comic universe, and one common to many fandoms. Chalker’s book is meant to be generally accessible, relying more on broad strokes than specific references, and running quite short (just over 40 pages for the biography proper). The print run was limited to 2000 copies, published by The Mirage Press, a small fantasy publisher, and it functions much like a period fan fiction, albeit text heavy due to the absence of images, echoing similar efforts in the same period of other nascent fandoms. Modern fan fiction began with Star Trek (1966–1969), as a handful of viewers sought to expand on a relatively limited media canon (79 episodes across three years) in creating a more fully realized world. The success of Star Wars (1977) served to further solidify the development of a market not only for secondary texts, but the development of dedicated communities of fans that not only kept a property alive (as had occurred with Star Trek), but to expand the shared universe at large. The mock seriousness of the Scrooge McDuck biography echoes the similar tone of the European Donaldists (as the European and particularly German fans refer to themselves), treating the work of Barks as essentially factual. Chalker includes several statements like: “this writer has attempted, using secondary sources such as the bits, snatches, crumbs, and occasional retellings of Mr. Barks together with a professional historian’s knowledge of the times in which McDuck player out such a large part of his life, to produce a short informal biography, which a minimum of footnoting and a maximum of factual and interpolative material from the Sacred Writings.”10 There is a scholarly degree of research inherent to the work, a hallmark of much of Duck comics fan writing on both sides of the Atlantic. The work even introduces some fan theories to explain the continuity issues, including the apparent lack of aging among the Ducks. Chalker posits “clearly Scrooge, Donald, and the kids don’t look any older at this writing than they did in the late 1940’s. The fortunate circumstance 8  Jack Chalker, The Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck (Baltimore: Mirage Press, 1974), xi–xii. 9  Chalker, Informal Biography, viii. 10  Chalker, vii.

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has allowed Scrooge to, who as always kept himself in the peak of physical condition, to be actively in charge of his empire well past his hundredth birthday.”11 The book represents a proto-version of Don Rosa’s future output (particularly The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, which will be discussed here in Chap. 7), an effort to make sense out of the extensive Barks catalogue and to locate the history of the characters within. The limited print run speaks to the small scale of fandom in the period, as well as the litigiousness of Disney on the American market; How to Read Donald Duck faced issues being published in the United States, and was delayed considerably longer in a similar timeframe.12 The fanzine (a portmanteau of “fan” and “magazine,” occasionally simplified to “zine”) has an extensive history as a companion piece to fiction, music, and popular culture at large. Broadly speaking, the term refers to the unauthorized production related to preexisting media, comprising original work produced by fans of the property.13 These efforts varied wildly in quality, from photocopied four-page pamphlets to glossy, magazine-­quality publications. The genre arose during the mid-twentieth century as science fiction fan publications, particularly those that contained reviews or discussions of other stories, and grew popular with the development of cheap and easy printing technology. In a period before social media, these spaces allowed fans to interact with one another and even occasionally with creators, writing letters that were traditionally printed with complete mailing addresses to encourage readers to write to each other on their own. In the pre-digital era, the fanzine was a space that allowed for the communication of related ephemera: author interviews and correspondence, unpublished stories, and research notes. These spaces allowed for the exchange of information that might otherwise go unseen, as well as serving as a social space for the fandom at large. Spencer explains “since their beginnings … zines have been traded amongst writers … this  Chalker, 19–20.  Chalker’s book includes a foreword to state “Walt Disney productions, the copyright holders on all illustrative matter that should accompany the text, have vigorously denied any permission to use any pictorial representation of any copyrighted Disney character in the preparation of this book, although their legal staff has very grudgingly admitted our right to publish the text, as its form is an established literary genre in and of itself.” Chalker. 13  Amy Spencer defines zines as “non-commercial, small-circulation publications which are produced and distributed by their creators. Generally, the zine writer is not a professional writer, nor are they being paid for their work.” Amy Spencer, DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture (Marion Boyars, 2005), 15. 11 12

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enables both parties involved to avoid commercial dealings and idealistically reverts the process back to the time when exchange of goods was more common than monetary exchange.”14 Historically, fanzines have existed for nearly any interest subculture, with the comics fanzines discussed here as a subculture within a subculture.15 Science fiction fanzines remain the dominant genre, though often allowed in elements of other fandoms; Starling No. 33 (February 1976), for instance, included an extended article on the portrayal of Christmas in the hands of Carl Barks.16 The Disney readership lacked a key component that had aided the development of the Silver Age comics fandom: the letters column. Still, fans found each other at early comic book conventions or fanzine letters, located Carl Barks in 1962 (significant in that his name never appeared in the comics during his career proper), and built social connections. Comics fanzines, particularly those emphasizing less mainstream (read: non-­ superhero) titles grew in this time, concurrent with the underground comix subculture, both having limited distribution channels.17 The Duck comics fandom was sufficient to create at least two ongoing fanzines, as well as occasional one-offs, as early as 1970. The Barks Collector appears to be the most consistently published Duck comics-focused fanzine, beginning publication in 1976, continuing until 1989 with at least 42 issues.18 It represents a fairly typical fanzine of the period (a mix of correspondence, articles, and price guides), though outlasted many contemporaries. Published under the auspices of Bear Mountain Enterprises and Oak Tree Press, it emphasized the collecting and sales aspects of the old Disney comics, emphasizing the work of Carl Barks in particular. The earliest issues consist larger of lists of comics for trade and sale, though the format developed with time to emphasize a  Spencer, DIY, 15.  It is difficult to pinpoint the first comics fanzine; Don and Maggie Thompson’s Comic Art was first published in spring 1961 and appears to be the earliest surviving example of the subgenre, though it is likely there are earlier, yet undiscovered comics fanzines. 16  Richard West, “The Great American Comics Part VIII: Christmas With Carl Barks,” Starling no. 33, February 1976, 28–37. 17  Comix and fanzines were generally distributed through direct mailings, though some independent bookstores (particularly on the West Coast) stocked quantities of various books. 18  The numbering is a little unclear; early issues were published as “Vol. 1,” though it is unclear if that was a reference to year (there was a “Vol. 3” as well, but I have been unable to locate any “Vol. 2” releases). By 1977, the magazines were numbered numerically, with No. 6 being the earliest I have located. The final release was No. 42, released in either 1989 or 1990, depending on the source. 14 15

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wider array of content, including new interviews. The Barks Collector appears to have been the first effort to create a public catalog of Carl Barks’s publications, a key precursor the I.N.D.U.C.K.S. project.19 There had been prior individual efforts, but this marked a collective effort by the fans to create a full reckoning of Carl Barks’s work. One major point of significance is that The Barks Collector featured correspondence from Barks, including occasionally new sketches and public statements. One statement credited to Barks is key: “I certainly hate the distortion of the ducks’ characters that is being done in the new Italian comics.”20 Barks was vocal about his dislike for the other versions of his characters when they ran against his characterization (as the more violent Italian stories did), while still recognizing that he lacked ownership over the Ducks.21 Barks continues: “it is a repeat of what happened in Chili (sic) years ago when the leftists got control of the Disney licenses and put out comic books that showed Uncle Scrooge robbing the poor and oppressing the proletariat. The blame for Uncle Scrooge’s vile capitalist practices were laid at my door.”22 That Barks was at least tangentially aware of Dorfman and Mattelart’s arguments (though misread their conclusions), and broadly engages with them, speaks to his interactions with the fandom and his characters; Barks had retired years before How to Read Donald Duck was written (and it was not officially published in the United States until 1990), but he retained a reputation as a sort of elder statesman for the Duck comics fandom. This would have been a minor coup for The Barks Collector, and a useful illustration of the intersections of scholarship and fandom that occur regularly in fanzines. In 1982, the fanzine held a survey to determine the most popular Carl Barks stories and art; the response rate was limited (49 respondents for a circulation in the hundreds), but does give a sense of what the fan community looked like circa 1982. There is a degree of elitism, even in the nominally friendly survey, that tends to appear in comics collecting more generally. Ken Bausert, who conducted the survey, emphasizes the specific focus of the Barks Collector: “unfortunately, some people’s choices for  The Barks Collector No. 15, 12–18.  Barks, Barks Collector No. 15, 4. 21  Donald Ault, “‘Those Things That Came Along in the twentieth Century and Became Obsolete’: Carl Barks on the Past, Present, and Future of Comic Books,” In Carl Barks Conversations, edited by Donald Ault (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 207. 22  Barks, Barks Collector No. 15, 4. 19 20

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covers and stories were not by Barks—this is where a good check list comes in handy. Luckily, I was able to inform several fans of their occasional mistakes in time for them to send ‘revised’ surveys.”23 This attitude reflects the divisions that existed within the fandom, both on the collector/non-­ collector axis and in terms of the “Barks fans” and the more general “Disney comics fans.” This effort to create a line of demarcation recalls Bourdieu’s statement that “it should not be thought that the relationship of distinction (which may or may not imply the conscious intention of distinguishing oneself from common people) is only an incidental component of aesthetic disposition.”24 Bausert is quite insistent in drawing lines with the texts; while the content of the fanzine favored Barks, the culling of survey results reflects an effort to assign elite status to the work of Barks (the survey asked not for favorite Disney comics stories or covers, but to rank Barks’s contributions). The breakdown of the votes fits with most of the modern conventional wisdom on the best Barks stories: “A Christmas for Shacktown” tops the list, followed by “Lost in the Andes” and “The Golden Helmet,” each regarded as significant stories within the Barks canon by modern fans.25 Notable is the demographic information: the average age of respondents was 25.5, with the oldest being 47.26 The readership of the comics themselves skewed younger (many of them likely started with the late 1950s and early 1960s), but the age of respondents speaks to a market for new content. Notably, only roughly half the responses were from American readers; nearly a third came from Sweden, and a further tenth from West Germany.27 That an American-published, English-language fanzine had such an extensive reach speaks to the interactions occurring between the global fandoms in the pre-digital 1980s, and the strength and reach of the European fan communities.

Pre-Digital Fan Communications One example of these transnational interactions appears in Barks Collector No. 20  (February 1982). German reader Klaus Spillman contributed a lengthy article “Mrs. Erika Fuchs and the Duckburg Citizens,” on  Ken Bausert, “The First International ‘Carl Barks Survey’,” Barks Collector No. 21, 23.  Pierre Bourdieu, “Distinction & the Aristocracy of Culture,” In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, Ed. By John Storey (London: Routledge, 2008), 505–506. 25  Bausert, Barks Collector No. 21, 29. 26  Bausert, 30. 27  Bausert, 30. 23 24

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translation work of Erika Fuchs. It offers a basic outline of her work, noting the liberties taken with the translation (which Spillman refers to as “free translation,” though in a slightly different meaning than Meloni).28 Spillman explains that “slang terms and catch-words are often used in comic books to keep the bubbles short and small and the story floating. Mrs. Fuchs made the best out of it by developing new dialogs and, sometimes, quoting sections from books of Goethe or Schiller which often created much more amusement than the original text.”29 Spillman is indicative reception of these translations within the German readership, as discussed previously, but is notable that the account was written while Fuchs was still actively translating; he notes “today, due to her age, Mrs. Fuchs is working a bit more slowly, but she still translates every Duck story and all the MICKY MAUS serials (whether it’s a Duck story or not).”30 That this account was published in an American fanzine indicates that transnational flows were moving both directions across the Atlantic even without a widespread, publicly available internet. European fans might be interested to read the latest Carl Barks interview, or news of limited-edition products from American publishers. American fans, members of a relatively small and tight-knit community, were exposed to the fact that their hobby was a worldwide phenomenon, and there is a tinge of exoticism in articles like Spillman’s that emphasized the unique cultures of the European community. The publication of articles related to European fans was a common theme throughout the fanzine’s run. The Barks Collector No. 19 (October 1981) featured Herman ten Kate’s “Carl Barks in the Netherlands,” which discusses the introduction of Donald Duck to the Netherlands, covering the early editorial and sales history of the comics, as well as an effort to chart which Barks stories had been published.31 The article serves as a primer for development of the Dutch readership, including some information about Dutch fanzines Inkt and Aloha.32 Interestingly, ten Kate also

28  Klaus Spillman, “Mrs. Erika Fuchs and the Duckburg Citizens,” The Barks Collector No. 20 (January 1982), 10. 29  Spillman, “Mrs. Erika Fuchs and the Duckburg Citizens,” 10. 30  Spillman, 11. 31  Herman ten Kate speaks to the issues with a few of these unpublished stories, noting that “this last story, Treasure of Marco Polo, will probably never be published in the Dutch ‘Donald Duck’ because of its doubtful political background.” Herman ten Kate, “Barks in the Netherlands,” The Barks Collector No. 19 (October 1981), 7. 32  ten Kate, “Barks in the Netherlands,” 7.

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mentions Daan Jippes, an artist that would have a small role in the early stages of Gladstone Comics as a cover artist.33 The Barks Collector No. 11 (January 1979) includes Horst Schröder’s “Views on the European Disneys,” which discusses the publication of Disney comics in Italy, although in much broader terms than Kate’s account. Schröder was born in Germany, but had moved to Sweden after completing his PhD in literary studies, focusing on Science Fiction; he discusses the basic history of the Italian publications, focusing heavily on their relationship to the publications in other countries. As a point of comparison, he complains that “Gutenberghus [as Egmont was called at the time] has frozen content at an extremely childish level, keen on avoiding any sort of offense and any resemblance to Scandinavian social reality, no matter what the cost … artists are firmly locked into the imitative mold: late Barks for the Ducks.”34 His contention is that the Italians are at least doing something different, mentioning several newly created characters, as well as Donald’s occasional transformation into the vengeful, Batman-­ esque Paperinik. Schröder discusses the more violent edge of the Italian stories, and surmises that the content results from the state of Italian politics, arguing that “Italy also has done the only sensible thing with the Duck: moved him right into the present with kidnappings, women’s lib, multinationals, etc., although on sadly reactionary terms … a conservative mirror image of the violent economic and class struggles which beset Italy.”35 Without careening into pernicious stereotyping (Schröder’s views are his own), this demonstrates Donald’s adaptability. The character is able to be repurposed by European authors for specific audiences, the Fuchs Effect playing out in a variety of settings. These are the same sentiments, albeit simplified, that Dorfman and Mattelart framed in How to Read Donald Duck, which had not yet been published officially in America by that point. Fans recognized the adaptational nature of the comics, and were aware that they were exposed to cultures and ideas that they had not encountered in day-to-day circumstances in the pre-digital era, with spaces like The Barks Collector creating connections to the intellectual and cultural discussions occurring throughout a global fandom. The encounters between the American and European fan communities were more direct still. The Barks Collector No. 17 (April 1981)  features  ten Kate, “Barks in the Netherlands,” 5.  Horst Schröder, “Views on European Disneys,” In The Barks Collector No. 11 (1979), 9. 35  Schröder, “Views on European Disneys,” 10. 33 34

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Hans von Storch’s “In Donaldismo Veritas,” an extensive explanation of the tongue-in-cheek Donaldist philosophy that forms a crucial aspect of the European fan community. It parallels the faux-seriousness of the fan community at large; for instance, “the absorption of Donaldism by the brains and hearts of the young was, however, heavily impeded, especially in Germany. In the German Democratic Republic the circulation of Donaldistic reports on Duckburg and the Duck Family was prevented from the outset, and in the FR Germany mass media and the pillar of public morals, the German housewife, was mobilized.”36 The discussion of the comics is framed in academic terms, the stories framed as “reports” on “scientific Donaldism,” accounting for both satiric responses to the comics themselves (he mentions a book that posits the Duck comics as a retelling of the New Testament) as well as more serious endeavors (Dorfman and Mattelart are once more briefly mentioned here).37 It goes on to account for the various fanzines on both sides of the Atlantic, locating the first Duck-centric fanzine as Norwegian Pal Jensen’s Donaldisten in 1973, as well as the long-running Der Hamburger Donaldist, which is still published biannually as of July 2020. Significantly, von Storch recounts the creation of D.O.N.A.L.D. (Deutche Organisation Nichtkommerzieller Anhanger Des Lauteren Donaldismus), which he translates as the “German Organization of Non-Commercial Supporters of Pure Donaldism.”38 This group reflects a more organized fan community than what existed in America, and one entirely unmoored from any connection to Disney itself.39 von Storch frames the organization as egalitarian and democratic, citing among the rules that “the membership is open to everybody who can truthfully declare to wholly submit to the Society’s statutes, to guarantee the Bill of Donaldistic Rights and to be irreproachable in the Donaldistic sense. It is, however, not required to be in full possession of one’s mental or physical powers or one’s civil rights.”40 This offers a hint of the dry German humor that pervades D.O.N.A.L.D., which further  Klaus von Storch, “In Donaldismo Veritas,” (The Barks Collector No. 17), 7.  von Storch, “In Donaldismo Veritas,” 9. 38  von Storch, 10. 39  There certainly were a number of fan clubs and similar organizations in America that operated with authorization from the media producers, notably the Merry Marvel Marching Society, but rarely persisted for long. More recently, Robert Iger’s creation of D23 under the auspices of the Walt Disney Company reflects a more top-down, rather than grassroots, effort, though organizations in that vein tend to be broadly portrayed as independent. 40  von Storch, 10. 36 37

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include various political factions (the Scroogeists are right wing, the Daisyists are feminists, the Barkists are akin to Orthodox religion) and the D.A.D.A. (“Documentation of Anti-Donaldistic Aggressions”) offers a sense of the group’s philosophy. There is a degree of scholarship inherent to the group, which von Storch outlines in his sardonic fashion, with a discussion of the various disciplines of Donaldism,41 though he glosses over his role as the first president of the organization, accusing the various “Presidentes” of being “flops.”42 Of course, the title “Presidente” itself is a pun on the German word for “duck” (“ente”). It is a small glimpse into the organization for American fan audience, illustrating the deeper interactions that would become more commonplace with the arrival of the internet. The divergence between the development of the European fan community and the American fan community is evident within the fanzines. Dana and Frank Gabbard mention in an editorial that “[the Europeans] have clubs, fanzines, good relations with the people who do Disney comics, even a Duck Convention! We have two zines, no club, and troubles galore with ol’ Western Printing and Lithograph.”43 The American community remained largely disconnected, more scattered collectors than any concerted effort, while the European efforts (anchored in Hamburg by the Donaldists) had staying power, with consistently published fanzines and annual conventions.44 Efforts were made to develop a more solid community, but rarely possessed a great deal of longevity. The Society of the First Dime was founded at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s as a campus group devoted to the collecting of Barks ephemera, though appears to have lasted only a few years.45

41  While leading D.O.N.A.L.D., Hans von Storch was completing his PhD, graduating in 1985; he has since become a leading climate scientist, though still retains an interest in the Ducks. 42  von Storch, 12. 43  Dana and Frank Gabbard, “Whither Barksdom: An Editorial,” The Duckburg Times 10/11, 26. 44  The Donaldists hold an annual convention (“Kongresse der D.O.N.A.L.D.”), along with smaller regional meetings; the 2020 meeting, originally scheduled to be held in March before being postponed into 2021, is the 43rd iteration of the meeting. 45  Danish collector Søren Marsner has attempted to revive the group as recently as 2017 as a website (http://www.carlbarkscomicbookart.dk), with original founder John Bullis passing on a piece of art that Barks had drawn for the group, though it appears that the group was essentially defunct for nearly fifty years.

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There were attempts to develop annual conventions akin to the Donaldists, but they do not appear to have lasted. The Disney fandom in the early 1980s was robust enough to support at least two conventions. The first was Barks Con ‘82, held in Norfolk, Virginia in June 1982, run by The Barks Collector editor John Nichols. It appears to have been collector and dealer-centric: the ad mentions that “admission is $10 for all events Saturday and Sunday. Tables are $30 for Saturday or $40 for both Saturday and Sunday … there will be Barks art, comics, slide shows, and special presentations galore.”46 The cost of the tables (nominally for the dealers to demonstrate their wares) is relatively low for a convention, especially since the tables typically include a free pass or two for the vendor, and reflects an emphasis on the sale and trade of comics, much like many other early comics conventions. There are no guests of honor (Carl Barks had only recently entered the convention circuit, and even then, primarily on the West Coast) or specific panels mentioned in the ads, “a truly national convention, with Barks fans from all around the country gathering to talk Ducks!”47 Information on attendance is a bit sparse, but it did inspire second convention with Barks Con West, held in Oakland, California in March 1983. There is no evidence of further Barks-centric conventions; it is likely that these were singular events that simply did not have the support, financial or otherwise, and faded away like many other period conventions. There were certainly meet-ups in other comics conventions and similar events, but the fandom in America simply was not large enough to support even a relatively small-scale annual convention. While the earliest fanzines made use of official art (The Duckburg Times liberally used traced drawings and even full photocopied pages), the practice ceased as the distribution increased. Old Carl Barks drawings were still included (mostly Calgary Eye-Opener cartoons and contemporary sketches), but anything that might fall under Disney’s copyright was studiously avoided. There is no evidence of any legal action actually occurring against either of the fanzines, and it is plausible that Disney was largely unaware of the publications, that topped out at a few hundred subscribers on average, but the sense of fear was real enough for the fans. European fans appeared to have less concern with copyright. Klaus Spillman notes that “in contrast to the American Disney zines, European Disney fans are

 John Nichols, The Barks Collector 20 (February 1982), 3.  John Nichols, “Carl Barks Convention,” The Barks Collector No. 19 (October 1981), 8.

46 47

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allowed to illustrate their mags with all the pics they want.”48 European copyright law favors the creator (in this case Carl Barks), and the German fanzines are further eye of Disney’s legal department. The art that appears in publications like Der Donaldist is generally limited (the only reprints of previous material are occasional pages that had been cut in the adaptation), though often feature Donald, Scrooge, and other Disney characters on the covers, contrasting the American covers having to resort to silhouettes as with The Duckburg Times #10/11  (January 1978). The Barks Collector was heavily focused on the collecting aspects of the fandom, and even The Duckburg Times has some emphasis on the collecting side of things, Der Donaldist also took a different approach than the American publications. While Der Donaldist did not impugn collectors outright, the relationship between the fanzine and the collectors is somewhat more complicated; Klaus Spillman notes “the interests of the Donaldists are too multifariously to be called off. But they mainly concentrate on inquiring into the lives of the Duck Family, especially with the life of Donald Duck … the native country of Disney comics is the United States, but the heart of Duckburg is to be found in Europe.”49 There are collectors of the comics in Germany and elsewhere, but they are not as directly involved in the fannish activities. The Donaldists work to explore the world of the comics, and expand the canon of the Duck comics in small, personal ways. There is an emphasis answering questions about the world: the weight of a solid gold meteor, the mapping of Duckburg, the fleshing out of the interior lives of the Ducks. Even Carl Barks is viewed as less of an infallible author; though well-regarded for his overall output, the level of adoration for him is somewhat less than for the characters he created, capturing the influence of Erika Fuchs and other more local creators in shaping the global fandom. Closer to the German approach was the other significant American fanzine The Duckburg Times, the longest-running of the Duck comics-focused fanzines, published intermittently from 1977 to 1992.50 Paul Anderson started the fanzine when he was a teenager, though it went on a several  Klaus Spillman, “Barks in Germany & Scandinavia,” The Duckburg Times 10/11, 10.  Spillman, 10. 50  There is some disagreement with which of the fanzines counts as the “longest-running,” even among the fans themselves. The Duckburg Times was published over a longer period, but was inconsistent in its schedule, whereas The Barks Collector was a much more consistent publications, producing more issues over a shorter period. This is further complicated by occasional double-issues, which generally (but not always) were given two numbers in sequence. 48 49

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years’ hiatus after issue 8. In contrast to The Barks Collector, The Duckburg Times emphasized more creative pursuits, favoring short articles and traced drawings, developing into more professionalized publication when Frank and Dana Gabbard revived the fanzine as editors. It catered to an audience beyond the collectors, toward a readership better understood as fans in the modern conception, with a greater emphasis on the features about the stories and even non-Barks elements of Disney comics. Though Carl Barks appears often, attention is given to even obscure creators and works, including a piece on Super Goof (one of Western Publishing’s late period publications, a parody of the ascendant superhero comics) that lamented the loss of the character with the arrival of Gladstone Comics. The content still fit within the amateur productions published in The Barks Collector and other fanzines, though the overall quality was consistent in both publications. The editors were on generally friendly terms, with The Barks Collector even printing advertisements for The Duckburg Times in the early 1980s, and there was certainly some audience crossover in the relatively small market for Duck-centric fan productions in that period. The Duckburg Times represents an alternative fan performance, more in line with the first wave of pop culture studies formulated by Ray Browne. Readers of The Duckburg Times seem more inclined to engage with the significance of the stories themselves, locating meaning in the narratives and discussing the meanings intended by Carl Barks. The emphasis here is more on how the texts are received, and how things are evolving, including a special issue in 1987 devoted to the arrival of the television series DuckTales, which drew heavily from Barks’s style and stories. The fanzines operated from a position of uncertainty. As mentioned above, Disney’s litigiousness was well-known by the American fan community, who took steps to avoid wrangling with the company. This is not to say that Disney would have necessarily pursued legal action, or would have even noticed the use of their images in an obscure fanzine, but the idea that it was a possibility speaks to the at-times antagonistic relationship of the fan community to the Walt Disney Company. In one instance, The Duckburg Times sought to celebrate Barks’s birthday for the March 1981 issue, and found humor within the situation. The cover itself features a massive birthday cake, to accommodate the 80 candles in honor of Barks’s 80th birthday, the massive conflagration of candle flames casting the gathered celebrants within shadow. This choice was intentional; the interior page explains that “we wanted all of Carl Barks’ friends to gather around the gigantic birthday cakes on the cover, but because of WDP’s position

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on reproducing any of their copyrighted characters, we were forced to recruit other ducks to pose for the picture.”51 The characters featured here (and nominally the ones appearing in shadow on the cover) are not Barks’s famous ducks, but rather are costumed pretenders, the Mallard family, who differ quite distinctly from Disney’s Ducks in appearance; one even references Howard the Duck, here christened “Howard du Mallard.” It concludes with a tongue-in-cheek “we are sorry for this bit of deception but we thought the cover would be remiss without at least some semblance of Carl Barks’ most famous characters.”52 This speaks to the ways in which the fan community skirted the question of copyright, but it captures something deeper. The idea that Ducks were the creation of Barks, and not truly the property of Disney, informs the understanding of the characters and comics by American fans. Barks was more than just a good artist to these readers, but functioned as a creator in his own right perhaps even eclipsing the work of Walt Disney. These were not the only fanzines devoted to the Ducks; Bruce Hamilton was involved in a group called “The Society of the First Dime” in mid-­1960s at University of Wisconsin, apparently producing pamphlets, although it does not appear that any have been archived as of this writing.53 Another early fanzine, Vacation in Duckburg, edited by Dan Lewonczyk and Dave Gulliksen, lasted two issues in 1971, serving as an in-depth examination of Barks’s work and another early effort to catalogue early publications. It did feature a surprising long list of contributors (ten), and contained an in-depth exploration of the development of the Barksian style. Similarly, Pat Hanifin’s The Duck Hunter lasted two issues in the mid-1990s, emphasizing the collecting aspects of the fandom, particularly figurines and other memorabilia. Dan McIntyre’s Barksburg appears to have only had a single issue in 1982, though references in other publications indicate that there may have been additional issues. There were other publications that focused more broadly on Disney (The “E” Ticket and Disneyana were both long-lived fan publications, with  Dana and Frank Gabbard, Duckburg Times #10/11, 1.  Dana and Frank Gabbard, Duckburg Times #10/11, 1. 53  There are few references to the group itself; Danish collector Søren Marsner wrote a short piece discussing a drawing that Barks had gifted to the group in 1968, and film historian David Bordewell mentions the group as counting cult director Terry Zwigoff among its members in the context of the late-1960s counterculture of Madison. (http://www.carlbarkscomicbookart.dk/index.asp?loadContent=231137) (http://www.davidbordwell.net/ blog/2018/02/12/did-the-60s-ever-really-end-mad-city-keeps-the-faith/). 51 52

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Disneyana running conventions starting in the 1990s) that occasionally featured interviews or other relevant material for fans of the comics. However, the American fan communities around the Donald Duck comics were typically tight-knit and limited in scope, focused on the work of Carl Barks (and to a lesser extent Floyd Gottfredson), divided into two distinct subgroups: more traditional fans and the collectors. This is not to say the categories are mutually exclusive, but there are distinctions between the two types of fans. Fan studies as a field is primarily concerned with the interactions and behaviors of fans at large: what do they read? What do they write (fan fiction and theorycrafting, for instance)? Who determines the rules for how fans interact with each other and the media that they consume? Collecting is often understood as an expression of fannish behavior, but can functionally exist without other expected behaviors (including reading or engaging with the text directly). A collector might not consider themselves a fan in the traditional sense, treating the act of collecting as a hobby or even a financial investment, rather than more purely an expression of enjoyment for a particular property. Comics by their nature are easy to collect: they are disparate products, relatively cheap, easy to access, and nominally disposable. For many, a given comic speaks to a moment in time for the life of a fan, the characters and story featured therein a point of emotional connection. This is often a starting point for collectors, but comics are also typically cheaply produced and not meant to survive as many other forms of media are (while still being relatively durable), which creates a value for the objects that survive. For fan collectors, certain comics or large sets function as status symbols, with rare issues prized objects to be shown off to fellow collectors in the fashion of a piece of art.54 Collected comics are not meant for reading, generally speaking, but for possessing: there echoes Uncle Scrooge’s militant skin-­ flintedness in this sort of fan behavior. This behavior appears within the American Duck fandom, and the first wave of comic fans, that tends to be more focused on the collecting aspects than the works themselves. Bart Beaty remarks that “the first wave of comic book fandom…was primarily defined by a connoisseurist relationship to specific contemporary comic book production. The second wave … was defined by fans born in the 54  It should be kept in mind that there are individuals who see comics collecting as an investment regardless of any interest in the characters or stories, though this begins to develop in a larger fashion in the late 1980s. The focus here is firmly on the fans in the more traditional sense, though the possible modes of fannish behavior are quite expansive.

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1930s and 1940s who wrote nostalgically about the comic books.”55 Even the efforts of Gladstone Comics, at least initially, worked in this space, with the publications being pitched as high-quality (and thus expensive) collector’s items (The Fine Art of Walt Disney’s Donald Duck and The Carl Barks Library were both intended as limited edition works, aimed at a relatively niche audience). For collectors, the goal is not necessarily in making the comics accessible, but in possessing the physical texts; as mentioned previously, the European Donaldists stood in general opposition to making a profit off the comics, which might have contributed to the long-­ term trends with regard to the two fan communities.56 There are fissures within the Duck comics fandom existing in comics fandom at large. Broadly speaking, any major publisher (DC, Marvel, Image, Dark Horse) has its share of diehard fans, who favor that company’s offerings over others. Furthermore, there are fans who only consume specific characters (Batman or the Avengers), or even favor specific authors (Gail Simone or Grant Morrison) to the exclusion of others. In discussing the various Duck comics here, it is best to understand the readership through a different lens (although there are many readers who prefer Carl Barks to Don Rosa, or Uncle Scrooge to Donald Duck), and approach the issue through the perspective of how fan behaviors manifest. Richard Reynolds seminal work on the development of comics fandom stated that adult superhero readership (a sub-section of adult comic readership as a whole) has come to identity itself with a small and very cohesive subculture. Specialist comic book retailers, ‘marts’ and full-scale conventions are the outward signs of this cohesion, as is the highly-organized marketplace for buying, selling and collecting old comics. If connoisseurship and value to the collector alone gave access to the privileged world of high culture, superhero comics would have been there long ago.57

The frictions between high and low culture were always on display within comics fandom, particularly with the development of comics collecting. While essentially anyone can read comics, collecting is an elite activity. It  Bart Beaty. Comics Versus Art. (University of Toronto Press, 2012), 154.  The “Non-Commercial” of the “German Organization of Non-Commercial Supporters of Pure Donaldism” is a key descriptor of the organization and its focus, though there are certainly German collectors as well. 57  Richard Reynolds, Superheroes: A Modern Mythology (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 7. 55 56

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implies a degree of either longevity as a member of the fandom or disposable wealth, and often both. Collectors are either readers who got in on the ground floor, acquiring the comics before they were popular, protecting and building their collection over time, or possess sufficient wealth to build a collection later. It is a form of conspicuous consumption: a comic book collection is most often meant to be shown off (particularly to other collectors), rather than actually read (risking damage  and thus  being consumed).58 These fans are not necessarily in opposition to each other, though disagreements can rage over reprints or revivals. A particular point of contention was the accessibility of old stories, and the effect that had on growing the readership. Readers that had grown up with the Duck comics were increasingly reliant to reprints of old stories; some welcomed a chance to read classic Barks stories that was years out of print, others saw it as devaluing their collections, but the haphazard nature of the reprints was a barrier of entry for new audiences in a moment when comics were taking off in America. Out of the long slow collapse of Western Publishing and the embers of the fan community, possibility sprang. EC Comics, publisher of titles like Tales From The Crypt and Weird Fantasy, had been the focal point of the outrage that created the Comics Code, yet retained (and perhaps even grew) a readership though the publication of collections and trade paperbacks, as well as growing a new audience through Mad Magazine. The old stories were continuously introduced to new generations, first through the Ballantine Books black-and-white paperback collections starting in 1964 (variously titled Tales of the Incredible, Tales From The Crypt, The Vault of Horror, The Autumn People, and Tomorrow Midnight), a Nostalgia Press collection (The EC Horror Library) in 1971, and even a dozen reprints of the originals in comic book format from East Coast Comix from 1973 to 1975.59 The restrictions of the Comics Code did not apply to these reprints, and they served to make the comics more accessible than they would have been otherwise. 58  Collecting behaviors with comics can be more complicated still than outlined here; some collectors wear out their comics with constant re-reading, others carefully protect their collections in climate-controlled spaces, while others seek out trade paperbacks and other pre-­ collected volumes. The main focus here is on the differences of collectors and readers in the Duck comics fandom, though there are a variety of motivations in collecting (and reading) comics. 59  Fred von Bernewitz and Grant Geissman. Tales of Terror!: The EC Companion (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2001), 208–211.

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Comics collecting had begun in the period, as hobbyists sought to complete collections of comics they recalled from their youth, which meant that new readers might have a harder time finding the originals (if any copies survived). Marvel and DC also engaged in similar efforts, focused on “classic” stories over reprinting complete runs of their characters. Crucially, Western Publishing did not  take care in what they published, instead mixing in reprints of old stories within their newer works, typically without clear labeling. The choice not to develop an organized, large-scale reprint effort meant that readers had a difficult time locating back issues; comic publishers often justified the practice of reprints with the idea that readers naturally aged out of comics, reprinting the same stories (sometimes in altered format) over the course of several years, though the development of storylines and continuity within superhero stories shifted the industry away from this practice. The Duck comics lacked much in the way of continuity during the Western/Dell years, but it nevertheless meant that specific stories would be inaccessible to new audiences, especially without access. Many letters to the Gladstone Comics editors would request specific stories, lamenting that they had been inaccessible for decades, and the collections appearing starting in the 1970s tended to be more arbitrarily chosen, since there was little in the way of sales figures or even collective consensus on what the important stories were. The fan community that existed around the Duck comics were relatively small and insular by the mid-1980s.60 The Barks Collector and The Duckburg Times, along with other fanzines, became sites for social interactions between fans, to converse in a public fashion. Significantly, these were spaces of transnational social interactions, and it created awareness of events on both sides of the Atlantic for both fan communities. These exchanges would largely be subsumed by the arrival of the internet, which effectively brought an end to the golden age of fanzines, though sporadic efforts continued to produce Ducks-centric fan publications. The 1980s represents the height of the Ducks fandom in America, at least after the collapse of the comics readership in the 1960s, and it seemed poised to achieve lasting success. The fandom, while relatively small, remained connected through the fanzines. Carl Barks remained a surprisingly active octogenarian. There was a market for the revival of Disney comics. 60  Bausert claims that Duckburg Times had a circulation of roughly 1000, and that John Nichols had a similar number of subscribers for The Barks Collector, in 1982. Bausert, “The First International ‘Carl Barks Survey’,” 22.

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Gladstone Comics Arrives on the Scene Bruce Hamilton and Russ Cochran stepped into this moment of great uncertainty. By 1980, Western Publishing, the once best-selling comics publisher in America, was fading into obscurity, retaining the Disney license largely because no one cared to take it back. There was a demand for reprints of the old Carl Barks stories, especially as prices began to rise on the old comics due to the rise of comics speculation in the 1980s, with an untapped market for the classic issues. Hamilton and Cochran formed Another Rainbow as a venture to preserve the work of Carl Barks, to reprint his one-of-a-kind paintings and out-of-print back issues for fans and collectors.61 Russ Cochran presents a unique case within the world of American fans, having been personally responsible for the reprints of EC Comics during the 1970s. He was a tenured professor of physics at Drake University who began visiting conventions during academic conferences, eventually making the acquaintance of William Gaines, the long-time publisher of EC.62 Cochran offers a sense of what drives a fan: he gave up his university post to become a full-time publisher, continuing to work in the field to present day. The turning point seems to have been a visit to the EC offices, where he was given access to the vault of old art (Gaines was quite fastidious in holding on to the original art for the comics). Cochran remarks “this was the first original EC art I had ever seen. I was immediately struck by how big it was … so I thought ‘Boy, wouldn’t other EC fans love to see it this size?’”63 This instinct speaks to the power of fandom, the desire to share that is common across groups and cultures, of seeing things as they were meant to be seen.. Bart Beaty remarks that “evidence of the continuing interest … can be seen in the fact that its ­catalogue of work has been republished no fewer than eight times … these many reprint efforts positions the EC output as an entire collection, suggesting that it is the entirety of the EC line that is important within the 61  Dan Cunningham explains the origin of the name: “so devoted to the work of Carl Barks were [Hamilton and Cochran], that their company name was based on the title of an early Barks oil painting of a young Scrooge McDuck: Always Another Rainbow. The imprint for their Walt Disney comic book license would bear a similar tribute: Gladstone Comics was named after the Barks-created cousin of Donald Duck with perpetual good luck: Gladstone Gander.” Cunningham, “The Disney Comics Story (1990–1993): Prologue”. 62  von Bernewitz and Geissman, Tales of Terror!, 284. 63  von Bernewitz and Geissman, 279.

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history of the American comic book industry.”64 Cochran, like Don Rosa a few years later, chose to pursue a life of doing what he most enjoyed, and his work on EC would eventually lead to the working on the Duck comics. The difference is that the Disney reprints focused specifically on Carl Barks, at least initially, but this work reflects an effort toward preservation of significant works. While the Disney and EC comics differed wildly in content, it appears that they appealed to a similar audience of collectors, a group more interested in funny animals and horror comics than in superhero titles and their creators, a middle-aged audience with disposable income and a hunger for nostalgia. Beaty notes that “the first wave of comic book fandom…was primarily defined by a connoisseurist relationship to specific contemporary comic book production. The second wave … was defined by fans born in the 1930s and 1940s who wrote nostalgically about the comic books.”65 The decision to reprint the comics was not born solely from an economic angle (though Another Rainbow was a business), but from a sense of personal nostalgia, and a mission to bring these lost stories back to print. This was a fusion of those first two waves of comic book fandom, as outlined by Beaty. Cochran chose to pursue a life of doing what he most enjoyed, and his work on EC would eventually lead to his work with the Duck comics. Another Rainbow’s first major Disney-centric publication was The Fine Art of Walt Disney’s Donald Duck (1981), which collected the oil portraits of Carl Barks and was a limited-edition book marketed to fans as a collector’s item, with a print run of 1875 copies, each signed by Barks himself. This were a niche product for a niche audience, but performed a valuable service in the pre-internet era, allowing the scattered Carl Barks fans, who might have been lucky to meet one another and to see one of his fabled portraits at a convention, a chance to enjoy the continued production of a favored creator. For the community, the books were a big hit, selling out quickly, and they served to help keep alive Barks fandom at a moment when his comics were falling out of publication and were difficult to access. Bruce Hamilton became a fixture on the convention circuit, including an appearance at “Barks Con East,” the one-off convention run by Barks Collector publisher and comics dealer John Nichols. In addition to establishing Another Rainbow’s reputation in the fan community, these convention appearances had a further effect, as they introduced Hamilton  Beaty, Comics Versus Art, 109.  Beaty, 154.

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and Russ Cochran to the attention of the Walt Disney Company. John Clark, one of Another Rainbow’s early editors, explains that “Disney was so impressed with that book [The Fine Art of Walt Disney’s Donald Duck] that Hamilton and Cochran were able to get a license to produce a series of lithographs based upon oil paintings newly commissioned from Barks.”66 Another Rainbow began releasing the collected, chronological, complete works of Carl Barks in 1984 as hardcover volumes; there had been other releases and reprints of classic Barks over the years, but this effort was the most extensive undertaken, and predated even the efforts of Marvel and DC to release complete collections of their classic superheroes. Still, the Disney connection presented even greater possibilities. Gladstone Comics produced the first new Duck comics in over a decade, though there was never a full break in the publication of the Duck comics; Western’s break with Dell had signaled a dearth of new material (the last new Barks story appeared in 1973, eight years after his retirement), with publication of reprints occurring under the Gold Key imprint  up until Gladstone acquired the license. These comics included advertisements, rare in the initial print runs, aimed at diffuse audiences (an ad for Saturday morning cartoons might run next to one for mail-order jewelry for soldiers), scattershot targeting of all possible audiences. Some scholars took this to mean that Disney comics had entirely left circulation (Roger Ash begins his article on Gladstone with: “by 1985, Disney comics had been missing from American comic racks for six years”), but it was in fact a lack of new content for American readers, and occasional slippage in the publishing schedule from month to month.67 Hamilton and Cochran saw potential in the format, and sought to bring the classic stories to a new generation of readers. They were able to secure the publishing rights from Disney for three years  starting in 1987, after Western Publishing finally concluded that the reprints were no longer profitable. Gladstone’s initial efforts focused on the reprinting of popular stories, though it occasionally included non-English stories, mixing in longer stories with a smattering of shorts. The occasional newly translated story from Europe piqued reader interest (particularly by writers of some reputation like Guido Martina and Romano Scarpa), and helped position Gladstone as more than a reprint publisher.68 Erickson explained that he  Roger Ash, “A Gander At Gladstone,” Back Issue #23 (August 2007), 35.  Ash, “Gander,” 35. 68  Ash, 35–41. 66 67

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chose stories “recommended by knowledgeable fans (the Dutch Jippes stories, for example), but mostly it was a matter of going through the various foreign magazines we started receiving and ordering proofs of stories that looked good (I couldn’t read them, mind you, so my orders were based just on looking at the pictures).”69 The effort was haphazard, but served to locate new stories for even the most well-read American fan, as well as creating new covers and including special columns, an effort to reach beyond the long-term fans who were content to pay for the hardcover Carl Barks Library editions. Moreover, the comics included new material of interest even to old fans; Dan Cunningham explains that “editors took great care in presenting each issue’s content: for the first time in the United States, Disney stories and art were properly credited to the artists, writers and colorists in the format they were originally presented. Thought-provoking text articles often accompanied comic stories, providing context and history on the featured tales.”70 The inclusion of credit for artists and writers was a major coup: the name Carl Barks had broken through to the mainstream enough that his name appeared on collections, but there were many other artists who had toiled anonymously for years. The comics often resembled a fanzine, containing additional bits of information and commentary that helped illuminate the obscure history of the stories. Geoffrey Blum recounts “new gag covers, chat columns (though I got too fey and literary with mine), background articles about the stories (there I was on more solid ground), vintage Gottfredson strips, and America’s first protracted exposure to the European-produced Disney comics (I think Whitman had trickled out a few European stories in its dying days). We were breaking ground, and everyone, fandom included, was excited.”71 Gladstone Comics had a large distribution for an independent comic. ComiChron has monthly circulation averaging over 70,000, indicating a larger readership than the dedicated Barks fan community that existed with the fanzines.72 The Duck fandom was once more growing under the auspices of Gladstone, interacting in new ways, and developing beyond the relatively insular comics-collecting community ­ that had developed. The comics were still niche products; overall  Ash, “Gander,” 36.  Cunningham, “The Disney Comics Story (1990–1993): Prologue.” 71  Ash, “Gander,” 41. 72  “Uncle Scrooge Sales Figures,” ComicChron, accessed 4 December 2020, https://www. comichron.com/titlespotlights/unclescrooge.html. 69 70

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readership was dwarfed by the numbers for Marvel and DC, but it was reaching new audiences.

Gladstone Grows a New Fan Community Gladstone quickly introduced a letters column—“The Quacker Box”—as a result of the strong community response. The column first appeared in Donald Duck No. 253 (May 1987) receiving correspondence that gives a sense of the larger feelings about the Gladstone publications. One fan wrote “it’s been great to not only have regular Barks reprints, but also the stories from Denmark and Holland, which are fabulous.”73 There was an appreciation for the printing of non-American stories, which had generally never been read (let alone translated into English) for the American audience. There was awareness among fans that non-American authors existed, thanks to the articles by Klaus von Storch, Horst Schröder, and others, which had served to generate interest in the stories and authors in a pre-­ digital era.74 Another letter commented “I’m sure you’ll receive outpourings of gratitude from all over North America for reprinting ‘Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold,’ but I can hardly refrain from adding mine. No longer is ‘Pirate Gold’ just a black and white photograph of the original cover.”75 This speaks to the significance of what Gladstone was doing, recreating a classic story (Barks’s first) as it had been originally read, rather than the black-and-white photocopies (at best) that circulated of the long-ago stories. A story like “Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold” might not have been printed in America in over forty years (“Pirate Gold” was a 64-page story, well beyond the roughly 22 pages that the modern comics publishing had standardized), but it was once more available to the public, not as a bootleg or a foreign release, but an official, English language edition. “The Quacker Box” also served as a space to communicate with fans about editorial decisions. The editors responded to one request for a 73  Byron Erickson, “The Quacker Box,” Donald Duck No. 253 (Gladstone Comics, May 1987), 23. 74  Barks Collector editor John Nichols stated emphatically in 1982 that “we appreciate the opportunity he has given us to show English-speaking Duck fans just what they are missing by not being able to get his stories on this side of the Atlantic … since Western Publishing has not seen fit to print high-quality European-drawn material.” Nichols, The Barks Collector 20, 3. 75  Byron Erickson, “The Quacker Box,” Donald Duck No. 253 (Gladstone Comics, May 1987), 23.

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reprint of a classic Barks comic that “as far as printing an all-Barks issue, we’ll to that from time to time (as in this very issue). For many technical reasons it is not possible, nor at all desirable, to reprint a replica of an old comic.”76 There is a recognition that the collectors’ market is a key component of fandom (for instance, an exact replica, even with the Gladstone insignia, would likely have negatively impacted the prices for the reprinted comic), as well as certain economic realities (Western had been reprinting old issues without any apparent problems, legal or otherwise, but did suffer a long decline in sales). The small scale of the operation allowed for exchanges like this; it is unclear how many letters Gladstone was receiving, and whether there was any editing involved, as there was in other letters columns.77 What is also striking is the number of letters from children and teenagers; several of the columns almost exclusively feature letters from youth, who tend to focus more on specific stories than the larger concerns. Nevertheless, it reflects that the fandom was once more growing under the auspices of Gladstone, interacting in new ways, and growing out of the relatively insular fan community that had developed. Another feature in many issues was Geoffrey Blum’s column “Cross Talk.” Initially a news column, it developed into an quasi-scholarly space, briefly discussing topics from Don Rosa’s use of mythical monsters to the history of particular Barks stories, building on the traditions in the fanzines.78 The plot descriptions of upcoming releases incorporated small details on publication history, or cuts made to the original stories, introducing readers to aspects of the process they might not have been aware of. On occasion, there would be more expansive pieces, taking a deeper dive into a given character or creator, something that set Gladstone comics apart from the more mainstream offerings of the period. This fit with the 76  Byron Erickson, “The Quacker Box,” Donald Duck No. 254 (Gladstone Comics, June 1987), 23. 77  Byron Erickson, writing for the editors, comments “amazingly enough, that very story is scheduled for the next issue of Donald Duck … but what’s really amazing is that we can dig up real letters when we need to come up with a plug for the next issue.” Byron Erickson, “The Quacker Box,” Donald Duck No. 256 (Gladstone Comics, August 1987), 23. This seems to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to the tendency of the letters columns in Marvel and DC comics to occasionally mention villains or side-characters that were scheduled to appear in subsequent releases. Due to the nature of its business model, Gladstone was a little more able to field requests, but it is likely this was simply a snarky reference to mainstream comics of the era. 78  Geoffrey Blum, “Cross Talk,” Donald Duck No. 258 (Gladstone Comics, October 1987), 24.

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other publications of Another Rainbow, which included extensive introductions written by experts; for the Duck comics, these efforts helped to introduce stories originally published in Europe to American audiences. It built upon the traditions of the fanzines, reinforcing the ties of fan community, and helped foster the transnational exchange that had become key to the Ducks fan community of the period. Finally, the moment included the hiring of Don Rosa and William van Horn to write new stories; this was intended as a one-off job that soon grew into a career for Rosa, which is discussed in greater detail in the following chapter. This was not a business decision by any means; Erikson explains that “a book-length Rosa or Van Horn epic didn’t sell any more copies than an issue filled with European stories and a Barks reprint. We did new material because I wanted to, or as I pitched it to Bruce at the time, to give us credibility as more than just a reprint house.”79 This is part of the appeal of Gladstone and their work, taking risks on new material and treating the comics more as a creative endeavor than an economic one. It also demonstrates that there was a passionate group of fans to serve as a market for these releases, something that was misunderstood by the Disney executives. Gladstone Comics was not without its issues. Daan Jippes, a Swedish Duck artist and writer, had initially been hired to draw new covers for the reprints of old stories. While the early efforts went smoothly, it did not last, with delays in shipping the covers (Jippes lived in Europe, and digital scanning was in its infancy) and acrimony over payment and delivery. Jippes explains “it happened way too often that ideas were dismissed without proper or constructive criticism, often just for arbitrary reasons. I could only expect financial compensation from those efforts after turning in completed, inked covers. So, all these submitted small masterpieces, for perspective covers that would never see the light of day, became, as far as I was concerned, a waste of my time.”80 Gladstone remained a small operation, even as sales grew. The Walt Disney Company, during the early 1990s, sought to bring its various products back under direct control, including the comics, which had not been produced by Disney since the 1930s. In this period, Cunningham notes that “creative notes from a once-quiet Burbank began to show up at the Gladstone offices more ­frequently: one notorious incident was a note regarding Barks-drawn duck characters looking ‘off-model’ on the cover of a comic book album,  Ash, “A Gander At Gladstone,” 39.  Ash, 38.

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suggesting Studio-approved models in its place.”81 There was a general sense of friction, as Disney sought to assume control over the product, and there was a sense that the decision to license out the characters for outside publication was more the result of Walt Disney’s disinterest in 1987, which further developments would complicate.

DuckTales (Woo-ooo!) The rise of Gladstone coincided with other key developments. Disney’s efforts to enter the lucrative children’s television  cartoon market finally paid off in 1987 with the release of DuckTales. Drawing from the classic stories of Carl Barks for broad inspiration, the show featured Uncle Scrooge with Huey, Dewey, and Louie, with Donald departing for the Navy in the pilot episode after a brief cameo. The initial pitch leaned heavily on the Barks stories, appealing as much to the nostalgia of Boomer parents as to the child audiences of the 1980s. LA Times animation critic Charles Solomon writes “to the Baby Boomers who grew up reading these comics, Barks’ Duckburg was as familiar as their hometown, yet as exotic as anything in ‘The Arabian Nights.’”82 The show utilized Barks as a base, while expanding the stories to fill a roughly 20-minute timeslot, and softened Scrooge somewhat from his comics original.83 The series borrowed from the spirit of Carl Barks, though there were accusations that it was not quite in the spirit of the original (Solomon included). Carl Barks himself seemed appreciative, explaining in an interview with a Swedish fan that “I think [DuckTales] was very excellent, but they couldn’t get enough material out of my stories to fill up a half hour, so they had to put in a great deal of fresh material which introduced a lot of other characters and a lot of other situations that weren’t in my original stories.”84 81  Dan Cunningham, “The Disney Comics Story (1990–1993): Prologue,” I Can Break Away, 5 November 2013, http://icanbreakaway.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-disney-­ comics-­story-1990-1993.html. 82  Charles Solomon, “The Duck Stops Here…” LA Times, 20 September 1987. 83  Solomon quotes producer Tom Ruzicka as explaining that “Barks was never really consulted although the show was initially based on the concept of doing Scrooge McDuck and the nephews. We discovered that a lot of stuff that made wonderful comics wouldn’t translate into the ‘80s or into animation, so we started evolving new characters and other things to contemporize the show. As we did that, the stories got further and further away from the comics, although a few episodes are lifted right out of them.” Solomon, “Duck Stops”. 84  Svane, “When Donald Duck Turned 60,” 166–167.

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How the series came to be is unclear, as is the decision to utilize the Barksian stories, but all available evidence points to coincidence. In the years before DuckTales, Disney had produced a few series (The Wuzzles and Gummi Bears) to limited success. Production on the series began around the same time that Gladstone revived the comics line; though Another Rainbow had found some success with its prints a few years prior, there does not appear to have been much coordination. Cunningham remarks “initially, the Another Rainbow/Gladstone staff had minimal interference from Burbank executives, who were likely pleased with long-­ dormant profit from U.S. comic books. In turn, the comics likely experienced a bump from the September 1987 debut of DuckTales as a new generation discovered the exploits of the world’s richest duck each weekday afternoon.”85 DuckTales, for its part, was an instant success; Ron Grover notes “the half-hour weekly cartoon show became Disney’s first hit show in syndication … within a few months, it was the top-ranked afternoon kids’ show in syndication, having captured nearly 11 percent of the market … by the end of the 1989 season … the show was seen by more than 12 million children.”86 For many children, it became their first exposure to the stories of Barks, and helped to solidify the mythos around Disney’s Ducks. The cultural footprint of DuckTales is significant in its own right, eclipsing the cultural memory of Barks’s stories for the post-1970s generations. In drawing upon the same basic DNA of the Barks stories, the episodes of DuckTales effectively repackage the old narratives for new audiences in a new medium, much in the fashion of Disney’s animated offerings. Like the Dell Comics from the mid-century, the show occupied a major place in the cultural zeitgeist at a specific moment in time, developing a small, dedicated fanbase and a larger awareness that it existed (in DuckTales case, buoyed by a catchy theme song), but the work itself largely faded into the nostalgic background noise of the pop cultural landscape. As with Barks, it did not pull its punches; AV Club critic Emily VanDerWerff explains that “rather than trying to be as kid-friendly as possible, the series made its protagonist an irascible old man. Rather than celebrating the sorts of family-friendly virtues Disney was associated with, the series was about the

 Cunningham, “The Disney Comics Story (1990–1993): Prologue.”  Grover, The Disney Touch, 146.

85 86

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awesomeness of unchecked avarice and greed.”87 The original stories often cast Scrooge as a borderline antagonist at times; here too, Scrooge is often the cause of his own troubles, and is not beyond the bad behavior of his various villains. The show was keenly aware of the structure of Scrooge’s relationship to his family (the only thing that kept him from falling into pure villainy at times), and expanded on the roles of the characters. Fan blogger Kevin Johnson notes that “DuckTales delved into that relationship between Scrooge and his nephews. Huey, Dewey, and Louie are not annoying brats that find themselves getting into trouble like so many cartoons tend to portray their younger characters. They are PART of the adventure, characters that Scrooge truly relies on to help. He doesn’t simply want them around; he NEEDS them.”88 The appeal of the series is the same as the Barks stories: the kids were equal partners to the adults.89 The child characters, nominally surrogates for the audience in both the comic and cartoon, were allowed to contribute and even fail in their efforts, the same as the adult characters. DuckTales was also refreshing in comparison to the rest of 1980s animated programming; unlike the many contemporary cartoons (Transformers, G.I. Joe, He-Man, My Little Pony), the series did not exist purely to sell toys, though merchandising tie-ins would follow later in the run.90 The series had surprising longevity, reaching 100 episodes by the end of its run (most children’s animated series maxed out at 65 episodes), and continuing to air in syndication for several years after the end of production in 1990. It had a significant impact overseas as well, being the first Western animated show broadcast in many former Soviet nations after the fall of communism, with Scrooge McDuck playing the role of cultural ambassador as Donald had before.91

87  Emily Todd VanDerWerff, “DuckTales Invented a New Animated Wonderland—That Quickly Disappeared,” The AV Club, 11 February 2013. https://tv.avclub.com/ ducktales-invented-a-new-animated-wonderland-that-quick-1798236288. 88  Kevin Johnson, “Childhood Revisited—Ducktales,” Total Media Bridge. 89  VanDerWerff concurs, explaining “Scrooge’s trust in the boys is implicit, and at the center of the series is a sense that any of the dangers—from multiple genres—that are thrown at the team will be defeated by the ducks’ ingenuity. This is a series about adults and kids relating to each other, but remaining adults and kids, instead of trying to play at each other’s levels.” VanDerWerff, “Animated Wonderland”. 90  VanDerWerff, “Animated Wonderland”. 91  Hungary in particular has a unique relationship to the show, when the death of the nation’s first democratically elected prime minister, József Antall, was announced during the airing of an episode of DuckTales on 12 December 1993. Journalist Dorottya Ócsai coined

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The Eisner Era The biggest factor in Gladstone’s collapse was when Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Frank Wells joined Disney in 1984 and begin a transformation of the company. Disney was positioned as a theme park company with a sideline in animation: Tokyo Disney opened 1983, and planning for Euro Disney was well underway by 1984. Operations of the company were scattered across a dozen small fiefdoms, with comics licensing being small consideration within merchandising, well outside the purview of the higher-ups. James Stewart explains that “Eisner was more interested in reviving Disney’s live-action film and television divisions, businesses he knew well from his stint at Paramount.”92 The focus was on more prestigious divisions than merchandising, and even there, comics were likely considered a sideshow, despite the rise of comic book shops and increasingly visible auctions of old superhero comics. The reorganization of Disney, with various staffing cuts, underlined the positive aspects of contracting the comics production to an outside company like Gladstone; Stewart notes that “over one thousand Disney employees lost their jobs during Eisner’s and Wells’s first year.”93 Within this, Disney began releasing their animated films to the home video market (starting with Robin Hood in December 1984) despite some disagreement, and the releases quickly proved hits. Eisner was less concerned about the Disney brand and nostalgia when considering the economic profitability, further cementing a corporate culture that often focused on mining preexisting properties.94 Notably, the growth of profits in this period was driven less by various theatrical successes like Three Men and A Baby (1987) and Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), but by theme-park admissions, hotel ownership, and (crucially) the distribution of the old animated classics on home video.95 Keeping the efforts in-house meant a larger share of the profits for Disney, and expanded the vertical integration of the Disney brand. The exact details behind the decision-making that lead to Disney clawing back their license from Gladstone are murky. Jim Shooter, the then recent editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, was brought on as a consultant the phrase “DuckTales Generation” in reference to the experience of the children watching the show that day. Dorottya Ócsai, “Egy Generáció Politikai Eszmélése,” NOL, 6 April 2009. 92  Stewart, Disney War, 73. 93  Stewart, Disney War, 76. 94  Stewart, 92–93. 95  Stewart, 96.

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by Disney executive Michael Lynton.96 Shooter explains: “Lynton’s Plan B was starting a comic book publishing division at Disney. Disney Comics were being published under license by Gladstone Publishing at that time. Lynton meant to terminate their license and bring Disney’s comic book publishing in-house.”97 The plan was to develop the Disney brand into a comic publishing powerhouse, seeing the possibility for growth in the market following the founding of independent publishers like Mirage Studios in 1983, Dark Horse Comics in 1986, and Shooter’s own Valiant Comics in 1989. It also coincided with a larger effort to bring the far-­ flung Disney empire under the control of the company itself, as with the creation of the mall-centric chain of Disney Stores under direct control of the company.98 Dan Cunningham posits that “the resurgence in interest of their classic characters and the boom in the comic book market inspired Disney to undertake something they’d always left to others: the company would publish the comic books themselves. The desire being that all profits could be kept in-house, and editorial control wouldn’t receive any creative pushback.”99 This is not a unique objective; Henry Jenkins explains “corporate rights holders are often so threatened by the potential disruption caused by ‘unauthorized’ circulation of their content that they seek to lock it down, containing it to their own sites.”100 Disney in the 1990s became increasingly concerned with copyright during the period, and the effort to take control of various revenue streams was complicated prior to the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, both passed in the United States in 1998. The independence of the licensees had been a fluke of history, and for ambitious executives like Lynton, it was viewed as another aspect of the outmoded approach that had weakened Disney over the past two 96  Interestingly, this may have been the genesis of Disney’s eventual acquisition of Marvel in 2009. Shooter recalls “Lynton was the head of marketing for Disney’s consumer products division (the other two being the film and parks divisions). I don’t recall his exact title, but he was a major cheese in the House of the Mouse. Turned out that Lynton, too, had been interested in acquiring Marvel. He’d tried to talk Disney’s upper management into it, and when that proved to be a no-go, he’d considered making an attempt on his own.” Jim Shooter, “Disney Adventures”. 97  Shooter, “Disney Adventures”. 98  This might also be a reflection of Eisner’s “firm belief that a good executive can run anything,” as outlined by Stewart. Stewart, Disney War, 198. 99  Cunningham, “The Disney Comics Story (1990–1993): Prologue.” 100  Henry Jenkins, Joshua Green, and Sam Ford, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 56.

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decades.101 The American market only one of many: Disney acquired Italian comic Topolino in 1988, and launched new lines in Latin America and Spain in a related effort.102 The idea that Disney endeavors to control all of its properties with an iron glove had been something of a myth throughout much of the company’s history, especially where the comics were concerned, but the corporate culture of the late 1980s dictated otherwise.

The End of Gladstone and the Rise (and Fall) of Disney Comics In 1989, Gladstone Comics was informed that their license would not be renewed. Gladstone editor-in-chief Bryon Erickson relates that “…our small success with Disney comics had convinced [Lynton] that there was a market for Disney comics, so Disney had decided to publish the comics themselves … they lost a million and half dollars per year … add to that the million and a half in lost annual Gladstone royalties, and that’s a tidy sum to flush down the toilet.”103 While Another Rainbow was able to continue publishing its high-end collections (culminating the complete reprinting of Carl Barks’s Duck comics), and Gladstone had a few other properties under its auspices, the publisher was grievously wounded by the sudden and unexpected reversal. Geoffrey Blum wrote in his farewell Cross Talk column that “we at Gladstone have longed believed that Carl Barks and Floyd Gottredson are the two unquestioned masters of the funny animal comics. We made their work a staple of our books and enjoyed introducing a new generation to the stories we loved as children.”104 Gladstone amounted to an officially sanctioned fan project: a 101  An alternative explanation might be that Disney’s corporate leadership began to understand the power held in their various properties, including the comics. CEO Michael Eisner wrote in 1995 that “it may not be such an exaggeration to appreciate the role of the American entertainment industry in helping to change history. The Berlin Wall was destroyed not by force of Western arms by the force of Western ideas. And what was the delivery system for those ideas? It has to be admitted that to an important degree it was by American entertainment.” Michael Eisner, “Planetized Entertainment,” New Perspectives Quarterly 12, no. 4 (Fall 1995), 8. Whether this was something recognized at the time, or a matter of hindsight, is unclear, though this line of thinking echoes the same ideas posited by Wanger, Carr, and others, as noted in Chap. 3. 102  Grover, 267. 103  Ash, 41. 104  Geoffrey Blum, “Cross Talk” (Uncle Scrooge No. 242, April 1990), 57.

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business more concerned with keeping Barks, Gottfredson, and other artists in the public consciousness without much regard for profitability. Gladstone was a labor of love, an expression of fandom writ large, and it served purposes beyond simply celebrating the old artists. Geoffrey Blum speaks to Gladstone Comics as a transnational space: we also uncovered new talent, and a flock of European artists who had been drawing Disney comics for several decades. After reading through a bushel of Dutch, Danish, and Italian comics, we found a good handful that seemed to demand exposure in America; and an enthusiastic flood of fan mail has proven us right … each man, however firmly grounded in the Disney tradition, has brought the force of his own personality and interests to bear on his comics. That is what made them so good.105

This golden age of Gladstone Comics only lasted around three years, from 1987 to 1990, but had a deeper impact on the development of the comics since the retirement of Carl Barks. New creators (including Don Rosa, who will be discussed in the following chapter) were brought into craft the comics, new audiences were introduced to the classic stories, with elements of scholarship elucidating the importance of these works. Disney Comics was an ambitious project from the start. Under the leadership of Len Wein, the line continued publishing many of the old series like Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck Adventures (though its numbering restarted from #1, a nod to the burgeoning collector’s market of the period) while introducing several new series, particularly ones based on their new animated properties: Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers, TaleSpin, Roger Rabbit, among others. Cunningham notes that “the initial Disney Comics output featured brand new commissioned material, plus European stories that had never been printed in the U.S., as well as classic content from the Western Publishing era to round out the books (and satisfy former Gladstone readers).”106 There was a recognition that the readership had evolved in the years since Western Publishing, and efforts were made to maintain the overall quality, continuing to print new Don Rosa stories as well as classic Barks, and attempting to engage with the readership.107  Blum, 57.  Cunningham, “The Disney Comics Story (1990–1993): Ready to Launch.” 107  Interestingly, the seeds for Don Rosa’s Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck appear to have been laid during this period at least to some extent. Responding to a fan letter, editor Bob Foster wrote: “we are in the process of doing a duck genealogy book that will include the 105 106

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Disney did a lot right in theory, though did not entirely understand the wants and needs of the fan community, nor the comics market as it existed in 1990 despite the presence of Jim Shooter. Cross-promotion became a major aspect of the overall project, particularly in advertising the animated television series that had developed following the success of DuckTales. Michael Lynton sought to borrow the format of Topolino entirely, shifting from a comic book to a smaller digest size (shrinking from 6 5 by 10 1 inches to 5 1 by 8 1 inches), which 8 4 2 4 allowed them to be stocked in supermarkets and other venues.108 The Disney Comics lube expanded quickly, creating tie-in comics for Disney films (The Little Mermaid), as well as spinning off imprints for fare targeted at older readers.109 The problem quickly became the saturation of the comics market; Disney Comics was producing far more than Gladstone ever had, far outstripping demand.110 The various cross-promotions (including tie-ins for Dick Tracy and The Rocketeer) fell short as the films underperformed at the box office, and low sales prompted the cancellation of several titles ahead of the publisher’s first anniversary in 1991. The organized fandom, which had not always supported Gladstone but vehemently opposed Disney’s takeover, grew even more unhappy.111 story of how Huey, Dewey and Louie came to inherit Donald Duck as their uncle.” Bob Foster, “Destination: Duckburg,” Donald Duck Adventures No. 6, 27. 108  Cunningham explains that “Lynton conceived a U.S. equivalent to Italy’s wildly popular digest Topolino: Disney Adventures featured articles, puzzles, contests and full-length comic book stories based on The Disney Afternoon properties. There was no mistaking the connection, as early issues of Disney Adventures proudly boasted a banner or stamp touting it as ‘The Official Magazine of The Disney Afternoon.’” Cunningham, “The Disney Comics Story (1990–1993): The Disney EXPLOSION!!!” 109  The use of imprints became common in the 1990s as a way to target different consumer demographics. DC’s Vertigo line, for instance, often produced darker, more adult horror and fantasy comics, and Marvel’s Tsunami imprint was aimed at fans of manga and anime. 110  This is something that was reflected in other Disney endeavors of the period, particularly film. Eisner and Katzenberg maintained a philosophy of boosting production on the back of successful projects: for instance, the success of Oliver and Company (1989) lead to yearly releases from Walt Disney Animation Studios until 2006 (which coincided with the acquisition of Pixar, ensuring a consistent annual output between the studios into present day). This thinking seems to have undergirded the approach to the comics as well. Stewart, Disney War, 109. 111  The fan response was decidedly negative; Duckburg Times editor Dana Gabbard wrote “arrogant presumption of this sort explains why Disney, with no experience publishing comics, could decide not to renew Gladstone’s license in the belief that they could more successfully produce and market the comics themselves. Before a single issue of the new Disney

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Disney made entreaties to the fans, but these were often ham-fisted and ineffective. Dan Cunningham recounts one such effort, involving a map of Duckburg. This was not the first effort to map the city (Ken Bausent had submitted one such map in The Barks Collector #15, and German fan efforts had become something a pastime), but the promotion went especially awry.112 It involved a three-part map found in comics, with pages that could be torn out and combined to produce a basic overview of Duckburg. Cunningham explains that the “problem was that the map pieces were placed in the three titles geared to collectors, yet the map really keyed directly off the animated series DuckTales, not the traditional, Barks-style stories. The promotion may have been a desire to develop that overlap between sales demographics, but it wasn’t properly executed, and came across as more youth-driven than collector-minded.”113 This speaks to the larger problem of Disney Comics: too expensive to appeal to child audiences, without the attention to detail that collectors and long-time fans demanded, while also stretching their resources too thin in attempting to publish a wide range of titles without first developing a reader base.114 Gladstone returned to publishing Disney’s comics in late 1993, picking up more or less where they had left off, with the best year for the sales of the comics (as per Table 6.2 below). Russ Cochran left Another Rainbow after the initial split with Disney in 1989, with Bruce Hamilton remaining at the helm. Gladstone’s return was a short-lived triumph; though 1993 was the best year for sales, the comics market at large was roiling and disrupting the unstable equilibrium that smaller publishers operated under.115 Comics line had even been distributed, Disney executives were rumored to be confidently predicting that in a short time they would be competing on an equal footing with industry leaders Marvel and DC … Disney never had a commitment to publishing comics beyond a desire for profit. When it became clear marketing Disney Comics would require more than just publishing the books and hope they sold, it was decided to scrap the line except for the Duck titles.” Dana Gabbard, The Duckburg Times No. 24/25, 45. 112  Ken Bausent, “In Search of Duckburg, Calisota,” The Barks Collector No. 15 (October 1980), 5–7. 113  Dan Cunningham, “The Disney Comics Story (1990–1993): The End of the Line.” 114  There were other accusations of Disney’s mismanagement in this period, and predictions that the company has expanded too quickly, and had expended too many resources. Writing in 1994, Douglas Gomery explained “the Walt Disney Company seems to be just another overextended media conglomerate. Eisner and Wells cannot seem to effect a long-­ run turnaround; they have exploited all of the assets in the Disney closet.” Gomery, “Disney’s Business History,” 85. 115  This is often framed as the Great Comic Book Crash of 1996, the result of various market forces (ill-advised crossovers, emphasis on the collector market, limited distribution

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Table 6.2 Gladstone Comics Era and Disney Comics Era Uncle Scrooge Sales Figures (based on Comichron’s data)

Release year 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998

Uncle Scrooge Publisher 78,935 74,092 74,055 89,963 60,462 53,231 158,775 116,600 80,235 41,052 33,968 10,555

Gladstone Gladstone Gladstone Disney Disney Disney Disney Gladstone Gladstone Gladstone Gladstone Gladstone

Gladstone retained the license for Donald Duck and other characters until 1998, when the collapse of sales finally lost them the license once and for all. Dark Horse Comics briefly took over publishing the comics, though this too would be short lived, and there would be a true drought of Disney comics by 2000. The Disney comics line was once again revived in 2003 under Gemstone Publishing, a new venture lead by several Gladstone veterans, including John Clark. Further financial woes of a murky nature saw Gemstone fold in 2008; subsequently, BOOM Studios and IDW have taken up the Disney licenses.116 Another Rainbow is effectively defunct beyond a small online store (which does not appear to have been updated since 2012), with Bruce Hamilton’s death in 2005 effectively marking the end of an era. There is no smoking gun that proves the Walt Disney Company’s takeover of their comics line in 1989 was the cause of the sudden collapse of American fan community. The major fanzines concluded soon thereafter, with the last issue of The Barks Collector released in 1990, while the final Duckburg Times appearing in 1992, marking an end of an era, though the arrival of the internet marked a shift away from the mail order collecting, and fans migrated to early bulletin boards. Disney Comics effectively options) resulting in a massive decline in sales in all sectors, to the degree that the industry still has not fully recovered. Wright, Comic Book Nation, 283. 116  Comics sales since the COVID-19 pandemic are complicated; distribution effectively shut down during March and April 2020, but prior to that point, IDW’s Uncle Scrooge was averaging around 3000 sales a month.

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sapped the momentum that Gladstone had been cultivating, and interviews with veterans emphasize the first run more than the second. The 1990s also saw the departure of many of the talents from Gladstone, both editors and creators, heading for the Danish publisher Gutenberghus, which offered better wages and other perks; it would eventually become Egmont, which continues to publish Disney comics into present day. Demand for the stories appears to have remained steady during the period, with the various collected reprints maintaining steady sales (Fantagraphics began their own collected reprints of Carl Barks stories in 2011, with similar effort for Don Rosa stories beginning the following year), and the ongoing IDW comics have achieved modest success with a relatively small audience. The modern fan community around the comics appears limited at best, more based around Carl Barks than the larger collected works, but it was likely never as robust as the Europeans. Maurice Sendak stated, in reference to Winsor McCay, that “America, it seems, still doesn’t take its great fantasists all that seriously.”117 That was true of Barks and Rosa as well, and the Ducks more generally, despite once being the best-selling comics in America.

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Jenkins, Henry, Joshua Green, and Sam Ford. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New  York: New  York University Press, 2013. Johnson, Kevin. “Childhood Revisited—Ducktales.” Total Media Bridge. 11 February 2013. http://www.totalmediabridge.com/childhood-­revisited-­ducktales/. Miller, John Jackson. “Uncle Scrooge—Only the Best-Seller of the 1960s.” ComicChron, 10 February 2012, https://comichron.com/ blog/2012/02/10/uncle-­scrooge-­only-­best-­seller-­of-­1960s/. Mittermeier, Sabrina. A Cultural History of the Disneyland Theme Parks: Middle Class Kingdoms. Intellect Books, 2021. Nichols, John. “Carl Barks Convention.” The Barks Collector No 19, October 1981, 8. Nichols, John. The Barks Collector 20 (February 1982), 3. Ócsai, Dorottya. “Egy Generáció Politikai Eszmélése” (“A Generation’s Political Awakening”). NOL. 6 April 2009. http://nol.hu/kultura/egy_generacio_politikai_eszmelese__vasarnap_fel_6_korul_megszakadt_a_kacsamesek-­327830. Reynolds, Richard. Superheroes: A Modern Mythology. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Schröder, Horst. “Views on European Disneys.” The Barks Collector No. 11, 1979. 2–14. Shooter, Jim. “Disney Adventures.” JimShooter.com. 26 September 2011. http:// jimshooter.com/2011/09/disney-­adventures.html/. Solomon, Charles. “The Duck Stops Here…” LA Times. 20 September 1987. http://articles.latimes.com/1987-­09-­20/entertainment/ca-­9288_1_donald­duck. Spencer, Amy. DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture. Marion Boyars. 2005. Spillman, Klaus. “Barks in Germany & Scandinavia,” The Duckburg Times 10/11, 27 March 1981. Stewart, James. Disney War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. von Storch, Klaus. “In Donaldismo Veritas.” The Barks Collector No. 17, 7–16. Svane, Erik. “When Donald Duck Turned 60.” Carl Barks: Conversations, edited by Donald Ault, 165–172. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Ten Kate, Herman. “Barks in the Netherlands.” The Barks Collector No. 19, October 1981. 1–7. “Uncle Scrooge Sales Figures,” ComicChron, accessed 4 December 2020, https:// www.comichron.com/titlespotlights/unclescrooge.html. VanDerWerff, Emily Todd. “DuckTales Invented a New Animated Wonderland— That Quickly Disappeared.” The AV Club. 11 February 2013. https://tv.avclub. com/ducktales-­invented-­a-­new-­animated-­wonderland-­that-­quick-­1798236288. West, Richard. “The Great American Comics Part VIII: Christmas with Carl Barks,” Starling no. 33, February 1976, 28–37. Wright, Bradford. Comic Book Nation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2001.

CHAPTER 7

“The King of the Klondike”: Don Rosa and (Re)envisioning the Frontier

Carl Barks created the world of Duckburg for the comics. Erika Fuchs made the Ducks German. Bruce Hamilton and Russ Cochran revived the Ducks. Don Rosa connected all of the pieces and made them into something new. Rosa is the American successor to Carl Barks, a fan creator who followed in the footsteps of “The Good Duck Artist,” and wove together the threads of fandom and history into an epic love letter to the grand scope of Carl Barks. This work was the culmination of the lifetimes of the three authors, made possible by the work of fans across the world, that bridged fandom and nations in a way that few popular texts have. Keno Don Hugo Rosa was born into a middle-class family of builders in 1951, with an expectation that he would take over the family business. He credits his older sister Deanna with introducing him to comics, his early interest in Little Lulu and Donald Duck shifting to superheroes as he grew up; Rosa remarks that “the house was filled with comic books…these characters Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, that I liked so much, one of the reasons I like them is that they’re alive to me as my parents were. They

An early version of this chapter was published as “The Buckaroo of the Badlands: Carl Barks, Don Rosa, and (Re)envisioning the West,” Drawing the Past: Comics and the Historical Imagination. Ed. Michael Goodrum, Dorian Alexander, and Phillip Smith. University Press of Mississippi, 2021. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. C. Bryan, Creation, Translation, and Adaptation in Donald Duck Comics, Palgrave Fan Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73636-1_7

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have always existed. It’s hard for me to imagine these are just comic book characters.”1 Rosa is self-taught in drawing, the same as Carl Barks, though received a more formal education, graduating from the University of Kentucky with a degree in civil engineering, at roughly the same time that the last Barks stories were being printed. At university he was a cartoonist for the college newspaper, with work ranging from political cartoons to the ongoing strip The Pertwillaby Papers, with his work continuing after he graduated.2 Rosa’s early work often echoed the comics of Carl Barks: with a story arc in The Pertwillaby Papers titled “Lost in (an Alternative Section of) the Andes,” a specific nod to the Donald Duck story “Lost in the Andes.” Don Rosa further positioned himself as a notable collector, writing an ongoing column for fanzine Rocket Blast Comicollector and becoming a minor figure in the Louisville comics collecting scene of the 1970s and 1980s.3 He remained involved in the Louisville fan community, with a particular interest in comics collecting, even as he continued to run his family’s company, which proved fortuitous as Gladstone got off the ground. When Rosa learned  through his connections that Gladstone had resumed publishing Duck comics, he pitched directly to Bruce Hamilton: “I said, ‘I was the only American who was born to write and draw Uncle Scrooge comics, it was my manifest destiny.’ I’d known it my whole life…I found myself writing and drawing one Uncle Scrooge adventure, which I’d dreamt of since I was a child.”4 His first work would be “The Son of the Sun” (Uncle Scrooge #219, April 1987), an adventure tale in the mode of Barks, containing myriad references to Barks’s work. The first page alone, set in the Duckburg museum, features visual allusions of the golden fleece (Uncle Scrooge #12, December 1955), the treasure of the Flying Dutchman (Uncle Scrooge #25, March–May 1959) and the Candy-Striped Ruby (Uncle Scrooge #41, March 1963), while the story itself is a spiritual  Elliot, “Interview With Don Rosa.”  The Pertwillaby Papers was well-received enough to receive a Fantagraphics collection in 1981, and was spun off into The Adventures of Captain Kentucky, which ran in the Louisville Times from 1979 until 1982. 3  “I started working for these fan magazines, comic book collector, fanzines. The biggest one of the day was the Rocket’s Blast ComiCollector. The first thing I did was contribute indexes. I was always an archivist, indexer, assembling full sets, writing reports… I first started contributing indexes of comic book series. One of them being Uncle Scrooge, it’s one of the first ones I did.” Frank Stanjano, “Don Rosa January 2008, part 2.” Frank Stanjano’s Comic Podcast, 9 June 2008. 4  Elliot, “Interview With Don Rosa.” 1 2

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sequel to the Barks classic “Lost in the Andes” (Four Color Comics #223, April 1949) published two years before Rosa was born. It was intended to be a singular work: the culmination of one fan’s ambition, a fun love letter from Don Rosa to Carl Barks. Instead, the story revealed an interest in new content among the readership, imbued vitality into a flagging fandom, and even garnered enough attention to receive a Harvey Award nomination. This story helped Gladstone Comics shift production to new stories in a concerted effort, with Rosa acting as the primary writer and artist on the first new American Disney comics in over a decade. Don Rosa’s work often follows the travelogue format of Barks, but uses the framing as a means to travel though Barks’s chronology and geography, as well as the real world itself. Rosa’s first steps were slow and tentative, written as a tribute for the 40th anniversary of the original.5 The adventure in “Son of the Sun” largely follows the original (which had been a Donald and the nephews story), with the additions of Uncle Scrooge and his rival Flintheart Glomgold enlivening the proceedings. Within the story, Rosa resoundingly echoes Barks with another grand panorama overlooking the lost city, one which places his own art as an evolution of Barks’s style, but Rosa’s most significant contribution would be in his stories and characterizations. Diana Green notes that “Rosa’s palette is specific to mood, location, and era…Rosa’s use of nuanced coloring and more muted tones in his work differs from that of many funny-animal books; by contrast, Carl Barks, Rosa’s predecessor in duck narratives, tended to use flat colors. While some of this may be attributed to advances in printing techniques, it also reflects a stylistic difference.”6 He took a special interest in Uncle Scrooge; with “Son of the Sun” (and “The Return to Plain Awful” after it), he placed Scrooge within the historical canon of Duck adventures, retroactively including Scrooge even in stories written before his creation. Rosa explained in his introduction to “Son of the Sun” that “I want to take everything Barks wrote and forge it into a workable timeline. My original dream was to become the new Carl Barks. I wanted to write, draw, and letter all my own stories. People tell me that my pencils look just like 5  Rosa revisited “Lost in the Andes” more directly with “Return to Plain Awful” (Donald Duck Adventures #12, May 1989), which served as a direct sequel to the Barks original (including the panorama reveal of the lost city), with the additions of Scrooge and Glomgold, as here. 6  Diana Green. “The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck,” in Critical Survey of Graphic Novels, Vol. 2 (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press. 2012), 481.

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Barks, but my inks are pure Rosa, and I can’t letter properly! So, I’ll have to settle for being Don Rosa.”7 Rosa’s style in both drawing and storytelling echoed that of Carl Barks and this first story set the tone for what would follow.8 The stories were sequels or reimaginings of decades-old Barks’s stories, involving return trips to exotic locales, returns of forgotten characters, and efforts to solidify the world that Barks had created; Scrooge’s time on the frontier, for instance, is a major focus of Rosa’s work, setting multiple stories in the Old West or the Klondike.9 Rosa explains his methodology “I constructed a list of every ‘fact’ about Scrooge’s youth that was ever revealed in a Barks tale, no matter how minute or obscurely buried morsel of history may have been. Next, I assembled these ‘facts’ into a timeline, mixing in actual historical events and people to give it an authentic feel.”10 Rosa’s West, as an extension of Barks’s, is not a wild space of high noon showdowns and bank robberies, but rather the birthplace of modern capitalism. Scrooge’s finding his fortune by being smarter than the smarties and tougher than the toughies echoes Barks’s philosophy, though Rosa uses it as a foundation to develop the character as a focal point. This reinterpretation of Scrooge’s history reconstructs the West that was: Scrooge becomes a Zelig-style figure, present at a great many major historical moments, though nevertheless on the fringe, not quite entering the grand stage of history. These stories mixed so-called “Barksian Facts” (in the same fashion as Jack Chalker had done with prose) with real historical research to create a fuller picture of  Rosa, Uncle Scrooge #219.  There are half a dozen references to earlier Carl Barks stories in the opening pages of “Son of the Sun,” ranging from the Candy-Striped Ruby (“The Status Seekers,” Uncle Scrooge #41, January 1963), Jason’s Golden Fleece (“The Golden Fleecing,” Uncle Scrooge #12, December 1955), even the Philosopher’s Stone (“The Fabulous Philosopher’s Stone,” Uncle Scrooge #10, June 1955). The referenced stories were all generally recognizable and popular within the fandom, and serves as a clear statement that Rosa was building directly out of the work of Barks. 9  Rosa explains that “the decision to create Barks Duck comics was done purely as a comics fan in general and a lover of Barks’ work in particular, to use his creations as my sandbox to play in. So it was my conscious intention from my first story ‘The Son of the Sun,’ not so much to introduce a ‘continuity’ into the BarksDuck Universe, but to clearly show that I knew what had gone before, that I loved it, and to make sure readers knew I loved it.” Thodoris Dimitropoulos, “Don Rosa, Interviewed for ONEMAN,” ONEMAN, 13 December 2013. https://www.oneman.gr/life/don-rosa-interviewed-for-oneman/ 10  Don Rosa, The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck (Timonium, MD: Gemstone Publishing, 2005), 70. 7 8

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the life Scrooge would have lived. The references laid out by Barks are expanded and emphasize the gritty realities of frontier life. These stories deconstructed the mythology of the West, locating the real-life individuals and portraying the events as they would have happened (albeit with a comical touch), and take an occasionally bleaker view of modern life than Barks had elucidated. Rosa’s research often proved an adventure in itself; he explains “as with all these stories of Scrooge’s early years, I don’t begin writing until I’ve done extensive research into history and geography.”11 His efforts started from re-reading the old Barks stories for context and clues as to Scrooge’s origins, but also tried to square the timeline with real-life places, events, and historical figures.12 Rosa explains his methodology “I constructed a list of every ‘fact’ about Scrooge’s youth that was ever revealed in a Barks tale, no matter how minute or obscurely buried morsel of history may have been. Next, I assembled these ‘facts’ into a timeline, mixing in actual historical events and people to give it an authentic feel.”13 Rosa reached out to fellow Duck fans and scholars while carefully researching the history of the later nineteenth century, when the young Scrooge was having adventures across the globe. Rosa even attempted to go straight to the source: “I sent my original detailed outline of this entire series…to Carl Barks, who was nice enough to check over its authenticity to his work…I was pleased that, apart from a few of his suggestions which I then followed, his letters of reply indicated his apparent satisfaction.”14 The writing process was a journey in itself: Rosa, like Barks, never ventured far from the comfort of his study, but traveled further than his idol by virtue of an easier access to information and the foundations to build on. Don Rosa’s work is best understood with an adaptational framework, though even that approach might be insufficient. Rosa is using the work of Carl Barks as raw material in the same manner that Erika Fuchs does:  Rosa, Life and Times, 131.  Notably, he also followed Barks’s approach; he explained in an interview that “the first thing I did when I knew I’d get a chance to do Scrooge stories is to go to a neighbor and to take her offer of the last 50 years of National Geographic. I’m sure I use them just as Barks did, but they are only a beginning point for research, since they don’t feature in-depth articles. It’s often more like a travelogue by some professional writer. The Nat Geos lead me to research in more detailed books.” Didier Ghez, Interview with Don Rosa, Didherghez.com, June 1996. https://didierghez.com/_private/interviu/rosaang.html 13  Rosa, Life and Times, 70. 14  Rosa, 117. 11 12

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that is, to create something new out of the base materials. Whereas Fuchs changed meanings large and small through translation, Rosa used the stories to create entirely new comics that also changed meanings large and small. Barks did not intend the stories to connect or have any particular continuity: for instance, the Duck Family tree remains the object of disagreement due to Barks’s nebulous and occasionally conflicting genealogy for the Ducks, with differences between countries and fandoms. Rosa endeavored to tame these bits of information into a comprehensive story, one that reflects on his fandom as well as the larger currents of publishing and history. Barks, Fuchs, and Rosa each write comics, both Fuchs and Rosa exist in conversation with Barks, albeit in somewhat different fashions. Mark O’Thomas’s definitions of adaptation elucidates the key differences: Fuchs’s work is the second mode (“adaptations are those that do not cross media but do cross culture”), while Rosa’s functions in the first mode (“the first are those that do cross media but are monocultural”).15 By this definition, comics are not generally adaptations, since they exist within the same culture and medium, even as the authors change (for instance, Wonder Woman as written by William Moulton Marston is different than how she is written by George Perez or Gail Simone, but the work still exists broadly in the same cultural context and medium). Don Rosa’s work is an exception, however: by Easter Eggs, creating continuations for earlier stories, and connecting the loose threads of Barks’s into a coherent canon, he creates an adaptation of the original work. Rosa is working in the same cultural context as Carl Barks, broadly speaking (both are middle-aged, White, American men), though comics as a genre (the “monoculture”) had changed considerably from the 1960s to the 1980s. That Rosa is also completing this work on behalf of a European publisher points to a hybridity framework as well; as O’Thomas states, “globalization may be an aid to transnational adaptation which need not necessarily produce texts that marginalize or consume the other, but might seek new, dialogic relations between texts. In this sense, translation and adaptation are allied pursuits which can lead rather than follow in an ethically framed artistic practice of rewriting across countries, continents, and cultures.”16 Rosa’s work does 15  Mark O’Thomas. “Turning Japanese: Translation, Adaptation, and the Ethics of Trans-­ National Exchange.” Adaptation Studies: New Approaches, edited by Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010), 49. 16  O’Thomas, 58.

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not  cleanly fit all definitions of adaptation, but does function in similar fashion: he is producing a work that seeks to recreate the work of Carl Barks, a new space that was not originally intended (Rosa seeks to connect the threads and write the grand history of Scrooge McDuck), with fidelity paid more to the works themselves than the intent of the author. Cutchins contends that “adaptations are artistic works that share a significant number of boundaries and interrelationships with other, previously known texts. But the more that meaning is generated by a perceiver by contact with these earlier texts, the more likely he or she is to identify it as an adaptation.”17 Rosa’s work, especially The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, is clearly tied to Barks’s work, though can be read and enjoyed without that prior knowledge. Understanding the references, history, and storytelling on the grand scale enhances the reading, and Rosa takes pains to clarify the exact significance of his chosen elements with essays at the end of each story often running multiple pages. Rosa’s early stories (“The Son of the Sun” in particular) can be understood as recreations of the original stories, but The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck serves to expand, reconstruct, and develop the overall canon of the Duck Family. Rosa’s work further functions as adaptation by his decision to weave in real-world locations (the Mississippi River, Skagway, the Anaconda Copper Mine), events (gold rushes in the Transvaal and the Yukon, the eruption of Krakatoa), and historic personages (Murdo MacKenzie, Sam Steele, Theodore Roosevelt). Cutchins explains that “much of the power of an adaptation, in other words, derives from its relationships with source texts and other texts on its boundaries, even if those texts are created hundreds of years later”; in this case, those texts comprise historical events as well.18

The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck as Fan Fiction Don Rosa, by receiving a paycheck directly from Gladstone Comics (and later Egmont), was thereby indirectly being paid by Disney, complicating whether this qualifies as fan fiction. Rosa himself is unabashedly a fan, and it is clear that his previous work on The Pertwillaby Papers was at least influenced by the storytelling of Barks (though the art style and overall content were somewhat different). By his own admission, Rosa positioned 17  Dennis Cutchins, “Bakhtin, Intertextuality, and Adaptation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, Edited by Thomas Leitch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 81. 18  Cutchins, “Bakhtin, Intertextuality, and Adaptation,” 84.

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himself as a fan of Barks first, and his work goes to great lengths to pay homage to Scrooge’s creator. The question of whether Rosa’s stories, particularly The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, verge on fan fiction is worth considering. Henry Jenkins explains that fans find ways to reuse and recontextualize texts with “if traditional collectors erase use value almost entirely in favor of sentimental value, these retro media fans restore use value by discovering new uses for forgotten materials…the ready availability of old media texts may inspire new acts of creation and performance…the residual becomes the emergent…as collector culture coexists with and even fuels retro culture.”19 Jenkins discusses the gap between collector and fan creator, and speaks to the manners in which Don Rosa (and Gladstone Comics to an extent) serve to bridge those gaps. Henry Jenkins’s discussion of “Ten Ways to Rewrite a Television Series” in Textual Poachers offers a starting point for discussing Don Rosa’s The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck in particular as fan fiction. Those comics fit five of the approaches outlined by Jenkins: “2. Expanding the Series Timeline” (Rosa sets everything in the narrative outside of the present-day setting of the comics, focusing on the origins of Scrooge McDuck in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries); “3. Refocalization” (Donald Duck only appears late in the story, and there as a child; Huey, Dewey, and Louie, Gladstone Gander, Gyro Gearloose, and other supporting characters are entirely absent); “4. Moral Realignment” (Scrooge’s journey is one of a descent into villainy as his search for ever-greater wealth breaks his moral compass); “7. Character Dislocation” (Scrooge does not arrive in eventual home base Duckburg until late in the narrative; Scrooge is unstuck in time); and “9. Emotional Intensification” (Scrooge deals with the deaths of his parents, estrangement from his sisters, and many lasting failures create lasting impacts on his character).20 These are hallmarks that can exist in works more generally, but Jenkins finds these to be common inclusions in fan fiction, which often attempts to expand or elaborate on the source material, as Rosa does here. Barks’s stories were set in a nominally modern setting, with automobiles, electric lights, and televisions, with only occasional limited flashbacks to the younger Scrooge. Rosa expands those moments to their logical conclusion, filling in the gaps to create a more complete history of Scrooge, explaining his development from an earnest shoeshine to only a poor old man over the course of  Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers (London, Routledge, 1992), 100.  Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 162–177.

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seventy years. This is similar behavior to the work done in the fanzines in both America and Germany, and reflects a common fan behavior; as Jenkins explains “many fan discussions develop and elaborate these meta-­ textual constructs, consolidating information the [text] explicitly provided and offering speculations and extrapolations to better explain the motivation and context of narrative events…even where such elaborate speculations are not offered, fans still try to reconstruct likely events not directly represented.”21 Don Rosa is neither the first nor the only to endeavor to make these connections about Scrooge McDuck or the Duck Family more generally, but he is the first to be formally recognized by both the publisher and the fan communities in America and Germany. There is a question of intent as well as function, and The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck could be understood as appropriation, a step beyond straight adaptation. Julie Sanders explains: “appropriation clearly extends far beyond the adaptation of other texts into new literary creations…what distinguishes appropriation from straightforward adaptation at this point is the specific intent behind the act of reinterpretation.”22 In this respect, Rosa’s work goes beyond An Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck or similar efforts by virtue of expanding the narrative well beyond what was laid out by Carl Barks, working to create something entirely new by incorporating aspects of history and new characters to the work. The elements are expanding upon for the discerning reader, relying on preexisting knowledge of the source, though Rosa is careful to include notes on his process throughout.23 There is an economic dimension to how fan fiction is demarcated as well. Writing about Hollywood filmmaking, Constantine Verevis argues that “participatory and social media cultures precipitate unauthorized new versions of recognizable properties and proprietary characters…” which describes Jack Chalker’s Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck (though said text was produced prior to the development of modern social media), while Don Rosa’s The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck is closer to “official adaptations and remakes just as clearly support and maintain commercial interests, including the negotiation of intellectual property rights and  Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 101.  Sanders, 191. 23  “The postmodern reader is alert to the working of these signifiers, to the semantic interplay between the informing source that is conjured into view and the supplementation or amplification that surrounds the fragmentary evocations of real life precursors.” Sanders, 187–188. 21 22

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payments.”24 The defining line between fan fiction and canonical creation is here rendered entirely within a capitalist system: the copyright holders are the ultimate arbiters of which authors produce the canon, even if those entities sought to obscure the identity of the true authors (as they did when they conflated Carl Barks and the other Duck comics authors with Walt Disney). Simply by the virtue of signing a contract with a licensee, Rosa is granted a degree of legitimacy, even if his motivations are broadly the same as Chalker or other fans. There is a final complication to defining whether Rosa’s work is fan fiction that arises from the fan response itself. Comics are often a collaborative effort to begin with, which limits the degree of ownership both legal and creative that the average creator can claim. There are exceptions (Charles Schulz with Peanuts, Bill Watterson with Calvin and Hobbes, George Herriman with Krazy Kat), but long-running comics tend to feature multiple writers and artists, if they even had the same writer and artist from the beginning.25 Changes to the creative staff can result in fan backlash (for instance, the hiring of Olivia Jaimes to write and draw for long-­ running comic strip Nancy in 2018 prompted considerable vitriol, even though the previous writer/artist Guy Gilchrist was the fourth person to write regularly for the strip after original creator Ernie Bushmiller died in 1982), and despite the gap in publication, Don Rosa is still regarded in some corners of the fan community as a usurper of Carl Barks.26 24   Constantine Verevis, “Remakes, Sequels, Prequels,” In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, Edited by Thomas Leitch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 270. 25  Comic books typically have a writer (which might be broken down into story and script), penciller, inker, colorist, letterer, and editor, and generally a separate cover artist and occasional assistants in various capacities, each working in collaboration. Cark Barks and Don Rosa were unique in that they were both doing most of the content creation on their own, though both have plenty of shared credits. 26  Rosa explains that “The puzzling thing is, there are some people who don’t like my work and some that do and are very passionate about it—that causes a lot of distress because people who don’t like it normally would just not pay attention to it. In fact, I wonder why, if they don’t like it, they keep reading it, just don’t read it if you don’t like it, nobody forces you…but in a way people feel like they have a personal interest, the characters are so important to them as they are to me so they can’t just ignore it. When they see other people who passionately love it, they have to passionately dislike it, that’s normal. But they should leave other people like what they want, and the others should just ignore their argument.” Mattia Mariani, “Don Rosa in Italy: The Great Interview of Ventenni Paperoni!” Ventenni Paperoni, 5 June 2019. https://www.ventennipaperoni.com/2019/06/05/ don-rosa-italy-the-interview/

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Don Rosa knew the stories that Carl Barks told as well as any other fan, and took great care in refining the timeline of Scrooge’s history, drawing from the old stories themselves, notes, scripts, within a context of real-­ world events, in much the same fashion that Barks had leaned on National Geographic, and Erika Fuchs upon her training in art history. This was a work of love, a paean to the many hours of joy from reading these stories as a youth. Moreover, this effort served to reintroduce audiences to those stories he so loved; Diana Green explains that “by redefining the genre beginning with his first duck story in 1985, Rosa rekindled interest in funny-animal narratives. His redefinition was, however, quite faithful to the tone of the stories that inspired him. His work is seen as on par with, if not eclipsing, the masters of the form from the 1950’s and 1960’s.”27 Rosa began to chart the personal history of Uncle Scrooge in comics form, following the markers laid down by Carl Barks, elaborating on the basic outlines with his own in-depth research, that would eventually be dubbed The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck in its collected twelve-issue format, with a dozen other side stories filling in gaps and references. Rosa emphasized the idea of Scrooge as a frontiersman, both at his old age and in his youth, just as Carl Barks did. The character is positioned akin to Teddy Roosevelt: a man equally at home on the frontier and in the hustle and bustle of city life, equally able to exist in the primitive wilds and the modern cityscape; Rosa had the historical Roosevelt cameo three times in the course of the comics, something that Barks had never done. Rosa explains specifically that “my research told me of another famous American (Teddy Roosevelt) who was in the Montana/Dakota Territory at the same tune, I knew it would be an absolute natural to make him one of Scrooge’s mentors and have him teach Scrooge the true values of life!”28 Scrooge’s connection to nature reflects his status as the self-made richest duck in the world: his fortunes gained from a gold strike deep in Alaskan wilderness, enhanced by his willingness to dive straight into various endeavors. The elements were there in the Barks originals, but were enhanced and focused in the adaptation, making those subtexts text. Don Rosa carefully charts the youth and development of the young Scrooge, following him as he participates in several major gold rushes yet invariably returning to the United States, first to Arizona, and later to the Klondike. He further grounds the stories within historical reality by  Green, Critical Survey, 482.  Rosa, Life and Times, 89.

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weaving the Barks stories into actual history, introducing historic figures to enhance the connections to the past. Rosa’s work, particularly the epic Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, was couched in authenticity, just as Barks’s was, while also remaining true to the classic canon. Rosa remarked “the sense of authentic history that is one of the most salient aspects of Barks’ great adventure sagas—perhaps that’s the one thing that makes me, like many others, find Scrooge to be a more fascinating character than Donald, who seems to live only in the present”29 Rosa builds upon this history in his stories, expands upon the themes and tone of Barks by delving deeper into Scrooge’s time on the frontier. The period is portrayed in loving detail, deeply-researched, and Rosa took pains to portray life on the frontier accurately. Scrooge works menial jobs, barely scraping by (and even then, occasionally relying on assistance from allies and loan sharks), his fated fortune seemingly forever out of reach. He becomes a hardened frontier spirit over time, his youthful optimism sharpening into a distrust of the world and a feeling that he owes nothing to anyone. This transformation embodies the landscape, the loss of the independence allowed by the frontier playing out within the character of Scrooge. The frontier keeps drawing Scrooge back: he adventures from the Mississippi to California, with forays to Indonesia, the Transvaal, and Australia, before ultimately finding his fortune in Alaska. Each of these events was something mentioned or implied in earlier Carl Barks stories; while there was only one Carl Barks story set in the past (“The Fantastic River Race,” Uncle Scrooge Goes to Disneyland, August 1957), many contained flashbacks or asides to decades of fortune-seeking. Scrooge lives a rough-and-tumble lifestyle throughout his life, his jobs ranging from cowboy to riverboat captain to miner, generally working by himself, which Rosa develops from short snippets into complete stories. He leans into Barks’s pro-capitalist philosophy, but finds ways to subvert obvious expectations. Rosa posits Scrooge as a man present at the closing of the frontier, for whom is fortune was a means for recalling his expansive personal experience, and echoes a certain sadness that these adventures are no longer possible. He explains “it’s the sense of authentic history that is one of the most salient aspects of Barks’s great adventure sagas—perhaps that’s the one thing that makes me, like many others, find Scrooge to be a more fascinating character than Donald, who seems to live only in the present.”30  Rosa, 155.  Rosa, 155.

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In Barks’s stories, Scrooge’s old adventures often formed the excuse for a given plot, sending him and his nephews in pursuit of a missing land deed or searching out some half-remembered legend. In Rosa’s stories, these adventures would often form the basis for the story itself, with Scrooge regaling his nephews with some tale of old-time adventure that is invariably a little wilder and more dangerous than that of the modern world. Rosa’s work on The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck is a creative endeavor that embodies something beyond the typical comic book reboot, a process more personal and entwined within the deeper history of the characters featured. It is a grand history of a fictional character than is nevertheless as meticulously researched as any history of a Roman Emperor or 19th  century business magnate. If Barks’s stories serve as a series of travelogues by way of adventure stories though very nearly real-life places (at as much as possible with National Geographic and the local library), Rosa’s work is a travelogue through the breadth and scope of Barks’s prodigious output, with a few detours to places of note. Barks emphasized authenticity in his stories that allowed them to function as more classic stories of travel literature, albeit aimed at a younger audience, even though he was largely confined to his farm in California throughout his working life. Don Rosa picked up the thread of these old stories, finding value in the same aspects of authenticity that Barks did, and focused on the travels of a single character, Scrooge McDuck, tracing his grand fictional history across a world of adventure. In this endeavor, Rosa himself was engaging in his own journey through the canon of Barks’s “Poor Old Man,” uncovering the myriad of clues Barks had left scattered in his wake, and found the characters he had loved in a whole new light. Rosa consistently claims he did not reinvent Scrooge’s character; rather, he simply found what was buried deep in the wild works of Carl Barks. Neither man would travel much during his prime; Barks did not visit Europe until he was 94, though Rosa would spend significantly more time on the European continent (as well as considerable time and money exchanging e-mails with fans across the Atlantic in the early days of the internet). The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck allowed Don Rosa to follow the paths staked out by Carl Barks: Barks was the trailblazer, striking out into the wilds with his adventurous tales, but Rosa was the builder, who followed the path of his predecessor and built a roadway that others could follow. If Erika Fuchs succeeded in making Donald Duck a German, Don Rosa succeeded grounding Scrooge McDuck as a historical figure. Carl Barks is fondly remembered by fans and scholars alike for his stories and creations, but Don Rosa built a

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monument out of incredible scale of that work that clarified the power and significance of those stories.

Don Rosa and “The King of the Klondike” “The King of the Klondike” (Uncle Scrooge #292, June 1995, part 8 of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck) includes encounters with several historical figures, but more significantly features an omnipresent attribute of life on the frontier: mud. Rosa’s West (in this case, Skagway, Alaska and Dawson City, Yukon Territory) is covered in mud, with the first two pages including Scrooge’s efforts to navigate half a mile of mudflats to reach the shore.31 In this moment, Scrooge encounters the dime-novel hero Wyatt Earp, who introduces himself threateningly with “don’t you recognize my famous buntline special?”32 Earp proves to be more a violent, egotistical brute, engaging in a barroom brawl, challenging a would-be gunslinger that “it’s me you want! The Wyatt Earp! Brave, courageous, and bold— the whole bit…I demand you shoot me!”33 Rosa pokes fun at the idea of the Western hero, casting Earp as a petty, violent thug, tarnishing the image of the white hat cowboy. Later in the story, the villainous Soapy Slick is introduced as a stand in for the real-life Skagway politician/criminal Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith, engaging in the same underhanded behavior that Smith was often accused of; here, Soapy is a loan shark and gambling kingpin who engages in claim jumping, similar to the historical Soapy.34 Soapy is the primary antagonist of Scrooge, though the difficulty of the environment (the mud and the cold) prove the real hindrance on Scrooge’s efforts. In Rosa’s reckoning of the West, there are few “good” individuals, with nearly every character in the story proving either outright malicious or simply ineffectual (as with the Mounties that appear near the conclusion of the story).35 Rosa laments that “I had to include Skagway in this tale; after all, another disappointing truth is that it was the American Skagway that was actually the lawless, crime-ridden murder capital of North America, not the peaceful Canadian town of Dawson City where the Northwest Mounted Police kept law and order. But that’s America for you.”36 The reality of Klondike  Don Rosa, “The King of the Klondike,” Uncle Scrooge #292, June 1995, 1–2.  Rosa, “Klondike,” 2. 33  Rosa, 3. 34  Rosa, 4–5. 35  Rosa, 22. 36  Rosa, 25. 31 32

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gets in the way of the storytelling to some extent, but the message of Rosa echoes that of Barks: that the frontier is dangerous, unfriendly, and consistently covered in mud. Rosa’s stories in general tend to stick as close as they can to the facts and real-life figures that inhabited the wilderness: many historical figures well-known and obscure turn up throughout his adventures there, ranging from Teddy Roosevelt and Wild Bill Hickock to Murdo MacKenzie and Sam Steele. The American frontier keeps drawing Scrooge back: though he initially adventures as a riverboat captain, circumstances cause him to take up a job as a cowboy, and soon after a prospector. Rosa uses these experiences to weave his story; at the start of “Raider of the Copper Hill” (Uncle Scrooge #288, October 1994, part 4 of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck), Scrooge laments “bad timing is my life story! I bought a riverboat right before the railroads out ‘em out of business! Then I got into cattle, but there’s not future there, either!”37 This West is not a land of endless opportunity, but one of broken dreams. Success here is achieved through luck and timing, with grit and determination secondary. Rosa explains of the story: “I have woven my tale around the founding of the famous (real life) Anaconda Copper Mine…this was a beautiful situation in which to place the young and callow Scrooge, and then teach him he won’t be able to retain success until he wins it wholly of his own hard work!”38 In this story, Scrooge achieves success through legal chicanery and the assistance of a wealthy benefactor rather than hard work, and that success proves short lived. Rosa uses the story to question the myth of the self-made man in a way that Barks never did, deconstructing the nature of Scrooge McDuck’s success and the very unfairness of a capitalist system that the comics were accused as serving as propaganda for. This proves a key thread in The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, with the earlier fortunes lost until he makes his first million, after which it proves quite a bit easier to generate further wealth.

Don Rosa and “The Vigilante of Pizen Bluff” The frontier seems to be ever fading into the distance through The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. Scrooge is always lighting out for the territories in the fashion of Huckleberry Finn, one step ahead of the sprawl of civilization. He departs the Mississippi River for the Dakotas and Montana,  Rosa, Life and Times, 68.  Rosa, 81.

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from there stopping in Arizona. The story in Arizona, “The Vigilante of Pizen Bluff” (Uncle Scrooge #306, October 1996, part 6B of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck), reads the closest to a traditional Western, with Scrooge facing off against the Dalton gang, with the assistance of Buffalo Bill and elements of his Wild West Show. The story subverts the myths of the Wild West, when at one point Buffalo Bill explains “but if we don’t have an exciting climax to this chase, P.T.’s publicity scheme will be worthless!”39 Buffalo Bill and Scrooge’s uncle Pothole proceed imagine half a page worth of pulp heroics, including Bill claiming “I pin two more to wall with Bowie Knives” and while Pothole “busts a table across a row of Daltons.”40 These statements directly parody the silliness of many classic Western tropes (similar to how Carl Barks poked fun in “The Sheriff of Bullet Valley”), but there is a underlying sense of loss to the story as a whole. Buffalo Bill’s concluding monologue intones “our glory days are quickly coming to an end! The great Indian tribes are all on reservations and we frontiersman are in silly Wild West shows! This year’s census shows that the frontier has now disappeared…we’re officially relics of a bygone age!”41 This is Rosa at his most metatextual, bluntly  echoing Turner’s frontier thesis, still building on the work of Carl Barks.42 Rosa’s stories are direct in their portrayal of life in the Old West, turning the brief snippets of Barks into full-length stories, borrowing elements of reality to create a more complete portrait of the historical moment; Rosa notes “as always, I’ve mixed much accuracy into this biography to give it a feel of authenticity.”43 Every major character that is not a Barks creation is a historical figure (or a facsimile thereof). Barks himself made use of a few real-world figures in his stories; for instance, “Soapy” Slick appears as an antagonist in a single Barks story, but is featured as a major villain in Rosa’s work, with additional historical details incorporated. Comics scholar Geoffrey Blum explains “where Barks dabbled and borrowed, Rosa researches his stories in painstaking detail, drawing maps…when Barks deftly but cavalierly combined features of two cities, Rosa goes out of his way to apologize for the inaccuracy…[Rosa] has  Don Rosa, “The Vigilante of Pizen Bluff” (U$ 306), 15.  Rosa, 16. 41  Rosa, 21. 42  This echoes Slotkin as well, who writes “in Cody’s farewell tours, that nostalgia for the ‘Old West’ that had been the basis for his first success gave way to a new form of sentiment: a nostalgia not for the reality but for the myth—not of the frontier itself, but for the lost glamor of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.” Slotkin, 87. 43  Rosa, Life and Times, 70. 39 40

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sought to flesh out Scrooge’s myth and tidy inconsistencies in the timeline.”44 Barks’s world-building reflected his own experiences growing up on a farm and interacting with aging cowboys, which was in turn enhanced by Rosa, who explains “the setting and events are as authentic as possible. I also tried to tell a bit more than some readers may know (or want to know) about Klondike gold prospecting.”45 In Rosa’s version, the West was dustier, muddier, and lonelier: the wide-open spaces were even more vibrant, yet also emptier, building on the themes of his predecessor. Rosa’s Scrooge suffers loneliness in his efforts to pull wealth from the land; in Barks’s version, he is always joined by his nephews or other relations, but in The Life and Times, he is most often on his own, or interacting with some stranger who will depart on some other path at the end of the story. While this plays upon certain larger myths of the Old West (“riding off into the sunset” may be the best-known trope produced by a Western), it captures a certain truth of the transitory reality of the space. The glory achieved by Scrooge is through blood, sweat, and tears; when he returns to Dawson City after striking gold, he is exhausted, dirtied, and virtually unrecognizable, echoing many of the lonesome images of cowboys in Goetzmann’s West of the Imagination. Jeremy Tunstall reflected on this shift in The Media Were American, explaining: “the United States had long prided itself on being an (or the) exceptional nation, uniquely founded on universal principles, which the rest of mankind may follow. Exceptionalism has continued to be a theme in America’s view of its place in the world, but since 1990 the world’s citizens and the world’s media have increasingly seen American exceptionalism as a negative.”46 There is little glee in Scrooge’s triumph, nor does life become particularly easier as the stories progress; the frontier is not a space that can be tamed, as such efforts simply result in its disappearance. Don Rosa lacks the depth of education that Erika Fuchs possessed, but still works to imbue his stories with cultural and historical underpinnings, reinforcing Scrooge’s Americanness with frontier imagery. The portrayal of the Old West in the Scrooge McDuck comics of Carl Barks and Don Rosa stands apart from contemporary images of that space. The western craze that consumed film, television, and comics was parodied by Barks on occasion, and Rosa worked to further deconstruct the  Blum, “Dawson,” 28.  Rosa, Life and Times, 132. 46  Jeremy Tunstall, The Media Were American: U.S Mass Media in Decline (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 104. 44 45

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idealized West that persisted in the American imagination (and perhaps even the Uncle Scrooge stories of his childhood). Here, frontier life is almost entirely bereft of glamour, the streets are paved with mud and wooden planks, hard work rarely pays off (and when it does, Scrooge is too exhausted to really enjoy it). There are tastes of an untouched utopia (Scrooge’s claim at White Agony Creek), but even those are quickly trampled upon, and there is a sense of inevitability: the frontier is very quickly closing, and even Alaska is falling to the forces of civilization by the end of Scrooge’s time there. Barks knew the frontier through his upbringing and stories, and worked it in to the history of Scrooge, capturing small moments and details of the reality, subtly echoing his own experiences. Rosa seeks the historical truth of the moment, locating historic figures present (or plausibly so) at major crossroads, using them to signify the changes that were occurring, commenting on the close of the frontier (as in “The Vigilante of Pizen Bluff” recounted above). The motivations of the two writers are similar: each endeavors to capture a sense of reality, and correct the myths of the West while still playing in that space. Barks writes an elegy for the frontier he missed by accident of birth, while Rosa constructs a masterwork of scholarship and fandom that serves as a towering monument to the work of Barks. The frontier is idealized within these stories, just as it is in the American mind, but both authors locate the pieces of truth buried deep within those myths, and illustrate the way things were. Don Rosa cultivated the seeds Barks planted into a fully formed biography of Scrooge McDuck, charting his travels and adventures across the world, dubbed The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. He created a travelogue through the comics of his youth, crucially revisiting the locations that Barks drew, including the mysterious valley in the Andes (twice). Barks’s originals enjoyed a popularity that owes much to this sense of adventure and authenticity, while Rosa’s follow-ups represent a different journey, crafting a canon out the assorted stories. Barks’s stories are modern travel stories, albeit ones written by a middle-aged man who would not leave the United States until his 94th birthday literally drawing from second-hand sources, and a successor working decades after his inspiration who spent an incredible effort researching the work to create something resembling fact. Rosa emphatically explains that: Only characters used by Carl Barks and created by Carl Barks. This is not Disney’s Donald Duck, as I have to explain to a lot of people, this is Carl

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Barks’ Donald Duck…Disney’s Donald Duck is an actor, who in every animated cartoon was a different character. He wasn’t a continuous character. So, you can do silly animated cartoons of this character throwing walnuts at Chip and Dale, slapstick nonsense, but you can’t have a comic book series on that. Carl Barks created the character of Donald Duck, he created the city of Duckburg, Uncle Scrooge, Gladstone Gander, etc. everything the world knows about the character Donald Duck was created by Carl Barks.47

The Donald Duck that exists in the comics is not the Donald Duck that exists in the cartoon shorts, and Rosa makes it clear that he is building on the Barks version of the character. There are some elements of the Disney cartoons that come through (the Three Caballeros, for instance), but Rosa’s version of the characters is the same as that of Barks, existing in continuity with Barks and his creations specifically. The DNA of Barks’s work runs through Rosa’s contributions, but there are other influences apparent. Whereas Barks largely worked within a vacuum (he wrote stories without much input or contact with outside sources), the fact that Rosa was a fan (and defined himself as such) ensured that he had contact with other sources of work. While Rosa himself largely sings the praises of Barks (particularly within The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck), his work contains elements not found in Barks’s work. Rosa’s stories tend to be a little more violent at times; Barks largely shied away from anything beyond light slapstick, while Rosa edges closer to the work of Italian authors like Scarpa and Martina. Rosa, in contrast to Barks, is better aware of other authors of the Duck comics, and his style was influenced by stories beyond Barks’s own. While most of Rosa’s stories are paeans to the work of Barks, they are not pure imitations, but rather mark a hybrid of styles, a bridge between the divergent evolution of Europe and the tradition of the Barksian classics.48 There are several large-scale, full-page brawls depicted within Rosa’s comic, particularly with the young Scrooge. The violence at times goes 47  Whitney Grace, “Visiting Duckburg with Legendary ‘Donald Duck’ Artist Don Rosa,” Fanboy Nation, 8 September 2015, https://fanboynation.com/visiting-duckburg-with-legendary-donald-duck-artist-don-rosa/ 48  Barks himself speaks of Rosa’s unique artistry, explaining “Don Rosa has a style that is a little bit different from the Disney style. I know there are a great deal of people that like that style, which is extremely detailed.” Sébastien Durand and Didier Ghez. “Carl Barks at Disneyland Paris.” (In Carl Barks: Conversations. Ed. Donald Ault. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 178.

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somewhat beyond purely slapstick, particularly in the sequence that occurs in “The King of the Klondike.” Scrooge, captured by the current villain, is taunted to the point of breaking by the news of his mother’s death back home. The action largely takes place offscreen, and there are implications that the event itself is simply a folkloric retelling of a disaster, but Rosa lends a great weight to the event. A grand piano crashes through a window, as smokestacks fall and smash through the docks, an event that is described as something akin to an act of nature. It seems clear that the destruction is the result of an unhinged Scrooge, and goes some distance toward explaining how Scrooge maintains his power. It is not wealth that allows him to dominate the world around him; his wealth is but a symbol of his power. Rather, it is his capacity for violence, that seems more readily apparent in Rosa’s work, much as in the Italian stories. The younger Scrooge has little compunction over using his physical might to control others; he simply carries away a would-be thief (Glittering Goldie) whom he effectively enslaves following her attempt to steal away his hard-earned gold. This story is canonical to Barks, though the event itself is kept somewhat vague in the original story, and it leads to a more violent conclusion, one much more akin to the Italian stories. Don Rosa completed around eighteen stories for Gladstone before he caught the attention of the European publisher Egmont, who offered a better salary than the small American publisher; Rosa notes that the “sequels and backstories came as European readers, seeing that I was a Barks fan like them rather than just another Disney-comics-worker, started writing to Egmont asking for those types of stories from me. The editors passed those desires on to me, and I was delighted to implement them!”49 It was through this new connection that the genesis of Rosa’s masterpiece occurred: The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, a twelve-issue (plus six side stories released later on) release by European publisher Egmont. Rosa explains the genesis of the series: “I wrote and drew the first series at the request of Egmont Creative A/S in Europe—my main goal was to gather every factoid, however small, that Scrooge McDuck (via his creator, Carl Barks) had ever mentioned about his early life and somehow feature (i.e. CRAM!) them all into a 12-chapter biography.”50 Rosa began his work in 1991, meticulously researching scattered bits of information, tracking down leads, speaking to fans, and writing letters directly to Barks; Rosa elaborates that “I sent copies  Dimitropoulos, “Don Rosa, Interviewed for ONEMAN.”  Rosa, Life and Times, 3.

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of that to all the main Barks fans around the world—including Barks—to get opinions…I was amazed that people even liked the finished series. To me, it was just a fan project. I was trying to assemble everything that Barks had ever said that Scrooge had done in one story. This is all what Barks said, and I’m putting it in one chronology, in one long story, and this is the tribute to Carl Barks.”51 Rosa’s efforts were not wholly appreciated, however; according to Barks biographer Thomas Andrae, the elder author “disagreed with attempts of other writers, including Don Rosa, Barks’s heir apparent as the scripter of Uncle Scrooge comics, to develop fully fleshed-out biographies for this characters and a coherent family tree.”52 Barks was never overtly confrontational over the use of the characters in this fashion; his sensibilities seem much more conservative and old-fashioned, that he was simply telling stories for a younger audience, not creating grand and significant works of fiction within a connected universe.53 Don Rosa entered a more divided canon in 1986 than Barks had left twenty years earlier, and it would have been a simple thing to jettison the various developments of foreign artists like Martina to focus on the original work of Carl Barks. While each of the stories in Life and Times was based on one of the original Barks-penned comics, many characters and situations are adapted from foreign comics. One such figure is John Rockerduck, a one-off antagonist in a late period Barks story (“Boat Buster,” in Walt Disney Comics and Stories #255, December 1961) that ended up becoming a major rival in the Italian comics continuity. Rosa explains “Barks used John [Rockerduck] one time in Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories 255, but this wealthy antagonist was later adopted in place of Flintheart Glomgold as Scrooge’s main rival in all the Italian Duck stories.”54 The prequel story, “Of Ducks, Dimes, and Destinies” (Uncle Scrooge #297, April 1996, part 0 of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck) features an appearance by Howard Rockerduck, John’s father, who is instrumental in Scrooge’s acquisition of his lucky dime. John Rockerduck later appears in “The Raider of the Copper Hill” (Uncle Scrooge #288,  Dueben, “Legendary ‘Uncle Scrooge’ Artist Rosa.”  Andrae, 107. 53  Barks was, however, quite agreeable to different styles that Europeans and others undertook. “Those guys in Italy and a number of people working for Egmont. They are wonderful artists. They are doing much better drawings of the ducks and other Disney characters than I was able to do. Daan Jippes, for example…Vicar who comes from Chile is excellent…those guys are superb artists.” Durand and Ghez, 178. 54  Rosa, Life and Times, 21. 51 52

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October 1994, part 3 of  The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck), along with his son, acting as a sort of origin story for Howard (in which the boy fails to learn a lesson about wealth and kindness), a first encounter between Scrooge and his future rival. The use of Rockerduck by Rosa, even in a small role, reveals his appreciation of another culture of Ducks; Rosa is not solely acting upon his old childhood fandom, but incorporating elements of that were important to non-American readers. It is a testament to the fusion of his art style and the content within his comics. Carl Barks remained Rosa’s main source of inspiration, with each element of a given The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck story was first identified within a Barks story, and Rosa worked hard to ensure the authenticity of these stories within the context of the original stories. Rosa explains “I first assembled all of the facts that Barks had ever mentioned…these references he’s made to what Scrooge had done early in his career. And I charted it out, and then decided which chapter would deal with which era, and figured out different actual historical people or places or events that Scrooge could interact with. When I got into it, that took me about 2½ years to do those 12 chapters.”55 There is an incredible attention to detail within these stories; Rosa includes myriad references to Barks, referencing both significant stories (“Lost in the Andes”, “The Status Seeker”) and characters (Glittering Goldie, Scrooge’s sisters), while attempting to craft a coherent and complete telling of Scrooge’s life story. It was his fondness of Barks characters and stories that drove him forward; Rosa explains of Goldie that “the dramatic manner in which the lost love of young Scrooge McDuck was revealed to me after I had already been a lifelong Scrooge fan is most assuredly why, when Egmont asked me to create a series depicting the life story of this character, I jumped at the chance with such enthusiasm.”56 Enthusiasm is what marks the work so strongly, and is a major reason for its success and acceptance within the larger fan community, though Rosa’s work is comparatively more popular among the Europeans. Don Rosa went into retirement due to health issues in 2008, though would not “officially” retire until 2013, with the publication of a high-end collection of his work that included a frank discussion of the forces that lead to his giving up the work he had so loved. Rosa has not left the scene entirely; he remains an enthusiastic fan of Barks and a booster of the worldwide fandom; he explained in an e-mail to a fan that “looking back on my own work, I realize more than ever that I was NEVER a  Elliot, “Interview With Don Rosa.”  Rosa, Life and Times, 112.

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‘professional.’ Everything I did was done as a FAN…that’s why everything I did was based strictly on someone else’s work and makes constant allusions to all my favorite movies and TV shows and everything else. I (my ego) never felt an urge to create anything totally new that would be ‘all my own.’ I (the fan) only wanted to pay homage to everything that I love.”57 Rosa’s status as a fan gave him an edge as a creator, allowing him to expand upon the stories Barks wrote, and bring in elements of the Italian tradition. In Rosa’s conception of himself, he is not a successor to Barks in the professional sense, but an ascended fan, who can now act as an ambassador to the community in the fashion that he pleases. He remains as active as he ever was on the convention circuit, continuing to appear at events in America and especially Europe, continuing to guide reprints of his work, though is a bit embittered by his mistreatment by Disney in particular. Despite his retirement, he still draws, even contributing cover art for Toumas Holopainen’s “soundtrack” album, The Life and Times of Scrooge.58 Rosa was able to do something fans only dream of, standing firmly next to his idol as one of the grand masters of Disney comics, but has left behind the praise and fame for a somewhat quieter life. His goodbye essay concluded on a bittersweet note; he writes “I thank Carl Barks for creating the comics that I loved so much that I serendipitously fell into the blessed work of paying homage to those great comics for over 20 years. And I thank you for receiving that work so graciously and making me feel very special…until they broke my spirit. But if you’ll excuse me…I think I’ll now go back to being only a fan.”59 Rosa may be finished with his life’s work of comics, but he played a great role in shaping the Duck Comics fan community into what it is today, and created his own definition of what the canon comprised, even in the face of disagreement from Barks. Everything Don Rosa did, from The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck to answering fan mail to attending conventions in Europe, was an act of pure love, for both Carl Barks and the entire Duck Comics fandom, and marks a shift toward a hybridized world. Barks sat at his chicken farm and relied on old copies of National Geographic, but Rosa brought in elements from other traditions, with additional access to the then-nascent internet and fellow fans worldwide, and marked a major shift in Disney comics that is still playing out today.  Don Rosa, “An Epilogue”.  Nikola Savić, “A Lifetime of Adventure” (in Progsphere, February 2014). 59  Rosa, “An Epilogue”. 57 58

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References Andrae, Thomas. Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2006. Blum, Geoffrey. “Dawson: Imagination’s Doorway.” Walt Disney Giant No. 1, Gladstone Comics, September 1995. 26–29. Cutchins, Dennis. “Bakhtin, Intertextuality, and Adaptation.” The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. Edited by Thomas Leitch. Oxford University Press, 2017. 71–86. Dimitropoulos, Thodoris. “Don Rosa, Interviewed for ONEMAN.” ONEMAN, 13 December 2013. https://www.oneman.gr/life/don-­rosa-­interviewed-­ for-­oneman/ Dueben, Alex. “Legendary ‘Uncle Scrooge’ Artist Rosa Builds A Library in Duckburg.” Comic Book Resources. 18 June 2014. https://www.cbr.com/ legendary-­uncle-­scrooge-­artist-­rosa-­builds-­a-­library-­in-­duckburg/ Durand, Sébastien and Didier Ghez. “Carl Barks at Disneyland Paris.” Carl Barks: Conversations. Ed. Donald Ault. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. 173–180. Elliot, Fieval A. “Interview with Don Rosa.” YouTube, 23 February 2011. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYUENWNAUR8 Ghez, Didier. Interview with Don Rosa, Didherghez.com, June 1996. https:// didierghez.com/_private/interviu/rosaang.html Grace, Whitney. “Visiting Duckburg with Legendary ‘Donald Duck’ Artist Don Rosa.” Fanboy Nation, 8 September 2015, https://fanboynation.com/ visiting-­duckburg-­with-­legendary-­donald-­duck-­artist-­don-­rosa/ Green, Diana. “The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck.” Critical Survey of Graphic Novels, Vol. 2. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2012. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers. London: Routledge, 2012. Mariani, Mattia. “Don Rosa in Italy: The Great Interview of Ventenni Paperoni!” Ventenni Paperoni, 5 June 2019. https://www.ventennipaperoni. com/2019/06/05/don-­rosa-­italy-­the-­interview/ O’Thomas, Mark. “Turning Japanese: Translation, Adaptation, and the Ethics of Trans-National Exchange.” Adaptation Studies: New Approaches. Edited by Christa Albrecht-Crane and Dennis Cutchins. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010. 46–60. Rosa, Don. The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. Gemstone Publishing, 2005. Rosa, Don. “The Raider of the Copper Hill.” Uncle Scrooge #288. October 1994. Rosa, Don. “The Vigilante of Pizen Bluff.” Uncle Scrooge #306, July 1987. Rosa, Don. “Untitled.” Message to Dan Cunningham. 9 July 2013a. Rosa, Don. “The Epilogue.” Don Rosa Collection. February 2013b. http:// career-­end.donrosa.de. Accessed 20 August 2016. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. New York: Routledge, 2016.

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Savić, Nikola with Tuomas Holopainen. “A Lifetime of Adventure.” Progsphere, February 2014. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-century America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Stanjano, Frank. “Don Rosa January 2008, part 2.” Frank Stanjano’s Comic Podcast, 9 June 2008. Tunstall, Jeremy. The Media Were American: U.S Mass Media in Decline. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Verevis, Constantine. “Remakes, Sequels, Prequels.” The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies. Edited by Thomas Leitch. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 267–284.

CHAPTER 8

“The Dream of Three Lifetimes”: Barks, Fuchs, Rosa, and Artistic Hybridity in Donald Duck Comics

The history of Disney comics and their fans is vast, stretching across national boundaries and generations. Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge were the best-selling comics on American newsstands in 1960, but had effectively disappeared within a decade. In Europe, Donald Duck was transformed by local writers and artists to their own ends, that splintered outward into a dozen different iterations undreamt of by Walt Disney. The growth of fan communities happened in countless spaces, quirks of chance that built lasting organizations, and built unexpected connections at the dawn of the digital age. The modern state of Disney comics is built on the foundations of the works of Carl Barks, Erika Fuchs, and Don Rosa, with the comics serving as a connecting thread between fans from all walks of life and in all geographic spaces. There are other threads to be followed in the exploration of the global popularity of Donald Duck. Though Carl Barks was regarded as “The Good Duck Artist,” many markets produced their own notable creators. Italy in particular took advantage of this: Donald Duck was so popular there in the post-war years that the demand for the comics began to outstrip the American supply of the stories. The Italian Duck comics experienced a divergent evolution, one that began under Romano Scarpa and Guido Martina in the early 1950s. The flagship Disney comic digest, Topolino, began bi-monthly publication in 1952, and quickly outpaced the supply of American-supplied comic stories (the American books tended to © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 P. C. Bryan, Creation, Translation, and Adaptation in Donald Duck Comics, Palgrave Fan Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73636-1_8

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feature one or two 10-page stories, and a few one- or two-page works to fill the space, whereas the Italian books tended to feature several lengthy stories, interspersed with a few one-page stories, in a digest format). To compensate, the publishers began to rely on home-grown talent, who in turn put their personal spin on the characters. Martina began to create a parallel to Barks’s universe, spring-boarding off of the originals to create both new characters and recast old figures in a new light, one that became increasingly defined after Barks’s retirement. Martina’s contributions included developing the one-shot character John D.  Rockerduck as a major rival to Scrooge, Grandma Duck as a more significant figure in the family tree, and the introduction of Donald’s anti-heroic alter-ego Paperinik. Scarpa’s influence on the characters is somewhat less obvious; he introduces several characters of questionable canonicity, including a brother for Scrooge McDuck and some later generations of the Coot Kin (a related branch of the Duck Family), though his most significant character is Brigetta MacBridge, a potential love interest for Scrooge (and rival to Barks creation Glittering Goldie). Martina retired in the 1980s having written some four hundred stories, while Scarpa’s output was more diverse and sporadic; neither would become as well-known as Barks or Rosa outside of Italy, or would actively engage with the fan community in the manner that they did, but still had influence upon the development of the worldwide Duck fandom and The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck specifically. The Italian stories tend to be somewhat more violent; while comical, it stands in contrast to Barks’s softer, more light-hearted stories, with Scrooge in particular taking a more physical approach to conflicts. In one Martina story (“Paperino e il disidratatore disidratato,” Topolino #1185), Scrooge and Donald attempt to boil a chicken alive, with Scrooge at one point chasing the bird with a large knife and fork. Later in the story, Scrooge actually chases Donald with an antique musket, after Donald accidentally destroys a portion of Scrooge’s wealth in a successful attempt to transform a miniaturized Scrooge to normal size. Huey, Dewey, and Louie act in less mischievous and more directly violent manners, and there is a strong element of slapstick that transcends the softer American variety. Martina’s recasting of Donald as Paperinik (a violent, selfish vigilante in the vein of the Shadow or other American pulp heroes) is a more direct example of his changes, though it is one that exists primarily within the Italian continuity than in the works of foreign artists. This should not be read as trafficking in offensive stereotypes; rather, it is indicative of Italian

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comedic traditions. Italian popular culture, from Roman times and the emergence of Commedia dell’arte in the 1500s, has a long and robust element of violence used for comic effect. Martina makes Donald more recognizable to his audience by situating the character within familiar tropes and roles, in the same fashion that Erika Fuchs did with her references to German culture, an example of the Fuchs Effect occurring in a different national space. Among the most significant developments in recent decades is the fan-­ created Disney comic database I.N.D.U.C.K.S. The project started in 1992 as part of a mailing list by Swedish fan Per Starbäck, with Dutch fan Harry Flucks programming a framework in 1994 to better organize the information.1 This was not the first serious effort to compile the stories, but it was the first global project, cross-referencing stories that appeared in different publications in various countries to gain a more complete sense of the content being produced and what works were being translated for new audiences. Moreover, this was an internet-based project, which allowed for greater access than similar efforts in fanzines and, as of December 2020, contains at least 160,000 stories, running the gamut from simple, single-page jokes to expansive, hundred-page efforts with a distinct labelling system that locates when and where the stories first appeared. These were inspired by fan efforts, including those in The Barks Collector and the identification of Carl Barks by Malcolm Willits and John Spicer. Another notable effort was that of civil engineer Jürgen Wollina, a Donaldist who spent thirteen years researching, constructing, and perfecting a map of the city, down to the street level, drawn entirely from the classic Barks stories. Notably, the map did not attempt to rectify competing facts as Rosa and many other fans did, but instead posited that Donald Duck, for instance, had lived in dozens of home, to reflect both different styles of architecture and geographic features, opting to approach all of Barks as inherently worth recording. Various other features were noted as well, and even the local geography (mountains, forests, deserts) were incorporated into the map, referencing the somewhat elastic geography of the original. The completed map was published in Der Donaldist #132 (July 2008), and D.O.N.A.L.D. continues to sell the full-sized maps, though Wollina unfortunately died in 2015.

1

 Ole Damgaard, “An Interview with Harry Fluks,” Inducks History, 11 March 2007.

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The revival of DuckTales in 2017 was developed by Matt Youngberg and Francisco Angones as a spiritual successor of the original series, the comics, and variations thereof. From the beginning, the series emphasizes the Barksian canon: Donald is a core cast member (rather than a cameo in the 1987 series), prominently featured in Barks’s oil portrait Always Another Rainbow in Scrooge’s lounge in the first episode, and Donald even spoke coherently in the first season finale via a “Barksian Translator.” The series also includes aspects of Don Rosa’s work, like John D. Rockerduck as an ongoing antagonist, as well an emphasis on character history and developing a canon, as well as introducing as-yet unseen characters from the comics: notably, Huey, Dewey, and Louie’s parentage is explored in greater detail than even in Rosa’s run, with their mother Della Duck joining the main cast in the second season.2 The arc of the second season, involving an invasion from the moon, hews closer to the Italian Paperinik comics, which featured the alien Evronians as primary antagonists in the PKNA—Paperinik New Adventures series from the late 1990s. There were non-comics connections as well: the Three Caballeros make multiple appearances, the “Moon Theme” from the 1989 NES game is a recurring motif in the second season, and various extended cameos from other Disney animated series of the 1990s (Darkwing Duck, Talespin, Goof Troop). The series cancellation in December 2020 is another end for the franchise, but the following will keep it alive in some circles until an eventual revival in some future space. No work of art is produced in a vacuum. The creation of Donald Duck resulted from the efforts of countless individuals, many of whom have been lost to history. The Duck that existed in 1942 was at a crossroads: the same year that saw the releases of Der Furher’s Face and Saludos Amigos, utilizing Donald as a stand-in for the average American in these propaganda projects, also saw Carl Barks enter the comics industry, with some help from Jack Hannah and Bob Karp, on “Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold.” The Donald of these comics became a more dimensional figure than the roiling ball of rage and disruption featured in the early shorts, still 2  The scope of references in the 2017 Ducktales is more expansive than there is space for here, ranging from crossovers with 1990s Disney animated series (Darkwing Duck, Goof Troop), films (The Three Caballeros) and Capcom’s Ducktales (the recurring “Moon Theme” motif). The series is an excellent example of transmedia convergence as fan culture in the modern era, with showrunners Matt Youngberg and Frank Angones incorporating elements from nearly all parts of the Duck Family’s media history, including a variety of comics-only characters, though they are less committed to Barks’s canon than Rosa’s.

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a beaten-down everyman, but possessing a more stable psyche. The disjointed process of creation and transformation necessitates an interdisciplinary approach. Donald Duck is an American figure, grown out of that landscape, bound up with myth and symbol (Donald is, after all, the eternal everyman, and Scrooge serves as a pure distillation of the bootstraps myth). This view, while accurate to the initial creation, fails to consider the broader, deeper power these characters possess, power far beyond the ken of their creators. The transition of Donald from an American figure to a transnational one should be at least partially credited to Walt Disney. Donald Duck, after all, came out of the war without the same baggage of the more outwardly racist propaganda shorts like those of Bugs Bunny and Popeye. The studio’s decision to moderate the content of their shorts might have been a business decision, or a reflection of Walt Disney’s humanity (or perhaps both), but the end result was a resurgent Disney attaining footholds worldwide, expanding the global appeal of their franchises. The use of Donald Duck as a world diplomat, as a figure of friendship to South America at large, had solidified the character as the flagbearer for the Disney brand worldwide, even as the more clean-cut Mickey Mouse became a mascot of the larger enterprise stateside. Donald’s role in the Good Neighbor policy and diplomatic outreach had positioned the character to play that role again: Disney had found success with the character in South America, and there was a certain inevitability to Donald Duck becoming a world diplomat. Carl Barks, working from his home studio in the heart of the Inland Empire, was free to write the adventures of the Ducks as he saw fit, free from the watchful eye of Walt Disney, no editor looking over his shoulder, no market research to make minor demands. In this space, Barks created his alternate vision of Donald: an inhabitant of Duckburg; watchful uncle to Huey, Dewey, and Louie; cousin to Gladstone Gander; nephew to rich Uncle Scrooge. This Donald possessed the gift of speech: he did not speak with Clarence Nash’s nasal squawk, but like a normal person. The trait that inured him to the audience in the first place, his tempestuous temper, was muted; instead, he became an often plucky, sometimes lazy, always relatable everyman. The Donald glimpsed in Modern Inventions, a victim of modernity, at odds with the march of technology, trapped in a world he did not create, was given from on the pages of Barks’s comics. Twenty-­ four pages of color allowed for greater development that Donald had ever been given in the original animated shorts, with family histories and grand

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rivalries sketched out across thousands of panels. Carl Barks made Donald Duck, or at least a version thereof, his own. There was more to this work than simply giving life to the Ducks. The world grew and sprawled, as Donald (especially with the addition of Uncle Scrooge) took wide-ranging adventures, straight out of the pages of National Geographic. Barks had a command of sweeping vistas and grand landscapes that was virtually unmatched in comics in this period, and it lent an authenticity to the treasure hunts and comical vacations. In a moment when Superman seemed trapped in Metropolis, Donald Duck was exploring the Andes, diving for pearls near the Great Barrier Reef, navigating secret passages within the Great Pyramids, and sailing across the South Pacific. Even the more fantastic adventures had a weight of reality, such as the pursuit of the famed Golden Fleece that results in a gold waistcoat that it both heavy and cold. There was excitement and adventure to be found in the best Barks stories, which was at times lacking in the staid superhero comics of the Comics Code era. These stories did lack much of a sense of continuity, however, as Scrooge’s fortune was invariably sufficient to drive whatever plot was brewing in a given week, and Donald remained relatively poor and downtrodden, though there were small hints of character development. This meant that Barks’s stories were quite simple and straightforward, however, allowing new readers to jump in without much sense of the supporting cast at large, nor requiring editorial oversight to explain the plot up to a given issue (as was the case with Marvel and DC, as serialized storytelling in superhero comics become more commonplace). This mix of simplicity and authenticity allowed a wider audience to enjoy the stories, and the narratives could be easily understood (or, indeed, translated) by new audiences. Barks never fathomed the breadth of the readership during his career proper, and was taken aback that his comics remained popular not only in America, but in Europe as well. Walt Disney himself had little inkling of the success of these comics: there was no great intent behind this process, but chance and happenstance. These comics did achieve success in nearly every market they entered, as the stories were translated and adapted by local publishers to suit the needs of local audiences. The dialogue that Barks wrote bent and shifted with each iteration, as the comics entered markets starved by World War II, a process that was effectively invisible to the readership in the pre-internet cultural landscape. The Fuchs Effect, as I referred to it, Germanized Donald Duck in a very real way for German audiences, and the process certainly occurred in other

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locales. Erika Fuchs had a deeper influence on the adoption of the Ducks as cultural institutions in Germany, creating a unique relationship between the characters and the country. The process of translation is complicated by cultural contexts. The comics that Erika Fuchs rewrote and that the German audiences read functioned closer to adaptations, with art and culture injected into the language that had not existed prior. Barks wrote for an American audience, with no knowledge of the wider reach of his works, while Fuchs recognized the potential of these comics as educational spaces, to bring bits of culture to a readership coming of age in a Germany still in a process of reconstruction. In this mix, Don Rosa represents the force of hybridity, taking the work of Barks and the context of history and of European traditions to create something that spoke to a global audience. Just as Fuchs benefited from the politics of the Adenauer administration, Rosa came along at a moment of reunification. Rosa created The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck as a love letter to Barks, but it was not born solely from his mind, just as the work of Barks was inspired by his youthful experiences and National Geographic. Rosa’s Scrooge was a citizen of the world, his history inexorably bound up with the events of the nineteenth century: this Duck was not just a day-tripper, but an adventurer who had seen what the world was, for good and (more often) bad. Rosa was a fan, one who had corresponded with European fans, who understood the Ducks not as a product of America but as a gift to the world. This split is apparent today. New issues of Donald Duck comics can be found on newsstands. The German fan organization D.O.N.A.L.D. continues to hold yearly conventions and publish a long-running fanzine. Don Rosa has received the prestige format reprinting of his stories in the same fashion as Carl Barks did in America, and it was under Egmont that Rosa’s later work was produced. The Ducks have never really left the American consciousness, as evidenced by the success of the Ducktales reboot, though it ended in March 2021 at the conclusion of its third season. In America, the comics remained in circulation, both in reprints and new material, albeit taking a much smaller space on newsstands than they did in their heyday. Even Dorfman and Mattelart’s How to Read Donald Duck has received a new edition in 2018. American fans lamented the glory of the German fans in the 1980s, and it seems now that there are even fewer American fans now to look across the Atlantic, and lament what might have been. The ultimate question is what this means. Walter Wanger and Robert Carr promised a glorious future for Donald Duck as the flagbearer of

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Western civilization, while Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart feared that this future was coming true. The reality has arrived somewhere in the middle: Disney was subverted to the ends of local actors, serving as an avenue for art appreciation (as it would under Fuchs’s pen in Germany) or outright propaganda (as it would in Chile). This process has been rendered more complex by the rise of Disney as a multinational conglomerate: the Eisner Era was responsible for the collapse of the Disney comics community in America, though the comics did eventually return, and still continue to be published in present day, once more licensed out. Disney’s takeover of Italy’s Topolino saw the continued success of the publisher, and it seems plausible that lessons were learned, considering the success of Marvel Comics under Disney’s ownership. The German fan community has more or less carried on, though its founding members have begun to die off, though high-end collector’s edition of the works of Carl Barks and Don Rosa continue to sell out. There are potentials for a situation like what occurred in post-war Germany; after all, John Kerry emphasized cultural diplomacy as a cornerstone of his tenure as Secretary of State, and Disney has become more secure in its role as a purveyor of American culture in the age of superheroes. New writers and artists will take on the Ducks, creators from the world over, bringing their own versions, whether they look to Barks, Fuchs, Rosa, Scarpa, or others still for inspiration. The final story of Donald, Scrooge, and the nephews is unwritten, even as creators retire or die, and the characters will continue to evolve and adapt to new settings, spaces, and cultures. There is always another rainbow.

Reference Damgaard, Ole. “An Interview with Harry Fluks.” Inducks History. 11 March 2007.

Index1

A Adaptation studies, 130, 190 Adenauer, Konrad, 111, 123 Adenauer Era, 105 Another Rainbow, 164, 176 B Barks, Carl, 3, 43–44, 61, 62, 69, 185 Calgary Eye-Opener, 72, 156 early life and career, 71 “The Good Duck Artist,” 67 identification by fans, 99 oil portraits, 72, 100, 165 retirement, 97 Beagle Boys, 74, 135 Branding, 39, 56, 57, 66 Europe, 106 Bray, J.R., 34 Col. Heeza Liar, 47

C Canon, 94, 146, 187, 188, 193, 194, 214 Cochran, Russ, 164 Comics Code, 122 Comics collecting, 146, 161 Cultural diplomacy, 51, 55, 59, 113, 116 D Dell Comics, 3, 5, 15, 30, 98, 123, 143 De-Nazification, 6, 105 Disney, Walt, 2, 38, 49, 53, 57, 59, 66, 69, 80, 143 Disney animated shorts The Band Concert, 40 Commando Duck, 65, 121 Der Fuehrer’s Face, 62 Donald and Pluto, 42

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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Disney animated shorts (cont.) Donald Gets Drafted, 61 Don Donald, 43 Education for Death, 63 Modern Inventions, 43 The New Spirit, 61 The Spirit of ‘43, 62 Disney Animation, 44, 47, 72 Kimball, Ward, 44 World War II, 50 Disney comics, 177, 180 Disney comics in Italy, 153, 211 Disney Company, 2, 5, 24, 39, 48, 56, 70, 117, 129, 145, 180 D.O.N.A.L.D, see Donaldism Donald Duck, 29, 49, 52, 61, 66, 69, 70, 73, 78, 105, 122, 160 creation and early history, 42 starring roles, 43–44 Donald Duck (comic), 144 “A Christmas for Shacktown,” 5 “Christmas on Bear Mountain,” 74 “Donald Duck and the Mummy’s Ring,” 5 ”The Golden Helmet”,” 136 “Lost in the Andes,” 81 “The Magic Hourglass,” 79 “Only A Poor Old Man,” 5 “The Sheriff of Bullet Valley,” 90 Donaldism, 137, 147, 154, 155, 213 Duckburg, 73 as Entenhausen, 135 map, 157, 179, 213 Duck Family tree, 77 Duckomenta, 2 DuckTales, 158, 171, 172, 179 reboot, 214

F Fan studies, 26, 160 Fanzines, 148, 163 Barks Collector, 149, 165, 180 Der Donaldist, 157 Duckburg Times, 157, 158, 180 Female characters in Disney comics, 19 Frontier theory, 85–86, 94 Fuchs, Erika, 6, 15, 16, 105, 152, 201 early life and career, 125 ”Erikativ,” 127, 131 German cultural references, 128, 136 retirement, 137 Fuchs Effect, 105, 132, 136–137, 153

E Egmont, 110, 126, 132, 153, 181, 204 Eisner, Michael, 174

I I.N.D.U.C.K.S., 6, 150, 213 An Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck, 146

G Gemstone Publishing, see Gladstone Comics German literature, 127 Gladstone Comics, 153, 158, 167, 174, 176, 180, 186, 192 Gladstone Gander, 74 Glittering Goldie, 204 The Good Duck Artist, 100 Gutenberghus, see Egmont Gyro Gearloose, 74, 129 H Hamilton, Bruce, 159, 164, 165 Hannah, Jack, 72 How to Read Donald Duck, 7, 24, 78, 148, 150, 153 Huey, Dewey, and Louie, 22, 73, 129 Hybridity theory, 16, 190

 INDEX 

J JCS 1067, 108–109 K Kimball, Ward, 65 Klondike gold rush, 93, 198 L The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, 7, 80, 192, 202, 204 “Of Ducks, Dimes, and Destinies,” 205 “The King of the Klondike,” 198, 204 “The Raider of the Copper Hill,” 205 Toumas Holopainen’s” “soundtrack” “album, 207 “The Vigilante of Pizen Bluff,” 200 M Martina, Guido, 125, 166, 211 McCay, Winsor, 31, 36, 61 N Nash, Clarence, 43 National Geographic, 76, 81, 87, 124 O Old West, 75, 200 P Paperinik, 125n58, 214 Propaganda, 29, 49, 65, 70 The Sinking of the Lusitania, 35–36

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R Rockerduck, John, 92, 205 Rosa, Don, 6, 16 early life, 185 retirement, 206 S Saludos Amigos, 53 Scarpa, Romano, 125, 166, 211 Schröder, Horst, 153 Scrooge McDuck, 4, 62, 72, 73, 76, 78, 92, 124, 129, 187, 193 creation, 74 See also Canon Shooter, Jim, 174 Spillman, Klaus, 151 State Department, 116, 119 T The Three Caballeros, 58–59, 71, 82, 120 Transnationalism, 39, 44 Translation studies, 125, 129 translation styles, 134 U Uncle Scrooge (comic), 138, 144 “Back to the Klondike,” 94 “North of the Yukon,” 96 “Only A Poor Old Man,” 75, 135 “The Son of the Sun,” 186 “Uncle Scrooge and the Golden River,” 5 V Von Storch, Hans, 154

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INDEX

W Wanger, Walter, 118 Western (genre), 82

Western Publishing, 3, 48, 66, 72, 144–145, 158, 162, 166, 177 Gold Key, 145, 166