Two posts in one week, what is this 2010?

 

I read another comic published this decade!

Dynamite's Duck Tales #1

It was....okay.

I was not familiar with any of the creative team prior to buying this comic. The writer, Brandon Montclare, has some Marvel credits under his belt, while the artist has worked on the Geronimo Stilton comics.

The art is appealing and easy to look at.  The character designs kind of split the difference between Duck Tales 1987 and 2017 (for instance the nephews have big heads and giant eyes), but the setting is definitely Duckburg Classic.

The story is just meh, I assume it is intended to serve as an introduction to the concept for little kids.  The best thing about it is that Scrooge tells the kids stories of past adventures, in the form of two-page gag strips.

It's a cute gimmick, like the fake movie trailers in Grindhouse.

If you have little kids at home who are interested in comics, or if you are looking for something nostalgic that you don't need to think about, this is a perfectly acceptable comic book.  It's not the worst Duck Tales comic, that's for sure.

And The Infinite Sadness

 In which Disney Weirdness takes a look at a recent-ish comic book

I have been eagerly purchasing all of the Marvel Disney books as they are released, and then stacking them up in a pile and not reading them.  After consulting with the learned members of the esteemed Feathery Society, I decided to jump in with what is considered by experts to be the best of the lot, Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime.

Let's start with the positives:  The book looks fantastic. Marvel wisely decided to treat this book as an Italy showcase, with art from Paolo Mottura, Francesco D'ippolito, Lucio De Giuseppe, Alessandro Pastrovicchio, Vitale Mangiatordi, and Giada Perissinotto.  If the intent behind this book was to showcase what the Disney Italia artists are capable of, then mission accomplished.  If this book causes some teenage kid to check out PKNA or Double Duck or the Disney Originals series, it counts as a success.

The first appearance of Uncle Scrooge, "Christmas on Bear Mountain," which you already have in your collection, is included as a bonus story, for historical context and also (one assumes) to entice readers to check out Fantagraphics' Carl Barks Library series, and also to pad out the page count.

So it's a good-looking comic, what's the problem?  The problem is Jason Aaron.

Aaron is a superhero writer, and a great one.  But he isn't quite as comfortable in Duckburg as he is on Earth-616 or Bizzaro World or whatever.  In the introduction piece, Aaron writes that his introduction into Duck comics was through Don Rosa's "Son of the Sun" and "Guardians of the Lost Library."  Don Rosa, as much as we love him, is an atypical Duck scribe, in that his stories are continuity-heavy, meticulously researched, and reference deep cut comic book lore in a way that puts Roy Thomas to shame. That stuff is catnip to superhero fans.  

Aaron's imagined audience for this comic is a Marvel Comics reader who is dipping his webbed toes into Disney Comics for the first time.  Fittingly, it's a slam-bang action fest that pulls Uncle Scrooges from all over the (ugh) Multiverse to battle the Lord of Dimes (Scrooge, but evil).

It's an Infinity Gauntlet, a Secret Wars, a Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Which is fine, if that's your thing.

If you have a teenage nephew or someone else in your life who is super into superheroes, they ought to like this.  Hardcore Duck fans like us might bristle at Donald the berserker

but if you are only familiar with the animated cartoons you won't care.

SO overall, this ins't a bad comic. The story is fun for what it is, and the art looks great.  Here's hoping the next one will strike a better balance between action and humor.

Crumb Bums

 

I'm about three-quarters of the way through Crumb: A Cartoonist's Life by Dan Nadel.  It's really good, highly recommended.

Reading it doesn't make me feel like I missed out on "the sixties" so much, but it does make it seem like it was a great time to be involved in comics fandom. As kids Crumb and his brother collect Carl Barks and Walt Kelly comics obsessively and contribute to comics fanzines.  Terry Zwigoff teaches classes on Barks comics before managing a comic shop, which he then quits to join a bluegrass band with Crumb and Robert Armstrong, creator of Mickey Rat.  The other Zap guys are all Barks-heads too; as idiosyncratic and unique as they are, the influence of the Good Duck Artist is clear as day.

 Neat to think that the hip, cutting-edge transgressive artistes of yore were all big Donald Duck and Little Lulu fans.

 

Parody Will Get You Nowhere

 

Good news, The Sincerest Form of Parody is back in print from Fantagraphics!

I borrowed the heck out of this from the library when it first came out.  If you were a fan of the Russ Cochrane Mad and Panic collections back in the day then you should love this.