Tracker

 

I am home sick with Captain Trips, so I took the opportunity to finally read this oddity I came across recently:

a funny-animal detective story by William Van Horn!

$2.00 for a black and white comic in 1988 sounds a little steep, no?  If you have heard of Blackthone Publishing before, it was probably for their licensed 3-D comics (Star Wars, GI Joe, etc), but they were a real publisher of original properties like this one.  The cover says "book one of four," but only two issues ever came out.  

It's a shame, because this is good stuff.  If you loved the Fantagraphics anthology Critters, then you should vibe with this book.  It's not laugh-out-loud funny, more of a pastiche of hard-boiled film noir private eye Raymond Chandler tropes, only with anthropomorphized cats and pigs and wolves.

I don't know if this character appeared somewhere else before or not, but this story opens with Tracker's glory days far behind him. He is swept up in a murder mystery complete with a femme fatale, but his attitude is a resigned "been there, done that" throughout.

Good action cartooning in places:

Adolf Kitler, yikes

Anyway, this was pretty good.  Not quite what I expected from Van Horn, author of some of the wackiest Duckburg comics ever printed, but if I ever see issue 2 I will be sure to grab it and post on it here.

Multiverse of Mad Ducks

 

For all of these years I had been under the impression that Duck Tales comics and The Barks Duckverse were two entirely separate continuities, containing many overlapping characters but also some aspects unique to each of the two worlds.  Earth-D and Earth DT, let's say. 

  A recent thread on The Fethry Society, however, set me straight that there are several examples of characters created specifically for  Duck Tales making the leap into the mainline Donald Duck comics universe:

Mr. Mc Dee's butler Duckworth appears in the William Van Horn story "Snore Losers," collected in Pie in the Sky

While Launchpad McQuack shares space with Donald and Daisy in "New Year's Daze," by Stefan Printz-Paulson and Vicar, as seen in Bear Mountain Tales.

So there you have it, Bubba the Cave Duck fans, your favorite character counts as an honorary Duckburgian! Surely it's only a matter of time before the Darkwing/ Gizmoduck/ PKNA teamup that all the Tumblr fanart people have been clamoring for becomes official.