UNCLE SCROOGE MCDUCK: HIS LIFE AND TIMES
by Carl Barks; Celestial Arts; 374 pages; $159.95
Estimates of his fortune vary. The last count was one multiplujillion, nine obsquatumatillion, six hundred twenty-three dollars and sixty-two cents. He may or may not have more money than anybody else, but one thing is certain: he is the richest duck in the world. Donald, his nephew, has more marquee value, but, much in the manner of movie stars, he has squandered his earnings. Uncle Scrooge McDuck, of Scots ancestry and American pioneer tradition, has never let go of a dime—not even the first one he ever earned, which he often carries, tied to a string and stashed in an inside pocket of his moleskin-collared coat.
The getting, preserving and enjoying of all this cash between 1952 and 1967 provided comic books with some of their greatest characters and grandest adventures. The eleven vintage stories collected in this sumptuous volume, along with a new yarn and a signed, numbered lithograph, are strong evidence that Scrooge and his creator Carl Barks belong in the great mainstream of American folklore.
Uncle Scrooge never had the high-style sizzle of Superman or Prince Valiant, or the cockeyed melodrama of Dick Tracy, but the mock-heroic sweep of Barks' stories and the whimsical clarity of his drawing made a heavy mark on a generation of children for whom comic books offered a powerful mythology. That mark shows up in some unlikely places. Barks' stories, as Film Director George Lucas points out in his affectionate Appreciation, are "very cinematic. They...don't just move from panel to panel, but flow in sequences—sometimes several pages long." Fans of the Lucas-Steven Spielberg adventure lark Raiders of the Lost Ark will discover a progenitor in The Seven Cities of Cibola. Indeed, Barks' stories and Lucas' Star Wars sagas share not only a gentle satiric edge but a kind of giddy imagination that leads into territory that is, in all senses of the word, fabulous.
"I'm certainly no expert on fables," Barks says, but his sagas of feathered heroes traveling the world, from Duckburg to outer space, all for the purpose of shoring up wealth, are each laced with a little lesson. In Tralla La, Scrooge suffers a nervous breakdown and, with Donald and nephews at his side, goes in search of a place "where there is no money, and wealth means nothing." They find a valley James Hilton might recognize, hidden behind the highest Himalayas. There Scrooge settles happily until a tin cap from a bottle of his nerve medicine is converted into a piece of coveted currency. Scrooge brings corruption to Utopia, just as, in another story, he almost brings industrial pollution to "the smokeless northern wilds." The miser skips out of Duckburg to escape the smog his own heavy industries have created, but the first glimpse of placid lakes and tall timber sets him to thinking about natural gas and paper mills.