Wow. My experience with the Disney characters is mostly limited to trips to Disneyland in my younger days and the barest of memories of watching the Disney show when it was on Sunday nights. I've long heard about Carl Barks's legendary duck comics and, to a lesser extent, the work of Don Rosa on the characters, but I hadn't really ever gone out of my way to read the stories. Clearly, that was a mistake, as this collection of a twelve-part epic that tells the story of Scrooge McDuck from poor waif to rich geezer is just amazingly good. Rosa's story cuts across the late 18th century and the early 19th, and places Scrooge McDuck firmly in the pantheon of American folk heroes, even though his origins reach back to Scotland. The book is also gorgeous to look at, with great detail in the background that reminds me of the densely packed backdrop storytelling of Sergio Aragones and exceptional panel-to-panel storytelling with beautiful color by Daigle-Leach.
If you're like me, you've never really wondered where Scrooge McDuck got his fortune from. After getting about one or two chapters into The Life of Times of Scrooge McDuck, however, I was dying to know when this beleaguered young duck's work ethic was going to pay off. My only exposure to Scrooge is the classic image of an old duck diving into a vault full of money, so I really had no idea that what I was going to find here was a story of a lifetime of adventure. Rosa's stories, based on the work of Carl Barks, takes Scrooge (and the reader) from the moors of Scotland to the most adventurous parts of America, Africa, Australia, Europe and even the Arctic, and in so doing cross paths with a number of adventurous ages and story tropes. Scrooge works a riverboat, becomes a cowboy, attempts mining (several times) and engages in any number of activities designed to make him rich but which end up mostly making him look adventurous. The globe-hopping nature of the story combined with the historical context makes it read kind of like a cross between Citizen Kane and Indiana Jones, with a healthy dose of the wild west thrown in for good measure.
Though I tend to read comics fairly quickly, I found that The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck absorbed a fair amount of my reading time, and the denseness of the storytelling really offers a lot of bang for the buck. Most of the issues are a mere fifteen pages in length, but they offer up rich stories that are as satisfying as the best single issue comics, and the occasional book that ventures beyond the 20-page mark is like a vast epic that would take most creators six issues to do using modern pacing. For all that, though, the stories here never feel too packed, and they don't have the overly expositional feel that similarly dense Silver Age superhero comics can have. Rosa's stories are very focused on one important life lesson, bit of geography or memorable adventure, so that all the extra details are just meat on the bone.
The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck compares nicely to grand adventure tales like Jeff Smith's Bone epic or more recent entries into this genre like Scott Chantler's Northwest Passage. Rosa really gives Scrooge a larger-than-life feel, especially in the climactic moment of "King of the Klondike" when Scrooge escapes from certain death and engages in a legendary tear against the villains who had attempted to steal his gold claim. Despite this, however, Scrooge remains the reader's viewpoint character, and while his combination of intensive work ethic and cartoonish greed can make him difficult to sympathize with, Rosa never fails to get across what Scrooge is thinking when he's having his adventures and building his fortune. There's a clear turn for the character later on, as he crosses a line from greedy to evil (just once), and certainly we see the bitterness creep in on him as old age sets in, with a terrific counterpoint to that bitterness and revitalization as a result of the introduction of his famous grand-nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie. This story is a sweeping epic, but the focus is always on one character whom we can all root for, because his do-it-yourself work ethic outweighs and even to some extent excuses his greedy nature.
Then there's the artwork. The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck is a triumph of cartooning. Rosa is exceptional at conveying the frantic motion that frequently results from Scrooge's horse (and lion) riding, any number of cart and boat chases and even a particularly memorable action scene in which the President of the United States leads his forces against Scrooge's newly purchased fortress. On top of terrific storytelling and comedic timing, Rosa adds a ton of detail into the work. If you watch the backgrounds, you can pick up on any number of gags worked into signs or other backdrop details, including little things like a worm with a board sneaking up on the early bird or a pair of snakes getting into a tussle in the desert. It is clear in looking at this artwork that Rosa is creating the entire world, not just the little part that Scrooge sees of it, and that scope in the artwork helps to convey the scope of the story as a whole.
When it was originally published as Uncle Scrooge issues, this story won the Eisner award for "Best Serialized Story," but the collected edition comes with some nice extras that those originals didn't have. Each chapter of the story is followed by a two- or three-page accounting by Rosa of the Carl Barks stories that informed the work, where he made any changes and how he fit it all together, as well as general notes on the story and what it means to the overall work. It's not as intensive as the annotations often offered up by Jess Nevins, but there's some nice detail and interesting tidbits in each chapter, akin to the Roy Thomas notes accompanying the Dark Horse reprints of Conan. The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck is a complete archival package of the story, with analysis and background as well as the stories themselves, reproduced in glorious color and in a terrific format.
At $17, The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck offers literally hours of enjoyment and one of the most far-reaching, deeply engaging comics stories it has been my pleasure to read this year. If you're already a ducks fan and you don't have this one, you should stop reading now and go buy this volume. If, like me, you have no particular attachment to Disney's ducks, you should still seek this one out as an introduction. The only downside is, now that I've seen that Rosa's duck story lives up to the hype, I find myself guessing that the Carl Barks duck stories must be just as amazing as everyone has always said, and I guess I'm going to have to figure out the best version of those tales to purchase sometime soon.
