One of the many great things about taking part in an academic conference and presenting a paper is the feedback and comments one receives from one’s peers. Last month I presented a paper at the International Graphic Novel & International Bande Dessinée Society Conference in Glasgow (my second favourite conference that month). My paper, The Parsimonius Cartoonist: Scottish Identity and the Autobiographical Comics of Eddie Campbell looked at Campbell’s relationship with money through the prism of that most notorious of Scottish stereotypes, excessive frugality or tightfistedness.
During a discussion afterwards another comics scholar wondered why I hadn’t discussed the Disney character Scrooge McDuck. Well, for the simple reason that I had never read any of the comics, “what not even Carl Barks?” they asked incredulously. No, not even, and I had only a vague recollection of the animated cartoons from my childhood. Helpfully Graphixia’s anthropomorphic season has allowed me to address this apparent oversight. By happenstance the second release in the Fantagraphics Complete Carl Barks Disney Library has only recently been published and it is all about the aforementioned Mr McDuck - Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge: Only a Poor Old Man.
Scrooge McDuck, created by Carl Barks in 1947, is the uncle of Donald Duck on his mother’s side. Although named after Charles Dickens’ famous miser Ebeneezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol, Uncle Scrooge was made to sound even stingier by being Scottish! Many sources (ie the internet) claim that McDuck was based on industrialist Andrew Carnegie, although I couldn’t find any evidence to back this up and it was never confirmed by Barks.
The first story in the volume is Only A Poor Old Man, which was first published in March 1952, and straight away we are presented with one of Scrooge’s signature moves, swimming like a porpoise in his vast Money Bin. Scrooge is the richest person in the Disney universe and his fortune is described in many ways. At the start of this story it is ‘umpteen-centrifugilillion dollars’ but throughout the book it is most commonly described as filling an area of ‘three cubic acres’.
Scrooge’s Scottish heritage is detailed in The Horse-Radish Treasure from September 1953. In a flashback set in 1753 we see Scrooge’s ancestor Captain Seafoam McDuck swindled in a deal to carry a chest of horse-radish from Glasgow to Jamaica on his ship the Golden Goose. In real life many shipping merchants made their fortunes sailing between Glasgow and America in the 18th century. The Merchant City area of Glasgow still betrays the fortunes of these nouveau riche traders with its grand architecture. The neo-classical palace that today houses the Gallery of Modern Art was originally the home of ‘Tobacco Laird’ William Cunninghame. The gallery’s vast ground floor was once his ballroom.
The tobacco trade was part of the trading route trading between Britain and North America and the Caribbean, it later became a leg of the ‘triangular trade’ when it connected with the slave trade from West Africa. In Painting the Forth Bridge: A Search for Scottish Identity, Carl MacDougall claims that Glasgow’s love affair with America dates back to these Tobacco Lords in the 1700s. A modern version of this trans-Atlantic connection can be seen in the many artists in Hope Street studios in Glasgow who are producing superhero comics for Marvel and DC.
Reading these comics for the first time I can appreciate the joy people find in them. Scrooge is a self-made umpteen-centrifugilillionairre who is always figuring out ways not to spend his money. The one-page gag strips are some of my favourites as they cut straight to the heart of his character. On finding out that a taxi starts the meter as soon as he enters the cab, Scrooge pauses at the door, only climbing inside when the stop light changes to green. In another short strip a beggar keeps asking for a dime for coffee and eventually Scrooge relents but only because he can buy one for himself and the second cup is free.
This shows that he is not completely heartless and in the longer strip Back to the Klondike we are introduced to Glittering Goldie, a woman from Scrooge’s prospecting past and possible previous love interest. They feud again and Scrooge decides to stage a competition with her to see who can find his buried treasure of gold nuggets. When Goldie wins Scrooge blames his failure on forgetting to take his memory medication, however Donald realises that he didn’t forget but allowed Goldie to win. Although he would never admit to it, Scrooge wanted to see this woman from his past escape her life of destitution.
Like other Disney staff Barks worked anonymously until his identity was uncovered in the late 1950s, until then fans knew him only as the Good Duck Artist and it’s easy to see why. His anthropomorphic creatures are full of life and character, be they ducks, dogs or pigs. I think my favourites are Scrooge’s nemeses the Beagle Boys who are all completely identical and are only differentiated by the prison numbers on their chests (see them on the book cover above). Some of the more fantastical creatures are the denizens of the undersea world in The Secret of Atlantis. The scaly green gilled human-fish are reminiscent of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, which came out in cinemas the same year (1954). I’d also wager that Mike Mignola had read that strip before coming up with the character Abe Sapien in Hellboy.
The backgrounds are often wonderfully detailed, Atlantis, and the whales that swim around it, are much more ‘realistically’ rendered than Scrooge and Donald. Similarly the Shangri-la-esque village of Tralla La in the strip of the same name is in a very detailed Himalayan mountain valley. However, the yellow slant eyed ducks that live in Tralla La are a little troublesome but perhaps just a product of the unenlightened politics of the time. Strangely in this world of anthropomorphic ducks, dogs and pigs, the creature that Scrooge ask for directions to the village appears to be human.
For Graphixia’s Anthropomorphic season I had initially intended to write about Norwegian cartoonist Jason and while I enjoyed my brief foray into the world of Disney as drawn by Carl Barks, it is the new Jason volume Lost Cat that I will be looking forward to as my next anthropomorphic purchase!
Works cited
Barks, Carl Uncle Scrooge: Only a Poor Man. Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2012.
Campbell, Eddie The Lovely Horrible Stuff. Marietta: Top Shelf Productions, 2012.
Jason Lost Cat Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2013.
MacDougall, Carl Painting the Forth Bridge: A Search for Scottish Identity. London: Aurum Press, 2001.