Spanning the Universes: Scrooge McDuck

(Editor’s note:  this article originally was published on Nerdspan in March, 2013.)

“Spanning the Universes” spotlights a different comic book character every week and suggests stories featuring those characters for you to seek out and gleefully devour. Want to see your favorite character featured in this column? Make suggestions in the comments and let us know who you’re passionate about!

WHO are they?

Created for Disney in 1947 by legendary cartoonist Carl Barks, Scrooge McDuck is a walking, talking (waddling, squawking?) animated avatar of avarice, adventurer extraordinaire, and literal inspiration for Spielberg and Lucas’s Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Existing in a world of cleverly conceived anthropomorphic animals, Scrooge is the world’s wealthiest duck. That wealth is the engine that drives his stories, which tend to be rousing adventure tales eminently suitable for sharing with the whole family.

Initially introduced as a greedy miser and an antagonist for Disney’s popular Donald Duck, just a few years after his first appearance Barks softened Scrooge’s edges and transformed him into a goodhearted, thrifty adventurer with strong ties to his family.

Barks makes a slyly hearty argument for the wonders of capitalism and free enterprise through his Scrooge stories, but never places monetary value above family values. Though the character is a Hoarders-level obsessive compulsive singularly focused on growing his obscene fortune, the character is surprisingly relatable and even admirable.

Scrooge’s money is literally the story of his life. He can recall, with frightening exactitude, precisely where and how he acquired every single penny, and it’s those memories that he seems to value most. Scrooge earns his money on the square – by being “smarter than the smarties and tougher than the toughies.” It’s hard not to like a self-made duck like Scrooge when he’s a principled straight shooter, even when he’s an obnoxiously, obscenely wealthy, principled straight shooter.

While the character has enjoyed long-lasting and extraordinary popularity with comic fans around the world, he’s perhaps best known to Americans as the lead character in Disney’s much-loved Ducktales cartoon, which aired on weekday afternoons during the late 1980s. Many of the same people who watched and enjoyed those cartoons have no idea that they were heavily inspired by, and deeply indebted to, Barks’s comic books.

WHY should I care?

Because the best Scrooge McDuck stories have an all-ages zing that’s as sharp and impressive as when they were first published, beginning over sixty years ago. Because Barks (and later, Don Rosa) didn’t simply tell a bunch of cute, unrelated tales for the kids – he created an overstuffed world for his characters to run around in and interact with, filled with lost civilizations, haunted castles, pirates, airships, treasure maps,  rockets, aliens, time machines, mythological beasties, strange machines and magical devices. The “Duck Universe” is vast and glorious.

Barks’s imagination was wild and wonderful, his mind almost shockingly inventive. He was so inventive in fact, that through his fictional tales he actually discovered a new molecule, created a way to raise sunken ships off the bottom of the ocean floor, and inspired both the creator of Astro Boy and the opening to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Mind you, Barks didn’t set out to do any of these things on purpose – he just let his natural creativity flow. His contributions to science and the arts were a mere side effect of telling first-rate stories. About DUCKS.

The character of Scrooge McDuck has penetrated world culture to a heartwarming degree. In 2008, the Weekly Standard published a parody letter from Uncle Scrooge, addressed to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, in which Scrooge attempted to apply for TARP funds. IN 2007, Glasgow, Scotland, added Scrooge McDuck to the list of “famous Glaswegians,” a list which includes decidedly non-fictional folk like Billy Connelly. Artist Jeff Smith was inspired by Barks’s Duck stories in creating his beloved BONE series.

Barks populated his Scrooge tales with a horde of wonderful, memorable characters that expanded and enriched the Duck Universe. He gave Scrooge allies like Gyro Gearloose (an inventor whose gadgets often spurred Scrooge’s sci-fi adventures), and gave him a rogues gallery of recurring villains with deliciously chewable names like Flintheart Glomgold (Scrooge’s chief rival and dark mirror image), the Beagle Boys (a family of crooks constantly breaking out of jail in order to steal Scrooge’s fortune), and Magica De Spell (an evil sorceress bent on acquiring Scrooge’s Number One Dime).

Using these characters within the world he’d created, Barks and his successor, Don Rosa (Barks’s widely lauded spiritual heir) were able to tell virtually any kind of story imaginable, from sci-fi to fantasy to noir to pulp adventure and on and on anon. Rosa took Barks’s vast tapestry and, while adding to it, managed to deepen the emotional impact of the stories that he told. The process lended Scrooge’s story a strain of melancholy that served to make him even more compelling. Other artists and writers have continued to spin those stories as well, though arguably few of them have come close to capturing the magic that Barks and Rosa conjured with seeming effortlessness.

It is beyond bizarre – bordering on criminal – that the Disney corporation has neglected the character as thoroughly as they have in recent years. Disney is sitting on a figurative Money Bin filled with cash by not utilizing Barks’s most famous and beloved creation more effectively. In a perfect world, we could hop on a plane to Disneyworld and stand in line for the Uncle Scrooge roller coaster  We could buy tickets to the latest, lavish theatrical adventures of Scrooge and his nephews. We could play video games set inside Barks’s elaborate Duckburg.

We do not live in a perfect world. Recently, Don Rosa announced that he was quitting comics, citing a history of mistreatment by Disney. This is not a new story, but it is a sad one. All too often the creatives responsible for a company’s successes are handled as though they are so much disposable cannon fodder.  And so it seems that, for now, readers must be content with a dauntingly large catalog of wonderous, laudable stories from the pens of some very talented, very imaginative men. There are far worse things than that.

WHAT should I read? 

Anything and everything. But here are a two (and a half) suggestions to get you started:

Only A Poor Old Man, written and illustrated by Carl Barks

The first Uncle Scrooge Story, and a bona fide Barks classic. It introduces readers to Scrooge, his nephews, and their most relentless adversaries – the notorious Beagle Boys. Only A Poor Old Man is a marvelously imaginative farce that piles absurdity on absurdity as Scrooge and the Beagle Boys fight for control of Scrooge’s monstrous fortune using weather balloons, giant magnifying glasses, trained birds, napalm, cloud-seeding, cannonballs, termites and a healthy, welcome dose of wit. Only A Poor Old Man’s mixture of insanity and intelligence make this a perfect gateway to Barks’s work.

You can read Only A Poor Old Man, as well as several other charming Uncle Scrooge tales, in Fantagraphics’ recently released Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge: Only A Poor Old Man – part of their ongoing Complete Carl Barks Disney Library. It’s on sale at various online bookshops and presumably available wherever fine, quality books are sold. Pick it up and share it with the young and the young at heart in your life.

The Life & Times of Scrooge McDuck Vol. 1, written and illustrated by Don Rosa.

Don Rosa was Carl Barks’s true heir and this collection serves as both Rosa’s defining statement and as a loving, in-depth homage to Barks’s work. Rosa lays out Scrooge’s journey from pre-birth to “present day” and in the process crafts a sprawling, rollicking chronicle of the history of the Duck universe, chockablock with humor, pathos, excitement, sly in-jokes, elaborate references, and historical personages. It’s worthy of bring spoken of in the same breath as Barks’s best tales, and it serves as an absolutely wonderful summary of the character and his life.

You can buy the Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck online, and wherever quality books are sold.

Ducktales, Vol. 2

This is a big fat cheat, but that’s okay. As chronicled admirably in Todd VanDerWerff’s recent column for the AV Club, Ducktales was created by Disney in order to take financial advantage of afternoon syndication on television – a ploy that Scrooge McDuck himself may have approved of. The series drew heavily from Barks’s Duck stories and that indebtedness lends the show a surprising watchability over twenty years after it first aired. Vol. 2 contains the show’s film-length pilot (yes, the placement of the pilot in vol. 2 makes no sense – bang-up job, Disney) and functions as the perfect introduction to the show as a result. This is a children’s show, and it’s best enjoyed by children, but literal youth or nostalgia aren’t necessary to enjoy Disney’s Ducktales, or to get its maddeningly catchy theme song wedged in your head for days and days and days on end. …You’re welcome.

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