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Saturday, December 23, 2006

A Duckburg Christmas

In addition to Jonah Hex, my other favorite character in comics is Uncle Scrooge. Carl Barks is one of my two favorite writer/artists (Don Rosa is the other) and I always enjoyed the Christmas stories that he wrote. My 2nd favorite story is "Christmas in Duckburg" from 1958.

A few convoluted things happen to bring this story to it's payoff. Scrooge was humiliated at teh town Christmas dinner last year & has promised to bring for the town a tree that will be taller than the clock tower. Donald has some catalogs laying around the house and he tells the boys they can ask for anything in the catalogs (because he know the most expensive thing is a bike). The boys pick a ferris wheel and then donald learns that there was a carnival supply catalog in the pile. He has to go to Scrooge to ask for money. Scrooge agrees if Donald & the boys go to Canada to get the 100 ft tree.

Meanwhile, a local business owner that had a bet with Scrooge about the tree finds out about Scrooge's plan. Not wanting to be shown up by Scrooge, he enlists the help of the Beagle Boys to cut 20 ft off of Scrooges tree, so it won't be taller than the 84 ft clock tower. After Donald & the boys leave, Scrooge wants to up the ante and sends a telegram to Donald. In an odd happenstance, the telegram is altered so that Donald thinks Scrooge wants them bring home 100 moose. (they only end up with two).

Once they get back home, they learn that Scrooge wanted 100 geese to weed Duckburg and he is the laughing stock with the two moose, but he is determined to save himself with the gigantic tree. Once it is stood up it is too short! Donald gets the idead of putting the tree on the ferris wheel and rotating it so the tree is taller than the clock tower, but Scrooge didn't spend the extra money for a motoe. The boys hook the moose up to the cable drum and use them to turn the ferris wheel.
All of THAT leads to this

That is one of my favorite Christmas comics images in my head. Thank you Carl Barks for creating it & thank you Gemstone for reprinting it this month in the CHristmas Parade book.

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