Comics Phase Fourteen

[Jaxom 1974]

This is so damn neat. But then you scroll through the comments and some SnyderBro tags in James Gunn demanding that Gunn be fired and Snyder reinstated...Twitter is a cesspool...

[hauberk]

2 hours ago, Jaxom 1974 said:

This is so damn neat. But then you scroll through the comments and some SnyderBro tags in James Gunn demanding that Gunn be fired and Snyder reinstated...Twitter is a cesspool...

This is a cherry on top. I’ve yet to read any Tom King that wasn’t enjoyable.  

[Kyll.Ing.]

I was unsure whether to bring this up in the Roald Dahl re-writing thread, as it pertains to much the same topic, or here. But I figured it'd derail the discussion if I put it in the other thread, so here it goes.

The Walt Disney Company has recently announced - very stealthily - that some of their comic stories are to be put out of circulation. Among them are some of the most influential, classic stories about Scrooge McDuck. The world found out through comic artist Don Rosa, who passed on the news to his fans on his Facebook page when Disney told him that A Dream of a Lifetime and The Empire-Builder from Calisota would no longer be published. The one element these stories have in common is that they feature the character "Bombie the zombie", which quickly led fans to surmise that Carl Barks' classic Voodoo Hoodoo would also be banned.

These stories are no small beans. Voodoo Hoodoo was a very early Scrooge story, before Barks really knew what to do about the character. It features an uncharacteristically dark deed by Scrooge McDuck, wherein he is mentioned to have evicted a voodoo tribe from their territory in Africa back when he was a youth travelling the world and building his empire. As a result, the tribe sends a zombie after him. And that's a zombie in the original sense of the world, not an Evil dead-style monster out to eat your brains. Simply an undead man who has no feelings and follows the bidding of his master without rest forever. Bombie is walking the world in pursuit of Scrooge, to deliver him a poisoned doll on behalf of the voodoo chief. Long story short, everyone end up okay, even Bombie eventually (the curse is said to be wearing off in a few decades, then he'll go on living as before).

In itself, Voodoo Hoodoo is memorable, but we might have managed without it. However, the episode with the voodoo tribe as referenced in The Empire-Builder from Calisota is perhaps the most crucial part of Don Rosa's Scrooge saga, The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. It is portrayed as the darkest depth Scrooge ever sinks to in his life. Years of pursuit of money has made him cynical and cold, and when he is humiliated by the tribe he hires local thugs to chase them from their village in revenge. This is the point where Scrooge's sisters finally have enough and leave his side. Empire-Builder is the story that ties together the optimistic Scrooge of the rest of Life and Times with the bitter old man seen in the first Scrooge story, Night on Bear Mountain. This comic portrayed Scrooge at his very darkest, the turning point in his life as he went from a fledgling tycoon to a lonely, rich miser. Without it, Life and Times is not a complete work, nor for that matter coherent. And Life and Times is seen as probably the most influential work in the Disney ducks comics 'verse since Carl Barks himself was active. Disney is really ripping gems out of the crown here.

Dream of a Lifetime is also a fine story, a sort of cavalcade of Scrooge's life collected in one story. Its plot is eerily similar to the movie Inception, which was released a few years after this comic. The Beagle Boys invade Scrooge's dreams, hoping to find the combination to his vault door. However, they find Scrooge dreaming of his life and experiences, and have to chase him from dream to dream to find the information they are after. An encounter with Bombie appears in one scene. The ban on this story also takes away one of Rosa's key interpretations of Scrooge, his recurring "what if?" dream where he is separated from the woman of his life by accident. The intervention of the Beagle Boys prevent the accident from playing out in this dream, and we get a small glimpse of what could have happened in another timeline. It's sweet. But Disney's corporate zombies were apparently too offended by the portrayal of one (or, possibly, a "designated family friendly" Disney character interacting with an undead"), so off the story goes.

It's sad. I know "sensitivity reading" and censorship of previous works are a big deal in the US, but the Disney comics are not. Over time, they have become a part of European heritage. It's sad to see the corporate drones at Disney HQ take this away, because they believe the stories are not "clean" enough to be associated with their brand anymore.

[mormont]

It's not about them not being 'clean'. It's about not publishing, in 2023, a book that is actively offensive to many readers in 2023. (And was actively offensive to many readers when it was originally published: it's just that Disney didn't care about those readers back then.)

Barks' stories are certainly significant in comics scholarship and will still be available and will still be studied in that context. But they're no longer actually necessary to understand the character, practically nobody but comics scholars reads them nowadays anyway, and the announcement wasn't so much 'stealthy' as it was just ignored because it's not really a big story.

[Ran]

What's funny is that Bombie appeared on the revived DuckTales in 2019, in an adaptation of "The Richest Duck in the World". 

Quote

practically nobody but comics scholars reads them nowadays anyway

A notably sensitive and easily influenced class of readers that require thoughtful protection. A very large class, too, since Disney is not cancelling the collections, merely removing the individual stories from them, so there's still an audience of eager scholars apparently still waiting to get their hands on the collection each year...

(Of course, Rosa doesn't own the story or the characters, Disney does, and they can do what they please with their IP. The stories will enter the public domain in 2089 and 2097, assuming that copyright terms have not been extended at the behest of Disney and other corporations yet again.)

 

Edited February 23 by Ran

[Kyll.Ing.]

4 hours ago, mormont said:

Barks' stories are certainly significant in comics scholarship and will still be available and will still be studied in that context. But they're no longer actually necessary to understand the character, practically nobody but comics scholars reads them nowadays anyway, and the announcement wasn't so much 'stealthy' as it was just ignored because it's not really a big story.

You'd be surprised. These news made newspaper front pages in all the Nordic countries and elsewhere around Europe. A substantial chunk of the population grew up with the Disney comics over here, so Barks and Rosa are household names. The weekly comic magazines have been read by a lot of people (as late as 1986, the weekly Donald Duck magazine sold 250,000 issues on average in Norway, a country of four million people). Following the news, Don Rosa's books are now sold out in book stores across the Nordic countries, as people want to get themselves a complete version of Life and Times before it disappears from the market.

[mormont]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

A notably sensitive and easily influenced class of readers that require thoughtful protection.

I'm not sure what point is this supposed to be making but it isn't making it. Comics scholars, as noted previously, will have no trouble accessing the work just because it's no longer being physically printed.