New translation: "The Life and Lies of Donald Duck" (D 2023-179)
I liked this story a lot, and thought it was a shame that it has not been released in English, so here we go. It's a nineteen-page anniversary comic in which Donald writes an autobiography about childhood with his sister Della and their mom Hortense. Also included are three pages of translation notes.
Haven't used this tumblr in a while due to real-life stuff happening, but I'm gonna take the opportunity to use it to reblog this English fan translation I did of "The Life and Lies of Donald Duck", that I published today!
Issue 2/2000 is from January 10, and it advertises that a toy "insect catapult" is included... I have no memory of this and the image of it in the table of contents is pretty vague. Worryingly, the TOC says there's a Grandma Duck comic in this issue whose title translates to "the slave uprising"... we'll see what that's about.
Also on the TOC page, there's a reprint of a comic strip from 1950, where Daisy says "anyone can make good food with expensive meat and lots of butter & cream - a good cook could make an old boot taste good", and Donald brings in a boot to the kitchen... these rarely land for me, and this doesn't either.
Anyway, the first comic of the issue is by William Van Horn: Inget att leka med (released in English as The Purloined Toys). I'm generally a fan of his work, and I assume this must've been the first of his comics that I ever read.
So the story begins ten days after Christmas, during which someone has stolen several Duckburg kids' toys. The thief strikes at the Duck family's house, but they notice that the doors and windows remain locked... going outside, they find traces of someone entering through the ventilation - which seems suspiciously small, even if the thief is a child - both at their house and at a neighbor's.
After another household is targeted, they realize there is only one house left in the neighborhood, so they camp out and wait for the thief to strike... and see miniature robots stealing and carrying away the toys, Pikmin-style. I do remember these little guys leaving an impression on me as a kid... they're pretty cute.
So the Ducks follow the trail, and find the mastermind: Laban Lunkentuss, which sure is A Name, an old robotics engineer who never got any gifts for Christmas as a kid, and... is taking revenge on kids around Duckburg by stealing theirs, so that he can break them. This is absolutely wild, and unfortunately the story doesn't really do much more with this - the kids get the police, and Laban is arrested.
I wanted to like this story, but it feels like it should've been given a few more pages, or maybe it would've been enough if the "the Ducks sit around outside watching houses in the dark" bits had been shortened to give more room for other stuff. Still, Van Horn's visual comedy and willingness to be weird does a lot for it.
After this, the recurring feature Gröngölings-sidan ("The Junior Woodchuck Page") where we learn to be careful when walking on frozen-over lakes, and the pretty weak Mickey Mouse one-pager Helt förkylt, drawn by Manuel Gonzales and written by Bill Walsh, where Minnie doesn't believe that Mickey has a cold... a lot of these old reprints are honestly not very good.
I'll take a break here, and in the next post, we'll see what that questionably-named Grandma Duck story is about.
The last comic in this issue is part 2/2 of the Mickey & Donald story Millenniets magiska midnatt (known in English as New Year's Nightmare), written by Pat and Carol McGreal and drawn by CĂšsar Ferioli Pelaez.
This one was always frustrating to me as a kid, because it's obviously the ending to a big cross-over adventure, and my subscription only started with this issue... so I've never actually read the beginning. The story has only been published twice in languages I understand, so I'd either have to track down a Swedish Kalle Anka & C:o issue from 1999 or an American Walt Disney's Comics and Stories from 2007.
The story does give us enough to get us up to speed, though. The evil wizard Morbidio is preparing to fuse his two magical orbs into a scepter that will let him rule the world, and apparently it needs to be done at the strike of midnight of the new millennium. The gang stopped him at midnight in Duckburg, but he's gonna try again in a time zone where it's still December 31.
Borrowing Scrooge's high-speed aircraft, Mickey and Donald go to confront the wizard at Goodnight Atoll, located exactly on the international date line, and there's some fun dramatic art of seagulls and sea lions fleeing as he successfully fuses the orbs and summons a tidal wave to obliterate Mickey and Donald.
Apparently, they learned in the previous issue that you can interfere with the orbs with high-pitched sounds, and they manage to do so with conch chells... causing the scepter to divide and suck the wizard into a magical whirlwind.
"I'm not afraid of picking them up, I just don't wanna do it."
Afterward, this fun scene where the two try to get the other to be the one to pick up the orbs while hiding that they're afraid of touching them, as the camera pulls back.
So obviously I'm missing the first half of this, but I'll say that the story feels pretty average, and that what really carries this is the interactions between Donald and Mickey, and the great art. I wish they got to interact more often, because their frenemies/rivals dynamic is some good stuff and makes Mickey way more of an interesting character than he usually is.
So that's it for Kalle Anka & C:o 2000-01. Next issue has a William van Horn story, and I'm looking forward to that.
So here's En försvarbar flicka, written by Frank Jonker and drawn by Marga Querol Manzano and Comicup Studio. It uses a "dear diary" format, pretty typical for Daisy comics, and starts with Donald and Gladstone fighting over Daisy's affection and being too distracted to step in when an armed robber steals her purse.
She talks to her friend Clara about it, who says some gender-essentialist shit about how men are inherently violent (please stop, I know you mean well but this excuses violent men's behavior), and advises Daisy to take up some self defense training. Daisy is unsure, imagining herself as a bodybuilder... but you don't need to be one to learn martial arts, so she does.
After she single-handedly knocks out three Beagle Boys, which is the only good thing that happens in this comic, Donald and Gladstone finally learn to respect her and pay attention to her. This love triangle is always such a mess, and I'm really not a fan of how much of Daisy's character is based around it.
Next, DeckargÄtan is a regular feature where you have to solve some mystery - here, Donald's nephews blame a broken window on the kids outside, and the magazine asks you how Donald knows they're lying. I can't recall if I found this difficult as a six-year-old, but it's probably appropriate for the target demographic.
After a two-page feature for Fantasia 2000 that definitely isn't solely there because it's a Disney film, there's a reprint of En vaken nattvakt (known in English as Watching the Watchman) by Carl Barks. I remembered this one as pretty funny, and man, it holds up. Lots of great visual comedy.
Donald is getting a new job as a warehouse night guard, and tries to get some sleep before his shift starts at midnight... but isn't sleepy at all, and distracts himself with all sorts of things, including inventing a new type of explosive, exercising, and singing.
This plays out pretty predictably - Donald does indeed finally get sleepy soon before his shift - but it's so well done that it doesn't matter. In the second half of the story, Donald's nephews make him go to work, and follow him around the warehouse to keep him awake as they all slowly fall asleep. Good stuff, just look at that slumped over sleepwalk.
Bompa! Bompa!
My one real criticism is that the story ends pretty abruptly: Donald, finally asleep, dreams that he's a cowboy and fires his gun in his sleep, stopping some thieves who were just breaking in. But all in all, a real good time.
After that, a cute two-page "happy new year" illustration, which uhhh... Normally my old comic books are in pretty good condition, and the rest of this issue is, but this spread certainly has taken a beating, somehow. The artist is unfortunately uncredited - this seems to generally be the case outside of comics - but according to INDUCKS it's by Dutch artist Mau Heymans.
A few more comics left in this issue, and next up is a Daisy story. I always want to like her, but I feel like she's rarely written very sympathetically. We'll see.
So the first real story in this issue is FrimÀrkliga hÀndelser (titled Sub-Sub Zero in English), written by Daniel Branca and Wanda Gattino, and drawn by Branca. It begins as Donald and the kids walk into Scrooge's office to learn that Scrooge's freight ships have gone missing. Typical adventure set-up, although I do really like that Scrooge is just lying on top of that globe in despair.
Currently he's worrying about the ship V-8, which is transporting his stamp collection to Puerto Rico... and just as they're talking about the upcoming stamp exhibit he's hoping to win, a telegram about V-8's disappearance comes in.
So Scrooge buys a submarine (literally just throws a wad of cash at a man in the harbor) and trails his next ship, hoping to catch whoever's behind this the next time they strike. Naturally one of the kids is steering the sub. They eventually end up in an air pocket in an underwater cave... where they're taken prisoner by underwater folk, and I can't say I like the way they're portrayed - a pretty uncomfortable "uncivilized savage" caricature. Scrooge even calls the chief "fishface", which doesn't feel great.
Turns out, the underwater folk are pacifying "the lord of the abyss" by letting water into the cave, which uhhhh.... also pulls down nearby ships. It's kind of unclear how it works, but that's how the ships disappeared. Scrooge makes a deal with the chief to retrieve his stamp collection and be let go, and in return he'll have his ships take a different route. Scrooge returns to land, and wins the stamp exhibition in Puerto Rico, and all's well.
Overall... I can't say I was a fan of this. It felt super rushed - we only spend a few pages in the underwater city, and get almost no sense of what that place and those people are like - really makes me wish we spent less time on the stamp exhibition and the lead-up to the underwater cave. It might be an unfair comparison, but I can't not compare it to Barks's Lost in the Andes!, which did a way better job at this.
I'll also stand by my opinion that it's rare for a story that ends with a Scrooge win to be very good, and this is not one of those instances - I do like Scrooge, but he's an oftentimes unsympathetic rich old man that we're just kind of expected to sympathize with because he's the title character. If Scrooge gets his way 100%, the story really needs to work hard to make it feel earned, and this just doesn't do that. The art is pretty good throughout, which does a lot to make it more enjoyable, at least.
"Do you think he'll make for a good hunter's steak?" "No, he's too old and chewy. Let's let him go"
Following this is the Mickey Mouse one-pager Jaga eller jagas? by Bill Walsh and Manuel Gonzales, where Mickey and Goofy put on their fursuits to deal psychic damage to hunters, so maybe it's all good after all.
When I was a kid, I had a subscription for several years to the weekly Swedish Donald Duck comic book, Kalle Anka & C:o ("Donald Duck & Co"), starting from 2000, when I was six.
A few years back I digitized the first year of issues, and I recently got the urge to go through them again, so obviously I gotta do a readthrough blog.
This first issue from January 3, 2000 alarmingly boasts that a "finger shock" (??) comes bundled with the magazine - I will actually block out the picture of it in the table of contents, because it's truly gross, but it's a toy severed finger for you to play Funny Pranks with. 6-year-old Alexandra was upset by it and did not keep it.
Aside from that, a very standard cover with nothing special going on. The artist isn't credited, and INDUCKS only says it's by people at a Spanish studio called Tello Art.
So, we've got a bunch of different stuff here, including a reprint of a Carl Barks story, a multi-parter continued from previous issues, a longer adventure story, and a few shorter stories, along with some non-comic stuff. We'll get to it.
As is usual, the TOC also has a reprint of a 1950s comic strip, which is remarkably unfunny (Donald asks one of his nephews to go buy bread, he puts it off until asked to buy ice cream as well), and a reader-submitted joke that does not translate super well (mom: "don't poke your nose [with your index finger]" / kid: "well what finger am I supposed to use then")
"Nothing like a saucer of milk, huh?" *pet pet*
The issue starts with the Goofy one-pager Inte en katt from 1954 (for some reason not listed in the TOC???) by Bill Walsh and Manuel Gonzales, where Goofy gets strong reading glasses and mistakes a panther for his neighbor's cat. Cute. I also immediately realize how extremely basic the lettering is, and wonder if it'll change any in future issues.
Gonna take a break here since a longer adventure story is coming up, but will also note that this issue is advertising the Swedish localization of the Italian comic series Paperinik New Adventures, released here as StÄl-Kalle, which I always wanted to read more often than I did.
