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.
