The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck

AUTHOR: Rosa, Don

ARTIST: Don Rosa (illustrator); Susan Daigle-Leach (colorist); Gary Leach (colorist); Todd Klein (letterer)

PUBLISHERS: Gemstone Publishing; Boom! Studios

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1994-1996

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2005

Publication History

The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck originally appeared as individual stories in Uncle Scrooge, issues 285-296, from Gladstone Publishing, Disney’s licensed publisher at the time. Comics creator Don Rosa’s run earned critical and popular acclaim, winning the Eisner Award for Best Serialized Story in 1995 and the Comic Buyer’s Guide Fan Award for Favorite Comic Book that same year.

In 2005, Gemstone Publishing collected the Rosa stories in book form for the first time. The following year, Gemstone published Rosa’s supplemental collection, The Life and Times of Uncle Scrooge Companion, which contains stories filling in gaps in the primary narrative as well as author commentary. In 2010, Boom! Studios reprinted The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck in two volumes. The story is told in twelve chapters, each including author commentary, and codifies the various Uncle Scrooge stories created by Rosa’s predecessor, Carl Barks. Chapters of the story have also appeared in a number of international editions, including the French Picsou, the Dutch Donald Duck Extra, the Italian Zio Paperone, and the Brazilian 40 Anos de Revista Tio Patinhas.

Plot

In 1880, after learning from his father of his family’s lost legacy, young Scrooge vows to return the clan to its former glory. Shining shoes with a kit given to him by his father, he earns his first coin, an American dime. This dime becomes his lifelong possession and a good-luck charm. While continuing to shine shoes, Scrooge builds a small empire out of peat-moss sales. With the help of an ancestral ghost, he drives intruders from Castle McDuck, the family home. Scrooge sets sail for the United States, where he becomes steward on his uncle’s riverboat. There, he outmaneuvers a gang of thieves called the Beagle Boys that tries to steal from him. After the riverboat explodes, Scrooge is left penniless. Heading west, he bests the James brothers in a railroad robbery, becomes a cowboy, and meets a young Theodore Roosevelt.

Scrooge then takes up prospecting. After laying claim to a valuable copper mine, he bests hordes of claim jumpers. He receives a telegram warning of family disaster and returns to Scotland.

Scrooge plans to use his mining wealth to pay the taxes on Castle McDuck. His rival Angus Whiskerville engages him in an armored duel, during which Scrooge falls to the bottom of the castle moat. The unconscious Scrooge has a visionary encounter with his ancestors and learns pieces of his future. Awakening, he uses his dime as a screwdriver to remove the armor and then surfaces and bests the Whiskervilles.

After failing as a South African gold miner, Scrooge tries prospecting in Australia. In dreamtime prophecy, an Aborigine tells Scrooge of his destiny. Scrooge sees prismatic light through the Aborigine’s crystal. Taking it as a sign, he ventures to the Yukon to resume prospecting.

Scrooge’s time in the Yukon is catalytic. He discovers an egg of solid gold, known as the Golden Goose Nugget, in a prosperous vein of ore. He finally amasses his fortune. During this time, he meets Goldie O’Gilt, the woman he comes closest to loving. With his first million dollars secured, he invests in the claims of others, always to his advantage but always dealing fairly.

Scrooge returns to Scotland. Expecting a hero’s welcome, he is frustrated to learn that the townspeople resent his success. After failing abysmally at the Highland Games, Scrooge decides to move to a parcel of land in the United States, leaving his young employee Scottie to run Castle McDuck. As Scrooge and his family depart, Scrooge’s father dies quietly.

In 1902, Scrooge returns to the United States with his family. He crashes his jalopy into the cornfield of his new neighbor, his aunt Elvira, later known as Grandma Duck. Elvira’s son Quackmore and Scrooge’s sister Hortense meet and fall in love. Scrooge discovers his land is dilapidated. He ejects the occupants, the Junior Woodchucks, who in turn cable authorities in Washington, D.C., that a Scot has occupied an American military base. Theodore Roosevelt, now president, takes up the charge.

Ferrying his barrels of money upstream, Scrooge has a chance encounter with the Beagle Boys. Seeking revenge for the years spent in prison at his hand following the riverboat incident, they follow Scrooge to his hilltop fort. Taking him by surprise, they nail him inside one of his money barrels. At this point, the U.S. Navy, the Marines, and the Junior Woodchucks, led by Roosevelt, attack the fort. After a ferocious battle, Scrooge and Roosevelt face each other for the first time in twenty years. Delighted to see his old friend, Roosevelt halts the charge and arrests the Beagle Boys. Later, Scrooge builds his money vault on the site of the old fort, which was demolished in the battle.

Now a billionaire, Scrooge invests in railroads and returns to South Africa to join in the Boer War (1899-1902). While there with his sisters, Scrooge insults a voodoo chief and hires local thugs to lay waste to the village, his only dishonest deed. He tricks the chief into signing the village over to him. The chief puts a curse on Scrooge.

When he returns to camp he discovers that his sisters have returned to Scotland, unable to forgive his dishonesty. Scrooge has a crisis of conscience. He prepares to leave but encounters Bombie the Zombie, the being manifest by the chief’s curse. He evades the zombie by removing the disguise he used to buy the village.

He joins Robert Peary’s arctic expedition, hoping to buy the North Pole. Making his way to Russia during the revolution, he buys a horde of Fabergé eggs and the famous candy-striped ruby. Bombie follows him every step of the way, even onto the sinking Titanic (1912).

Later, Scrooge embarks on a series of treasure-hunting expeditions. In the South Pacific, Bombie reappears. Relenting, Scrooge pays a local witch doctor with the candy-striped ruby to put a binding spell on Bombie, removing the threat that has haunted him for decades.

After twenty-seven years of globe-trotting and treasure seeking, Scrooge returns to Duckburg, the town he founded, where his family throws him a surprise party. He ignores their gesture, and angered, they threaten to never see him again. They all leave, and as they do, his young nephew Donald Duck kicks his behind. After realizing that he now has no family at his side, Scrooge discovers that he is the richest man in the world.

The years pass by, and Scrooge becomes a recluse. Finally, he sends for Donald, who arrives accompanied by his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Scrooge shows them his money vault.

The Beagle Boys, led by Blackheart, break into the vault. They handily defeat Scrooge and the boys and lock them in a warehouse in the vault. Scrooge is angered that his nephew does not believe his adventures; this disbelief spurs Scrooge back to life. Using mementos of his past and skills accumulated over decades of adventures, he defeats the Beagle Boys. Scrooge resolves to sell his drafty mansion and resume adventuring.

Characters

•Scrooge McDuck, the protagonist, is the heir of Castle McDuck in Scotland. Like all characters in the story, he is a humanized animal. He evolves from an ambitious youth into a rich, secluded old man. In most ways, he is an active character, taking initiative to achieve his needs.

•Hortense McDuck is Scrooge’s younger sister and Donald’s mother. Her primary physical characteristic is her fiery red hair. She tolerates Scrooge’s meanness and miserly ways but rejects him when he behaves dishonorably.

•Donald Duck is Hortense’s son and, following the story line contained in The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Scrooge’s companion on numerous adventures. He is as irascible as his uncle but lacks Scrooge’s common sense. He appears twice: first as a youth, then as an adult with his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

•The Beagle Boys are Scrooge’s primary adversaries. They are physically identical, aside from a white beard on the family elder and the different six-digit number each wears on his chest. All are stocky, have beard stubble, and wear orange shirts and diamond-shaped masks. Their appearances coincide with key moments in Scrooge’s life.

•Goldie O’Gilt is Scrooge’s lost love. Their romance is only alluded to but is pivotal in Scrooge’s life.

•Huey, Dewey, and Louie are Donald’s identical nephews and Scrooge’s grandnephews. They are proud members of the Junior Woodchucks, the Boy Scout-like organization begun on the original site of Scrooge’s money bin.

Artistic Style

Rosa’s art is replete with detail while maintaining the deceptively simple design of the characters. His meticulous research on every aspect of the narrative, from chronology to period design elements, enhances the narrative flow. The level of detail, though impressive, is not pure ornamentation but serves the story. For example, when Scrooge is returning to Scotland and thinking about the United States as the land of opportunity, the Statue of Liberty is being erected behind his departing boat.

Rosa’s primary page layout is the eight-panel grid used in most funny-animal comics during the 1950’s and 1960’s. This grid encourages quick reading and has proven an effective way of communicating slapstick humor in the still images of the comic medium. Rosa also routinely uses larger panels, open panels, and silhouettes for emphasis. For example, while page 133 is a straightforward eight-panel layout with only minor variation in panel widths, page 177 has two equal tiers in the top half, but the third tier in the bottom half is interrupted by a single panel set in an uncommon shape. The shape echoes that of the castle in the background. There are two wordless panels on this page. The first shows Scrooge’s happiness from making a profit on a simple transaction. The second shows him mourning at his mother’s grave. This is consistent with Rosa’s occasional but effective use of wordless panels to demonstrate or reinforce emotional states.

Rosa’s palette is specific to mood, location, and era. The colors of the Australian Outback in chapter 7 are primarily earth tones, while chapter 8, set in the Klondike, starts with earth tones and segues into cooler tones. Color reinforces mood in that chapter, as the narrative voice is third person for a flashback page rendered in sepia tones. Rosa’s use of nuanced coloring and more muted tones in his work differs from that used in many funny-animal books; by contrast, Carl Barks, Rosa’s predecessor in duck narratives, tended to use flat colors. While some of this may be attributed to advances in printing techniques, it also reflects a stylistic difference.

The backgrounds are consistent with comics creator and theorist Scott McCloud’s axiom that the best backgrounds serve as environments. Riverboats, trains, and scenes set in Africa and Russia are all rendered with accuracy and care. The veracity of talking ducks and dogs ambling about such carefully rendered settings is never questioned.

Above all, this is a character-driven narrative, and the art reflects that. Rosa’s strength is showing character’s emotional state. Facial expressions are exaggerated but remain believable and are reinforced with specific and dynamic poses. A cursory examination of the text finds less than a dozen panels in which any character simply stands still. As this is an adventure story, largely modeled on the American convention of the tall tale, every page and pose has a kinetic quality. Images depicting static characters are used for emphasis. The silhouette image, more frequently used, is employed for a similar emotional effect.

Themes

Rosa is the heir apparent to Barks, despite Barks’s insistence that Rosa’s work was contrary to his and that unifying the narrative was unnecessary. Rosa’s work succeeds on a variety of levels.

The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck is one man’s story, a classic definition of a novel. That man (here represented as a duck) embarks on a journey that begins with saving family, works through the abandonment of family for wealth, and circles back to family as a reason to live. These themes are an extension of some of Barks’s ideas about characterization in funny-animal comics. They are also a repudiation of some of those ideas. While Barks insisted that these stories were “simple fables” and needed no larger context, by providing that context, Rosa has made a larger statement about the human condition. Ultimately, this story is about the costs and rewards of ambition.

Impact

These stories appeared in the Bronze Age of comics, following the “duck boom” of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Readership of duck books specifically, and funny-animal books in general, was rapidly diminishing. By this time, no new Barks’s duck stories were appearing. The last issue of the alternative title No Ducks appeared in 1979.

Rosa came out of comics fandom, applying some of Barks’s storytelling principles to his series Captain Kentucky (1981-1985) and The Pertwillaby Papers (1971-1978), both of which ran in the critically successful Rocket’s Blast Comicollector magazine. By redefining the genre beginning with his first duck story in 1985, Rosa rekindled interest in funny-animal narratives. His redefinition was, however, quite faithful to the tone of the stories that inspired him. His work is seen as on par with, if not eclipsing, the masters of the form from the 1950’s and 1960’s. Much of his work has been reprinted over subsequent decades, despite licensing issues with Disney.

Further Reading

Díaz Canales, Juan, and Juanjo Guarnido. Blacksad (2010).

Smith, Jeff. Bone (1991-2004).

Waller, Reed, Kate Worley, and James Vance. Omaha the Cat Dancer (1978- ).

Bibliography

Andrae, Thomas. Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006.

Barrier, J. Michael. Carl Barks and the Art of the Comic Book. New York: M. Lilien, 1981.

Rosa, Don. “Don Rosa Part 1.” Interview by Dana Gabbard. The Comics Journal 183 (January, 1996): 82.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion. Timonium, Md.: Gemstone, 2006.