Three interesting scenes from Don Rosa's "A Little Something Special"

The title story of Fantagraphics' new collection Uncle Scrooge: "A Little Something Special" and Other Tales of Fiendish Foes is by Don Rosa and was created in 1997 to mark the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Carl Barks' creation of Scrooge McDuck. It's an all-around great story, a celebration and summation of Uncle Scrooge comics, containing the character's family, friends and foes, as well as references to his biography and the history of Duckburg. 

Is it the ultimate Uncle Scrooge story? Perhaps.

Thes reason it is one of the 15 stories collected in this particular book is, of course, because it contains an alliance of Scrooge's greatest villains. Though I think Rosa's "A Matter of Some Gravity", a Magica De Spell story, is probably the most inventive and technically interesting of his work in this collection, there are some really great bits of storytelling and cartooning in "A Little Something Special," which I wanted to take a moment to point out here on the blog.(You can read my full review of the book at Good Comics For Kids.)

1.) The villains gather. Though Magica De Spell, The Beagle Boys and Flintheart Glomgold are Scrooge's greatest foes, and each has their own longstanding conflict with him, Rosa details here that each villain's desires differ greatly from one another, so much so that they can all play a part in a coordinated attack against Scrooge.

Also, I thought it notable that their alliance doesn't fail for the same reason similar groupings of supervillains generally fail in superhero comics. That is, while they don't necessarily like or respect one another, they aren't done in by infighting or betrayal...at least, not until a panel that acts as a sort of coda to that aspect of the story, perhaps suggesting why these guys didn't make such a team-up a regular thing. 

2.) Scrooge puts two and two together. The bad guys' plan involves keeping Scrooge away from his money bin by having him sit through an interminable ceremony in his honor, and another part of the plan involves the various villains taking on magically created disguises, these generated by a transmutation wand that Magica purchased with Glomgold's money. 

There is apparently one flaw in the disguises though: Transmuted or not, a person's shadow remains the same. That's how Scrooge, with an assist from a nephew, realizes that the speaker is actually Glomgold in disguise. 

The last panel in the above sequence, in which Scrooge realizes that Glomgold must be working with Magica and that means trouble for him, is a great one, one of those "only-in-comics" bits of storytelling.

3.) The disguises break down. During his mad dash back to his money bin, Scrooge runs headlong into Magica, damaging her transmutation wand. The result? The disguises that the Beagle Boys had adopted, each of them appearing to be a different one of Scrooge's friends or family, start to fall apart. They don't disappear entirely, but the Beagle Boys suddenly look like hybrids of themselves and a duck character, and Rosa gives them each a unique form, as you can see above (Unfortunately for Donald and one of the Beagle Boys, Donald was in the process of kissing "Daisy" when Scrooge accidentally damaged the wand).

The Beagle Boys would remain in this weird state for a few more pages, giving us a few more fun images of a Beagle head atop Daisy's body or a nephew's torso atop a Beagle's legs. 

Not pictured here are the Beagles who were disguised as Gladstone Gander and Gyro Gearloose. The former resumes his Beagle body, but he is now dressed in Gladstone's far too small clothes (Rosa never draws him from the waist down; the Beagles wear pants, remember, while the ducks don't). The latter is bisected vertically, so that he looks like a Beagle Boy on the right half of his body, while the left half of his body is that of Gyro.

Huey, Dewey and Louie have never been so insulted in their whole lives.

Uncle Scrooge offers a theory as to why the people of Plain Awful might have decided to base their entire culture around Donald Duck instead of Huey, Dewey and Louie after that one time Donald and his three identical nephews visited them.

That gag is probably my favorite part of Don Rosa's "Return to Plain Awful," one of the stories collected in the second volume of Fantagraphics' Don Rosa Library, entitled Return to Plain Awful. You're gonna want to pick that up this week, or write yourself a note to do so in the near future, as it's a pretty great collection, and the title story's not even one of the better ones you'll find in it.

Meanwhile...

I reviewed Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck: The Son of The Sun for Good Comics For Kids. That's the first collection in Fantagraphics' new Don Rosa Library, collecting the work of the second best Disney duck artist. What makes this particular Rosa collection--and, I imagine, future ones--so fun and interesting is the amount of input and commentary from Rosa himself, something that couldn't really be don with the Carl Barks Library collection.

Then, over at Robot 6 this week, I had two pieces. The first is a review of two books featuring super men and wonder women in relationships: Charles Soule, Tony S. Daniel and company's Superman/Wonder Woman Vol. 1: Power Couple and Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson and Alex Ross's Astro City: Victory. The second is a review of a handful of this week's Futures End one-shot specials that don't really tie-in to The New 52: Futures End weekly series, like, at all. (That's probably either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what you're expecting; if all you're expecting is a 3D lenticular cover, your expectations will definitely be met, maybe eve exceeded).

And, finally, I have a short little feature on Vegas-based cartoonist Gilbert Hernandez and his (excellent) new original graphic novel, Bumperhead, in this week's issue of Las Vegas Weekly.