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.

Review: Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime: Gallery Edition

After his The Other Side and Scalped became successes for DC's Vertigo imprint in the 2000s, writer Jason Aaron began a career at Marvel, one full of generally well-regarded runs on various high profile characters. He wrote Ghost Rider, Thor, The Punisher, Wolverine, The X-Men, Wolverine and The X-Men, Doctor Strange, The Hulk, The Avengers, and even Star Wars and Conan.

In 2023, he announced that he was no longer under exclusive contract with Marvel and he was shortly tackling some...well, some unusual characters for a guy who had spent about 20 years writing so much of the Marvel Universe. He wrote Superman (in an Action Comics arc, followed by the Absolute Superman ongoing), the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (relaunching IDW's ongoing series based on the license) and Uncle Scrooge (for a special Marvel one-shot). 

I wondered if, perhaps free of his exclusive contract, he was setting about working on his bucket list of comic book characters in earnest.

One has to imagine that, if Scrooge McDuck isn't on a lot of comics creators' bucket lists, it's only because writing him might seem so unrealistic. Luckily for Aaron, though, he had a long and fruitful relationship with Marvel, a corporate entity that is now owned by Disney (Although, aside from licensing most of their Star Wars comics to Marvel, Disney has mostly steered clear of having Marvel publish much of anything starring their signature cartoon characters, Fantagraphics seemingly remaining their favored publisher for duck and mouse comics). 

Certainly, Scrooge is one of the all-time greatest comics characters, and, of course, Aaron is a fan—although according to his brief introduction to the hardcover "Gallery Edition" of his comic Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime, he's a rather recent one. 

Under the title "Why I Love This Duck", which begins with the sentence "Uncle Scrooge is one of the greatest adventure characters in comic-book history," he tells of sitting down with his son at bedtime one night to read Don Rosa's "Son of the Sun". After that, he was hooked, and said he spent the rest of his son's childhood reading the Don Rosa library with him, singling out "Guardians of the Lost Library" as his favorite story. 

While he dedicates The Infinity Dime to several people—including his son, Rosa and Scrooge creator Carl Barks—he also says he wrote it for "you," by which he seems to mean readers who aren't already fans of Uncle Scrooge, hoping his comic would serve as a sort of gateway into some of those many great comics, comics you can know fill several bookshelves full of handsome collections of, thanks to Fantagraphics.

After reading that, I was a bit curious as to how well the project might have succeeded. Did Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime find its way in front of the average Marvel Comics fan, or, perhaps Jason Aaron fan, and did such readers not have any prior experience with Uncle Scrooge? (Given the presence of Disney comics in comic shops over the last few decades, and the existence of two different versions of the cartoon Duck Tales, one from 1987s and one from 2017, I have to imagine most comics readers already had a pretty good idea of who Scrooge was and what he was all about. I know I personally met him in repeated viewings of Mickey's Christmas Carol, hung out with him after school during the initial Duck Tales series, spent hours playing the video game based on the cartoon and then followed him into the comics as soon as Fanta started their Carl Barks Library.)

Anyway, Aaron's effort is a rather odd comic, something of an uneasy Marvel/Disney hybrid. Its writer is, of course, a Marvel guy, and the basic idea seems to be to put Scrooge, his cast and basic milieu into a somewhat typical Marvel comic book, although they apparently didn't want to book to look or feel like a Marvel comic, as rather than commissioning a Marvel artist or artists to draw it, they turned to a half-dozen Italian Disney artists, splitting the chapters between them: Paolo Mottura, Fancesco D'Ippolito and Lucio De Giuseppe,  Alessandro Pastrovicchio and Vitale Mangiatordi and Giada Perissinotto, with colors by Arianna Consonni.

The only clue of what members of Marvel's "bullpen" might have done with the character if given a chance came on the covers. Recent Fantastic Four cover artist Alex Ross is responsible for the one above, but there were of course plenty of variants, including ones from J. Scott Campbell, Gabriele Dell'Otto, Steve McNiven, Frank Miller, Peach Momoko, John Romita Jr, Walter Simonson and Skottie Young (This particular hardcover collection includes them all in the back, as well as interviews with many of the artists; we'll get to them later on in the post, as I'm sure you're fascinated to find out what Frank Miller's version of a Disney duck might look like and, if you can't wait, you can always visit Comics.org).

Now, The Infinity Dime was apparently a 30-page, $7.99 one-shot, published in August of 2024. Being currently comic shop-less, I naturally skipped it, deciding to wait until it was republished in trade (I had assumed it was a far longer, multi-issue story, to be honest; I guess when one stops reading Marvel's solicitations month in and month out, one no longer knows exactly what they're getting when picking up the publisher's works).

I never did buy a trade, nor did I ever find one in my library and, recently remembering the comic existed, I checked the library catalog for it, and was somewhat surprised to see that that while an over-sized 9.57-inch by 13.25 inch, 112-page hardcover collection was indeed published back in March, neither my library nor the consortium we share materials with had ordered a physical copy for some reason (Reminder: That consortium consists of 40 different library systems throughout northeast Ohio, including the Cleveland Public Library system). 

And so I read it as an "eComic", borrowed via the Hoopla app.

This meant that I couldn't tell how big the published version's pages actually were, nor could I guess how long it actually was until I had finished reading it. Based on the original comic's cover boasting that it was "The Story of the Century!", and by Aaron's professed interest in the works of Rosa and Barks and company, and by the fact that it was broken into three chapters and an epilogue and the fact that it had so many different artists involved, I was expecting the story to be, well, something of an epic, you know?

It's not. Like I said above, there are just 30 original story pages devoted to The Infinity Dime, making it the length of about one-and-a-half regular Marvel comics. That was, obviously, rather disappointing.

And as for Aaron's story, while it is big in terms of scale and stakes, if not page count, and it does seem to endeavor to offer something of a mission statement on the title character and what makes him so special, it can't help but feel a little small...more of a trifle than an epic, really.

The plot is really quite superheroic, and while many Disney comics have been published that deal with the genre—including those in which Donald Duck and Goofy have their own superhero personas—this one feels much more like a modern DC or Marvel book, rather than an application of the Disney characters to the classic superhero tropes.

The book begins with Donald and Huey, Dewey and Louie diving through a terrible snowstorm, on their way to Bear Mountain, where they would meet their distant Uncle Scrooge for the first time and spend Christmas with him (This is, of course, the same premise of Bark's 1947 story "Christmas on Bear Mountain," the first appearance of Scrooge). Here, things go differently, though: Scrooge's nephews never make it to see him, Donald never proves his mettle to Scrooge and the old miser never becomes part of their lives. This, a caption in the last panel of the first page tells us, is a world "among the myriad of alternate universes arrayed across infinity."

That's right, it's a multiverse story! Sick of the Marvel Cinematic Universe telling multiverse stories? Well, now they've even infected Disney duck comics!

This particular world's Scrooge seems to have still had many of his adventures, enough to fill a massive money bin, but he's grown more bitter and lonely than ever. One day, while stomping through his bin, he happens by a magic mirror embedded in a pile of coins, which he had taken from "that two-bit conjurer, Magica De Spell". No sooner does he finish his exposition, telling readers that it was called "The Mirror of Worlds", then it begins to glow pink, emit a stream of five-pointed cartoon stars and pull on his number one dime, which he wears like a necklace. (For some reason, it's a really big dime, looking more like a fifty-cent piece).

Then he has a revelation: "Why settle for being the richest duck in the world, when I could be... ...the richest duck on ALL the worlds!!!"

Meanwhile, in the "real" world, Scrooge and his nephews are flying back into Duckburg, where they see the Beagle Boys attempting a strange money bin heist, wherein the entire bin is being lifted up off the ground and into some sort of pink energy portal in the sky.

Scrooge goes on the attack, but he soon finds himself face to face with Doctor Doom-like "the Scrooge-Above-All", the evil Scrooge we had just met, now outfitted with a villainous-looking costume (dig the coins on his knuckles). Between the pages, he has apparently busied himself by visiting alternate reality after alternate reality, besting each world's Scrooge and then making off with that fallen Scrooge's number one dime and money bin. He gets those of our Scrooge too.

Scrooge and the nephews go to Gyro Gearloose for help, and the nephews explain the multiverse, using the entry on "multiverse" from their Junior Woodchuck Guidebook. Gyro pulls out this world's Mirror of Worlds, which he has been studying (He does not, therefore, end up inventing anything here to help Scrooge). 

After it's explained that to travel through the multiverse, one needs a "universal constant", "something that exists in all universes at once," Scrooge at first thinks that his number one dime might be it, but Gyro tell his that no, it is Scrooge himself that is the universal constant (And I guess he does exist in our universe, the only one we can be sure is definitely real, in the form of a comic book and cartoon character, but then, we also know that he doesn't exist in other universes we read about regularly, like that of the Marvel Universe or DC Universe...)

To make a not-very-long story short (a "weeks later" caption seems to skip over what a reader might expect to come next), our Scrooge visits the Scrooge-Above-All's Duckburg and infiltrates his gigantic money bin, which is a money bin big enough to encompass all the other worlds' money bins. It's "The All-Bin."

Confronted by Beagle Boys, our Scrooge commands his shadowy allies, revealed on one of the book's several splash pages, a story technique that is definitely more modern Marvel than classic Disney, "Fight like Scrooges!!!"

Scrooge's multiversal army of himself then falls before the magical might of the Scrooge-Above-All, who tells them that this has all happened before, and refers to himself at one point as "Scrooge...Uncle to NO ONE!"

Then the Scrooges unleash their secret weapon, dogpile, er, duckpile the evil Scrooge, and, in a matter of panels of them yelling at him while wrestling, convince him that all of the money in all of the worlds is still just so much metal, and that the sense of adventure, the connections made along the way, and family is the real treasure.

And, a few pages later, there's a two-page epilogue, during which we see that the evil Scrooge too has been redeemed in the same way that the "real" Scrooge was...his redemption just took a lot longer, and a violent intervention by his own multiversal doppelgangers, rather than just, you know, spending a Christmas with his nephew and grand-nephews.

As you can see then, it's quite "Marvelous" a story...Aaron even drops a "'Nuff said" into the proceedings. 

I confess to being somewhat disappointed, but that's mainly because I was expecting something longer and grander (and the way I read it kept me from realizing how short it actually was until I reached "THE END" on the last page; obviously if you get a physical copy of the book for yourself, this won't be a factor for you), but it certainly does its job of putting Scrooge and company into what feels a lot like a modern Marvel story, while extolling the character's virtues: Not only is he smart and tough and super-rich, but his extreme wealth is presented as a symbol of what is really valuable in life. 

And then it's on to the backmatter, of which there is a lot.

In fact, there is some 80 pages of it. All these extras include a short interview with Jason Aaron, another with the artists, one with the artist who designed the "dark" Scrooge including some preliminary sketches, some pages of unfinished art, and each of the variant covers, including interviews with many of the artists who contributed them.  Finally, there's Bark's original 19-page "Christmas on Bear Mountain," reprinted in all its glory.

The Marvel artists who contributed these tended to fall into one of two camps. 

Some simply drew in the Disney style and did so to such a degree that you might not recognize their art as theirs at all. This includes Alex Ross (I mean sure, his is painted, and in a more photorealistic style that suggests a degree of three-dimensionality, but other than that, his Scrooge just looks like the regular Scrooge, right?), as well as J. Scott Campbell, Ron Lim, Steve McNiven, Gabriele Dell'Otto and, I think, even such distinct stylists as John Romita JR and Walt Simonson.

I mean, at a glance, could you tell these covers were the work of JRJR and Simonson?

And then there are artists who drew Scrooge in their own signature styles, design be damned. These include Peach Momoko, Skottie Young and Frank Miller.

Check out Miller's Scrooge:

I think it's quite safe to say that it doesn't look like a piece one might expect to find on a Disney-branded comic (I'm most intrigued by how he handled Scrooge's feathers between the hem of his coat and the top of his legs; it looks like he's wearing a white hula skirt...and man, that beak...! I remember from middle-school trying to draw Scrooge's beak, and damn, it is not easy...!)

I think the artists who fares the best at drawing Scrooge, the one who balances adherence to the design without sacrificing their own personal style at all is Young. Check this out:

It's obviously a Scrooge, and a workable one, but not the Scrooge, right? I imagine it is merely a result of Young's own cartoon-inspired style being closer to that of Disney comics than the style of many of his peers, but it's easy to imagine Young having drawn all of The Infinity Dime, for example, while Miller doing so would seem unthinkable.

Now, while the book doesn't say so, I can say so here. If this really was your first introduction to Uncle Scrooge comics, click this link and start shopping. 

While I've yet to read a book from any of Fanta's Disney series that I didn't enjoy, I'd recommend starting with pretty much any volume of The Carl Barks Library, be they Donald Duck or Uncle Scrooge books. I only have a pair of volumes from the Don Rosa Library myself so far, as I wanted to get all the Barks ones before moving on, but, obviously, those are damn good comics too (And, after reading this, I want to seek "Guardians of the Lost Library" ASAP).

When it comes to Fantagraphics' collections of classic Disney comics, it's really rather hard to think of a better deal in terms of quality of comics to money spent ratio in comics right now....

Meanwhile...

I reviewed Uncle Scrooge #1, the first issue of the first of IDW's publication of a line of Disney books, at Robot 6 yesterday. You can go read it here, if you'd like. That's Andrew Pepoy's variant cover above.

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.

What is the greatest, most creative ostentatious demonstration of wealth in Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Trail of The Unicorn...?

The scene in "Letter to Santa" in which Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge (dressed uncharacteristically in a suit jacket and tie) hit each other over the head with sacks of money as if engaged in the world's most expensive pillow fight certainly demonstrates great wealth, but as it occurs in the privacy of Scrooge's own office, it's hardly ostentatious.

This panel from the last page of "The Great Duckburg Frog-Jumping Contest," in which Donald and his nephews take their $3,000 prize to an expensive restaurant to buy the most expensive dish is pretty great. I love the fact that here Donald has so much cash that he's not only stuffed himself with it like a scarecrow, but the serene expression on his face, as having a sailor's hat bursting with bills is perfectly natural (Louie, by contrast, cracks a smile).

But I think this panel from the title story, in which Donald and the boys drive past Gladstone in their new, absurdly impractical-looking car, purchased with the $2 million that Uncle Scrooge gave them for saving the life of his unicorn, is the best ostentatious demonstration of wealth. It's not just the ridiculous luxury car itself—the fact that appears to get TV and/or radio in 1949, the monogrammed car door, the hood ornament bigger than the kids—or the fact that they've hired a driver in an elaborate uniform.

It's the fact that they've hired a second guy in an elaborate uniform to sit next to driver, apparently for the specific purpose of insulting other drivers with less ostentatious cars.

You tell 'em, Uncle Scrooge!

(Another panel scanned from Fantagraphics' latest Carl Barks collection,  Walt Disney's Donald Duck: The Old Castle's Secret)

Wow, I never realized how many of those coats Scrooge owned

Super-Endorsements 2012:

Three from Boom: The Grasshopper and The Ant, Hawks of Outremer #1 and Uncle Scrooge #392

The Grasshopper and The Ant: Harvey Kurtzman’s comics version of the classic insect fable was originally produced in 1960 for Esquire magazine, and almost 50 years later it’s still a remarkably relevant work. Perhaps that should come as nor surprise; 50 years is awfully recent compared to the original fable’s suspected vintage (Heck, the Bible’s Book of Proverbs includes a version of it).

Of course, it might also come down to the fact that this is a Kurtzman comic we’re talking about, and the late, great cartoonist’s work boasts a vitality and originality that makes it always seem fresh and new. (When I first encountered his work, it was his covers to the earliest issues of Mad that were reprinted in various price catalogs and histories of comics, and I remember being quite shocked to learn that those drawings were done before my parents were born, but looked just as fresh as last Saturday’s Saturday morning cartoons).

Kurtzman’s The Grasshopper and The Ant is a 37-page story, with each page consisting of a single large drawing, the edges of the page making each page its own de facto panel, with the lovely hand-lettering in dialogue balloons sometimes breaking the single image into several moments, by virtue of the time it takes to read all the words. (We probably shouldn’t get into this now, but Kurtzman does some pretty amazing stuff in these pages when it comes to manipulating time through the interaction of the words and pictures…it’s particularly amazing given the perfect uniformity of the pages and panels; given the format, each page should “last” as long as every other one, but that’s not the case. Shit, this is a comic not just to read, but to study).

You probably know the basic story. There’s a grasshopper and an ant. The former wants to sing and dance and play all year around, while the latter works gathering food; when winter comes along, the grasshopper has nothing to eat and either starves or is saved by the ant so he can survive to learn his lesson.

Kurtzman’s version has a sucker-punch twist befitting the work of a cartoonist—particularly a cartoonist who is also one of the founders of Mad—but it’s the execution and the details that make this an exciting read.

The 1950s origins of the comic are somewhat apparent in some of the details, with the grasshopper making long-winded speeches and playing the bongos while his fellow insect beatniks (bugniks?) read poetry or play jazz, or the insect equivalent: “This is th enew ‘cool-chirping,’ Ant…semi improvisational, distinguished by an immediacy of communication; an expressiveness characteristic of the free use of the voice and forming a complex, flowing rhythm.”

All the ant wants to know, however, is “Can you gather grain to it.”

Kurtzman gets a lot of mileage out of simple bug jokes, like Grasshopper talking to what he thinks is Cicada (but is really just Cicada’s discarded exoskleton), and/or the application of insect details to normal human situations and conversations, like Ant remarking on how a hot, Kurtzman-curvy butterfly was the “freckle-faced caterpillar I sued to know—with pigtails and braces” or individualistic Grasshopper scoffing when someone hints there’s a “big Locust Plague staring up…Big outfit! Security…”

“Me?” he says, “Join a plague? CONFORM?”

Underlying the panel-to-panel gags is the sense that bug-life, even more so than the human life they’re playing at, is extremely short and likely to end suddenly and violently, adding to the tension of a story we all know ends with one of the characters either dying or almost dying.

As I said though, Kurtzman’s version is his own version. As big a fool as his grasshopper may be, he’s still a cool fool, and if never doing any work at all is bad for your health, constantly doing work at the expense of all else isn’t presented in a necessarily healthy light either. This Grasshopper and Ant are two unappealing extremes, so it’s neat to see that they both have something to learn from the other before the final pages, and that Kurtzman has a darkly funny ending in mind all along.

If the moral of the original was something along the lines of “To work today is to eat tomorrow” or “If you don’t work in the spring, summer and autumn, you’re totally going to starve to death in the winter,” Kurtzman’s seems to be something along the lines of, “No matter how hard a worker you are, and no matter how with it and cool you are, if you’re a chump, you’re going to come to a bad end.”

And is there any more important moral to learn and internalize than, “Don’t be a chump?” I think not.


Hawks of Outremer #1: Robert E. Howard’s characters have given birth to thousands of pages of comic books over the years, and yet Marvel, Dark Horse, and other publishers still haven’t managed to exploit them all. Enter Boom Studios, which is adapting Howard’s 1931 short story “Hawks of Outremer” into a four-issue miniseries.

The star of the story is Cormac Fitzgeoffery, a typically badass, no-nonsense Howard hero, this one an Irish chieftan who was fighting against Saladin and the “Moslem” during the Crusades. When the story opens, he’s presumed dead, and after recounting his tale to one of the few men he counts as friends, he learns that a man he owed allegiance to has been killed. So he sets out to kill those he holds responsible, both by direct action and self-interested inaction.

The first issue of the series, adapted from Howard’s story by Michael Alan Nelson, is pretty much a perfect serial comic book, in terms of structure. It’s a fairly complete story all on its own, with an introduction to the character and setting followed by a conflict with a beginning, middle and satisfying end, but there’s an overarching conflict to propel a reader into the next issue. In other words, it works as a single 22-page story, and as the first chapter of a longer story.

Nelson does a great job of turning a prose piece into a comics one—this looks and works like a comic book, rather than something adapted from prose, and Nelson relies on the images of the art and the dialogue to tell the story, not resorting to captions or narration.

The art is provided by Damian Couceiro, and it’s pretty strong. His Cormac has the pissed-off, scary look of Conan and Solomon Kane, and is fairly hulking compared to the other characters. Couceiro is given an awful lot of the heavy lifting to do, but bears the weight well, and colorist Juan Manuel Tumbrus makes it look as if pen-and-ink drawings are done over water-colored backgrounds.

It’s somewhat slight—it’s a Robert E. Howard 12th century revenge story, after all, and Howard’s not the most complex writer in the world—but it’s very well done.


Uncle Scrooge #392: This is a Duck Tales-centric issue, which is kind of amusing—a Disney duck comic heavily inspired by an old Disney duck cartoon that was adapted from old Disney duck comics.

The issue is broken up into two complete stories by two different creative teams, and they’re both quite solid. This is a comic book anyone of just about any age could pick up and enjoy.

The first is “Everlasting Coal,” written by Paul Halas and Tom Anderson and drawn by Zavier Vives Mateh. This one reminded me the most of the classic Carl Barks-style Uncle Scrooge stories, with the ducks going off to a far off land to exploit a resource, and having an adventure in the process. The resource here is coal that burns indefinitely without ever being consumed, which can only be found in a mountain range ruled over by a bandit named after a type of delicious rice.

The second is “The Littlest Gizmoduck,” which is written by Disney Adventures Staff (that’s a funny name), drawn by artist Robert Santillo and finds Huey, Dewey, Louie and Webby (which doesn’t rhyme at all) constructing their own homemade Gizmoduck costume, and then using it against the Beagle Boys.

I’ve always been more partial to the traveling adventures, so I enjoyed the first story more, despite the more dynamic art Santillo provides the second one. As someone who grew up with Duck Tales (the cartoon) and then discovered Carl Barks’ duck tales (the comics) as an adult, I particularly enjoyed seeing Donald Duck and Donald Duck stand-in Launchpad McQuack together with Uncle Scrooge and the nephews in the first story and, yeah, I admit it—seeing Gizmoduck again did push a nostalgia button I didn’t know I had.

Click to better scrutinize my poor penmanship and limited understanding of Photoshop's eye drop and paint tools

(Cross-posted here and at Blog@Newsarama)