Tom Shapira | May 14, 2025
Donald Duck: Vacation Parade belongs to a genre that I like to call “nothing more, nothing less.” It gives you a promise early on: Donald Duck will go on a vacation and will suffer mischief in an entertaining manner, and for the rest of the story it tries and keep the promise. Simple? Yes, in theory at least. But consider: How many would-be humor comics actually made you laugh? How many action comics genuinely made you feel tension? How many adventure comics actually made you excited? "Simple" isn’t the same as "easy," as shown by the huge pile of genre stories I go through that leave absolutely no impression.
Whatever else you need to know about it, you should know this – Donald Duck: Vacation Parade upholds its promise. For the duration of its reading, even if not for a second after, my crinkled face pulled muscles it has rarely used during the last decade, that frown turned upside down. As Jesus must suffer for our sins, so must Donald Duck suffer for our laughter. His skeleton crinkles with just the right amount of energy as he gets hit by lightning; though sadly, he doesn’t turns into a pile of ash only to be reconstructed a second later.
An aside: it is odd, genuinely odd, that Disney Corporation, the largest and most wicked of entertainment giants, bought Marvel Comics, a company known (up until the last decade at least) for publishing four color fluff, and yet actual comics about what people would consider "Disney Characters" — your Donald, Mickey, Goofy etc. — is mostly published by other companies. Over the last decade I have seen Disney-related comics from the likes of Boom! Studious, Dark Horse, IDW and, of course, Fantagraphics. In fact, Fantagraphics seemingly publishes more Disney stuff than anyone else in the English-speaking world; starting out with the generally-accepted-as-classics Cark Barks and Don Rosa material and expanding from there. Did Gary Groth imagine, all the way back in 1976, that the house he built would one day publish TaleSpin comics?
All the while Marvel’s efforts were limited to the occasional variant cover. The reticence to fully combine Marvel and Disney is understandable. After all, one entity is considered something of a "name" within the world of comics, responsible for a string of memorable creations that has transcended their humble origins and might actually be called masterpieces. The other is Marvel Comics.
Back to the main course: The Warner Brothers cartoons, previously mentioned, are actually a better signpost for Vacation Parade than anything Disney-related from the 21st century. There’s more Chuck Jones here than Milt Kahl. This isn’t to say classic Disney films couldn’t be funny as their Loony tunes counterparts — pick any classic Goofy short by Jack Kinney to see some true excellence in slapstick — but Disney (the corporation) did its fair share to erase that legacy, sanding off whatever edges the characters had until only the marketing mascots remain. Not in Europe though. In the world of European comics Mickey and company are still allowed to run wild (up to a point) and get into all sorts of hijinks you can’t fit on a baby’s bib.
Fréderic Brémaud and Federico Bertolucci are the pair responsible for the Love series (Love: The Tiger, Love: The Fox, Love: The Lion), a collection of silent graphic novels (published in the English-speaking world by Magnetic Press). I have written about my dislike for most "serious" silent comics before, so we’ll not rehash old scores. When it comes to comedy, however, the pantomime style works a lot better. Vacation Parade still feels like a self-imposed challenge, there are several moments that seemingly call for some old-fashioned symbol swearing, but the book doesn’t try to pretend like it’s making a serious statement about life, the universe and everything else. The Duck goes "ouch," or at least makes the face of a person saying "ouch." The reader goes "ha." That’s as deep as it gets.
Leafing through the albums of Love that were available in local shop Bertolucci’s style always struck me as too clean and rounded for what is meant to be a series of stories investigating real nature. The animals appear to lack mass, I always knew I was looking at a cartoon of a creature. This is not a problem with his Donald Duck. In fact, Bertolucci’s art strikes exactly the right balance between selling the charms of the vacation spot as a an actual lovely spot without clashing with Donald Duck's cartoonish design. When Donald crashes on hard ground (on page 39) his body shows the correct amount of squash and stretch, his body contours but doesn't flatten entirely, he remains a person rather than a figure.
This is important — Donald is out of place because he is a tourist from the big city, not because he is drawn in a different manner. It's the impossible game played by Duck artists since the early days of Barks: These are not animals that have been humanized, these are humans who happen to have feathers and a beak. Donald’s opponents in this story, mostly these annoying rodents Chip and Dale (but also one sad bear) are an even sturdier challenge, because they are meant to be actual animals in the wild, while still being recognizable as their cartoon selves. Vacation Parade leaps that hurdle like Goofy in one of these Olympic shorts.
Another aside: Speaking of Barks, I have read a lot of translated Disney comics, so my perception may be colored by the small selection, but most of the works I have read were more in the Barksian manner than in the animated cartoon manner. These are two very different versions of Donald Duck, with Barks (and his followers) featuring him as a regular joe who gets into all sorts of crazy events and reacting appropriately. The cartoon version, the more famous one, is defined by Donald inability to connect with the outside world, speaking in throat-shattering tones even before his ire explodes.
The cartoon Donald can pretend to be a regular person only for a short burst, and that is the version seen in Vacation Parade. He can’t make do in the city, and he can’t enjoy himself in the wild. He's an outsider wherever he goes. There is a reason cartoons and comics went in different directions with the character — the outbursts of rage are less enjoyable when not accompanied by a voice or wild movement. Vacation Parade does as good a job as any comics can of aping that particular idea of Donald Duck, but that is still someone else’s idea. Fréderic Brémaud and Federico Bertolucci are struggling mightily, seemingly against the very nature of the medium they work in.
Which, I guess, is the most Donald Duck thing one can imagine. To try so hard and to achieve rather little. There is joy to be had in the little things, like a good laugh or a well-drawn panel. Vacation Parade probably won’t be considered a classic decades from today, but in the here and now it fulfills its promise. Even small promises should be kept.
English (US) · 