"The Charge at Dawn"

 Look, I'd LIKE to start with an intro, but there just ISN'T TIME! Gotta get going NOW NOW NOW!

I mean, "He's a lonely old guy" is clearly accurate, and it took some unknown Western author to reveal it so artlessly! Little did he know, he was just what was needed. I sometimes wonder if comix should emphasize this aspect of Scrooge's character more often. I suppose it really mostly has to exist as subtext; we can't get TOO angsty in comix for kidz. I'm writing "comix" with an x now. I just decided that. And "kidz" with a z so it's more extreme.

But actually, I shouldn't be mean to the writer, because this is notably not-badly-written. More or less. I daresay that if this were Barks art you wouldn't bat an eye at the idea that it was Barks writing too. Look at "fretfully" there.

So who DID write this? Well, I'm not some sort of expert. Here are the people I know who wrote but didn't draw stories: Vic Lockman, Bob Gregory, Carl Fallberg, and Don Christensen (well, those first two DID draw a number of stories later in their career, to everyone's dismay, but you know). Tony Strobl DID write some of his own stories, but I don't think this is one such. If inducks is correct, we can remove Gregory from contention, as this story is from 1956, and he didn't start writing stories until '57. Is that accurate? I don't know, but let's assume so. No way this is Lockman. You MIGHT want to go with Fallberg, as the western stuff (well, we haven't got there yet, but we will momentarily) sort of seems, from other stories he wrote, like it would be his jam, but I ultimately think I'm gonna have to go Christensen again, same as the last story. Probably! Tell me if you have other thoughts.

"Yeah...ours! We're leaving!" is good. But "a slave in a golden cage?" I appreciate the effort, but you are mixing different levels of comparison here: Scrooge, trapped in his bin, is a prisoner: he's LIKE a bird in a gilded cage, but he's not in an actual cage. Birds are to cages as misers are to paranoia and money-obsession, would be the idea. If you see what I'm saying.

Why did I cut this image? Probably just for plot purposes. The government is selling the fort. Does the government do that? The internet suggests...maybe. I'll give Christensen or whoever a pass there, though it still seems kind of weird.

Donald makes a great point here. Let's just hope no one invents airplanes; that might put a damper on things.

Did they imagine they WOULDN'T have to end up getting involved? Unclear. It's really their own fault; if they didn't want to participate, they shouldn't have told him. Also, note "tapped phone wire." I think the writer's conception is that a phone wire goes directly to your house and from there presumably directly to your phone. When someone calls you, their voice rushes down this series of wires to the receiver. So if you just tie an extra wire to the phone line, and you helpfully have an extra receiver, you can listen in on them. Is that how it works? It seems unlikely, but I do have to admit, <i>I</i> don't know how telephone wires work!  Seems vaguely plausible to me!

I do enjoy our colorful Beagles here. Nice change from their usual orange-and-blue. Or red and blue, depending on the colorist or if you're watching Ducktales. And it just occurs to me to wonder: why red? I mean, their shirts are clearly orange because they're prison jumpsuits (that they're wearing jeans over, I guess?). Orange is pretty universally the color for such things, so where the hell did RED come from? A colorist with some form of colorblindness, which seems like a pretty big handicap for a colorist? Who can say.

Welp, get used to the word "Injun," because you'll be seeing it A LOT in this story. I don't have much to say about it, other than fuck this shit. I'm less inclined to be lenient in an age where racism in all forms is official government policy.

Oh for the love of--I dunno; maybe we SHOULD massacre some more white people. What do you guys think? I just want to point out that all the disingenuous anti arguments people were making when they were arguing against changing the Washington football team's name are neatly rendered null and fucking void by Scrooge here specifically using the word as a term of abuse.

I mean, wood does rot. I suspect that if it were so rotten that you could do that, the whole thing would've collapsed long ago, but whatevz. It's fine. Granted, if anyone involved here had done ANY DUE DILLIGENCE WHATSOEVER, this problem would've been revealed before now, and cheer up, Scrooge, now you can probably sue the government, but...anyway.

Good news: there's only an extremely small quantity of issues with this plan. Generally speaking, it is great as hell. I would just suggest one little thing: in the bottom left panel, Scrooge's dialogue should be modified slightly to read "Hurry with your king-size mud pies, kids, and 'mud' here is obviously a euphemism for 'clay that you've fired in a makeshift kiln that you learned how to make by looking in the Junior Woodchucks handbook under "pottery materials, improvised."'" Otherwise, uh. Uh.

Okay, all joking aside, I'm really having a hard time believing that Christensen or whoever believed that mud somehow wasn't water-soluable. I hate to say it, but it seems like a plot point you stick in because it's easy and you don't care that much. Not too impressive. And even if it somehow DIDN'T immediately disintegrate, a filled-in well like that is EXTREMELY SUSPICIOUS, and anyone passing by would drop a rock or something on it to see if it would break, which it would.

I really like how wistful the Beagles look here. Gosh...maybe someday...

I feel like making fun of their extreme dumbness here would be superfluous. I mean...no doubt most of what I write is superfluous, but this is a different level, you know?

So this is actually quite an atmospheric set of panels, I like it a lot, but BOY HOWDY do I wish you'd stop saying that word!

Because he is unlucky, Donald never gets to sleep. Apparently. Do militaries work like this? Or ragtag mercenary bands? I doubt it!

I do enjoy seeing Scrooge freaking out while Donald stays ice-cold, but that enjoyment IS tempered a bit by, oh, you know.

Truly one of Scrooge's more insane gambits. I suppose if you DIE you won't be able to talk either, so you've got that, uh, going for you.

And I really like THIS because of Huey's line there: "I hope they don't look in here!" Because yeah, man, that is definitely one hundred percent going to be the main thing going through your mind while hiding from Beagles in a cannon. Not that I really blame anyone, since this is just how things are written, but you could totally take that balloon out, and would the meaning be affected in any way? I doubt it. Pretty sure it would be better unless, like me, you enjoy dopey redundancy.

Duh-h! Duh-h!

You might think that this would just be the start--sure, the well fools them initially, but obviously they're not going to give up THAT easily, are you they? But naw, man, you're wrong, they totally are. Don't even worry about it. I do have to acknowledge that this story does not end up exactly where you'd expect it's going to.

Civil War re-enactors? "Descendents of cavalry troopers" is not very descriptive. All I know is, if I'm one of them, I am NOT in it to attack bandits. Fuck. This. Shit. I am OUT.

I dunno; given what a halfassed effort the Beagles actually made I don't oh forget it.

Seriously, your every expectation here is that Donald's plan is going to fall through; maybe they'll save the day nonetheless or maybe not, but that's how it's gonna be. But nope! Turns out his money's just going to be rotting in this well from now on. That's a twist. If I were Scrooge, I might possibly conceivably worry a bit about the effect that a bunch of coins might have on the seal which is somehow permanent. Well, I guess we've pretty clearly established that it's a magic seal, so...okay!

That is that. No real profundities to offer, but I did want to take the opportunity to share this one-pager that accompanied "The Charge at Dawn" in Donald Duck 49:

What I really like about this is that I don't get the impression that Donald is doing it to be a dick. It looks like he just thinks eating at a hobo encampment is a super-fun thing to do and assumes Daisy will share his enthusiasm. Ah, love!

Labels: Tony Strobl