Welcome to the First Issue Bin, where I — Ethan Kaye — randomly grab one of this week's comics that’s just starting up and give you the details on whether it should get added to your collection … or remain on the comic shop shelf.
Uncle Scrooge: Earth's Mightiest Duck #1
Writer: Jason Aaron
Artists: Mahmud Asrar, Ciro Cangialosi, Guiseppe Camuncoli, Daniele Orlandini
Color Artist: Arianna Consonni
Letterer: VC's Joe Caramagna
Editor: Mark Paniccia
Sometimes a great comic story is sidelined by the limitations, or in this instance, expectations and conventions of the medium itself. Marvel's Uncle Scrooge: Earth's Mightiest Duck #1 would have been much more enjoyable to read if it stuck to the format of Dynamite's Disney comics (or IDW's, or Gladstone's, or Panini's, or Gold Key's, or Dell's) and didn't try to pass itself off as a Marvel action comic.
Like many of you, I've been picking up Marvel's erratic run of comics starring the iconic Disney characters with a feeling of trepidation. This experiment could go bad at anytime, I thought, but I like that the experiment is happening at all. Books like "What If Donald Duck Became Wolverine?" were weak beer, but I appreciated that the people at Marvel were willing to take a shot at the properties and didn't just foist them off to a third-party publisher. Heck, I even collected every single Disney character variant cover that Marvel published over the last two years.
But when the books stray away from Marvel crossovers and into their own storytelling, I find myself looking over at those third-party publishers and thinking, "Those carry the torch better than what Marvel's doing." Jason Aaron's Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime was the first attempt, his Uncle Scrooge: Earth's Mightiest Duck is the second.
Disney comics are an institution at this point, and not just an American one. They've been running for 95 years in one form or another, which is incredible. If comic fans aren't reading them now, they probably read them as kids. It's a challenge indeed to say something new with these old characters, but there's always the idea that new work is going to be held up against the old to see how it compares. I think there was a lot of good to the story of Earth's Mightiest Duck, but it read like a Marvel superhero comic. Which hurts the experience.
To sum up the plot, the world has been taken over by hoarder aliens called "The Connoisseurs" who are stealing all the art and culture and stuff. And a big part of that is Scrooge McDuck's money bin, but when they come to collect, it's empty. Much like Assassin's Creed, they strap Scrooge into a memory sucking device to try to find the cash. And just like Assassin's Creed, we follow Scrooge to explore events from his past as he attempts to stay one step ahead of the Connoisseurs.
I'll say that I have a decent background on Disney comics. I grew up with the Abbeville Press's "Walt Disney Best Comics" series, collected all of them, and when Fantagraphics started publishing Carl Barks's work (out of order, I might add), I grabbed nearly every volume. Why not all? Because I stumbled across the full 30-volume set of the Another Rainbow Carl Barks Library for a price that I couldn't say no to. The Fantagraphics volumes went to my nephew, and I continued to pick up all of the Fantagraphics Don Rosa Library, all in slipcases, as well as the entire Floyd Gottfredson Mickey Mouse collection. I love Disney comics.
And that's why I look at Earth's Mightiest Duck and say to myself, "Carl Barks could have told the same story in half the pages." The panels are too big, there's too much wasted action, page layouts are roomy to the point of feeling empty. It feels…like a superhero action book. And while Uncle Scrooge is probably the Disney character who best lends himself to action, it's not a chocolate and peanut butter moment. Barks would have gotten to the point faster, Rosa too, and had more space for additional plot twists, humor, and Junior Woodchuck-inspired science tricks.
There are still good choices made throughout, and really, if we're just focusing on the storyline, it's interesting enough to keep you flipping to the end, and maaaaaybe enough to pick up a second issue to see what era of Scrooge's life we'll dive into. We're dipping back into the Don Rosa-verse with tales of young Scrooge's life using an art style that apes Rosa's pretty darn well. Camuncoli and Orlandini are up to the task for sure, and Cangialosi is outstanding. The coloring by Arianna Consonni is wild and, dare I say, ambitious. And there are some good gags interspersed, including Aaron hiding "Kungaloosh!", the secret greeting for Disney's well-missed Aventurer's Club, in the dialogue.
But I think Disney's characters are best served outside of the Marvel bubble. The superhero storytelling conventions, even in an action-packed story, don't serve the material as well. Just look at Ducktales over at Dynamite. With only a few issues under its belt (thanks to, I'm assuming, the Diamond distribution shake up destroying shipping schedules), it's fast paced while not losing the puzzle-solving and humor that distinguish a Disney book. I don't feel like I'm sacrificing fun for kinetic action there like I did with Earth's Mightiest Duck.
Marvel is probably going to keep pushing this corporate synergy because, it's Disney, they haven't heard of two concepts they couldn't bash together. But with such diminishing returns, even great moments like the Rosa tributes have to carry a lot of water.
Art, pages 1-7: 2/5
Art, pages 8-17: 4/5
Art, pages 18-23: 4/5
Story: 3/5
Pacing: 1/5
Verdict: With 95 years of Disney comics to sample, and so many of them being reprinted, there are better options than this Marvel effort.
