The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck TPB

July 5, 2005

Quick Rating: Excellent
Contains: Feature stories from Uncle Scrooge #285-296 (First American printings)

The incredible story of how a shoeshine boy from Glascow became the Richest Duck in the World!

Writer: Don Rosa (Based on stories suggested by Carl Barks)
Art: Don Rosa
Cover Art: Don Rosa
Publisher: Gemstone Comics

Everyone who’s ever read a Disney comic or watched an episode of the Ducktales cartoon knows who Uncle Scrooge is – Donald Duck’s tightwad old uncle who has a bin full of three cubic acres of money and likes to swim around in it like a porpoise. That’s all there is to it, right?

Wrong. So wrong.

Haven’t you ever wondered how he got all that money? Where it came from? And most importantly, why he keeps so much of it in that vault? The answers may surprise you. Fortunately, you can find them all right here, in The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, a complete, cohesive life story for one of the richest characters in comic book history.

In 1947, Disney cartoonist Carl Barks wrote a Donald Duck story, “Christmas on Bear Mountain,” published in Donald Duck Four-Color #178. Don and his nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie, were invited to spend Christmas Eve at the cabin of their reclusive billionaire uncle, Scrooge McDuck. Barks intended the character for just one appearance, but he turned out to be popular enough to bring back again. And again. And again. And eventually, in the comics, Scrooge turned out to be more popular than any other Disney character, and by spreading to the European market, one of the most popular comic book characters in the world.

In the early 90s, Don Rosa had picked up the torch Barks left, using Scrooge and his nephews to tell stories of high adventure and high comedy – which led, ultimately, to this incredibly ambitious project. Over the years, Barks had thrown out frequent comments from Scrooge about his life as he built his fortune – stories about serving as a first mate on the Mississippi River, riding through the Australian outback, and most famously, how he made his first billion prospecting for gold in the Klondike. Rosa took those comments by Barks and pieced them together into this – a 12-part life story that makes this character seem like so much more than he ever was on the Ducktales cartoon where so many of us gained our first impressions of him.

Rosa begins his story in the year 1877, the day before young Scrooge’s 10th birthday, when the gift of a shoeshine kit changed his life forever. Scrooge is the last of the Clan McDuck, a once proud and noble family that has fallen into hard times, barely even able to pay the back taxes and keep their ancestral castle. Scrooge is determined to help. After a hard hour of scrubbing the filthiest boots imaginable, he is paid just one thin dime – and a worthless (in Scotland) American dime at that. He feels like he’s been cheated – but rather than giving up, Scrooge uses that dime as his inspiration, to be smart, tough and make his money “square.”

Again inspired by the dime, Scrooge heads to America, where he signs on as a mate on the riverboat piloted by his uncle, Angus “Pothole” McDuck. There his adventures truly begin. Rosa chronicles the next 70 years of Scrooge’s life as he goes on one treasure hunt to the next, one job to the next, one adventure to the next. On the Mississippi, he first encounters a gang of masked crooks named the Beagle Boys. In the African Transvaal, he runs afoul of an unscrupulous young duck named Flintheart Glomgold. On more than one occasion he encounters an adventurer with a heart to match his own – Theodore Roosevelt. We watch as he earns the nicknames “Master of the Mississippi,” “Buckaroo of the Badlands” and “Terror of Transvaal,” among many others.

These early chapters, all taking place before he finally strikes it rich (as the reader knows he eventually will), are a true masterpiece. Rosa packs in pages upon pages of adventure and excitement, mixing it in with better comedy than in any 10 other comic books. Stories like this one are why it burns me when people dismiss Rosa’s work as being just a “kid’s comic.” Scrooge has had treasure hunting adventures to put Indiana Jones to shame! And not only is it a great adventure and a great comedy, but it’s also something you can share with your kids. They already love the Disney characters – are you telling me they wouldn’t love learning where they came from?

Not only that, but this book is full of actual history. Rosa meticulously researched this book, placing Scrooge in the right place at the right time to interact with actual historical events. Even towns with the silliest-sounding names turn out to be real.

The latter chapters, the “falling action” of Scrooge’s life, are some of the most emotional I’ve ever read. When we first met the character in Barks’s “Christmas” story, he was alone, a hermit, someone with no family or friends. Rosa takes the story right up to that Christmas Day, showing up how he came to be that way, how his rough life hardened him even to his sisters (including, of course, Donald’s mother), and how his one great mistake, his one dishonest deed, would haunt him through the years.

Even as the final chapters are, by necessity, somewhat sad, the book ends on a note of triumph, as we see how the good-hearted lad with the shoeshine kit still lives in the body of the miser, and how his greatest adventures – those that Barks and Rosa and so many others have told for nearly 60 years – were yet to come.

A lot of people have compared Scrooge’s character to that of Orson Welles in Citizen Kane – a comparison Rosa himself rejects as Charles Foster Kane inherited his money, while Scrooge worked for every cent. I think the comparison is apt in another way, though – Kane and the Scrooge in this book are both men who let the world harden them and made them forget what mattered in life. The difference is, Scrooge realizes his mistake before it’s too late, and Kane didn’t.

In addition to being a simply beautifully-written story, Rosa’s artwork is superb as well. He packs more detail into his panels than almost any artist you can imagine, and unlike so many superhero artists, he does it without just adding extraneous lines to faces. He instead draws deep, lush backgrounds, full of little jokes and “Easter Eggs” for eagle-eyed fans. (Just see how many times you can find Mickey Mouse in the backgrounds in this volume.) His “acting” is phenomenal too – he puts so much raw emotion onto faces dominated by duckbills that it’s absolutely astounding. You can look at any character in any panel and know exactly how he or she is feeling at that moment, something you can’t say about some of the superstars of the comic book industry today.

The collection – the first paperback edition published in America – is really nice as well. Gemstone wisely chose to include the essays Rosa wrote for each chapter, explaining how he pieced together all the Barksian facts and melded them with real history. Topping off the package is a fair amount of discarded sketches, early covers and overseas editions of the issues collected herein. And for anyone who’s ever wanted to know exactly how Scrooge is related to Donald, Gladstone Gander, Grandma Duck and all the other denizens of Duckburg, Rosa has included a full, amusingly illustrated family tree on a two-page spread, suitable for framing as a poster.

This isn’t just my favorite Uncle Scrooge story, this is one of the best comic book stories ever told, and if it starred guys in spandex instead of feathers and spats, it would already be spoken of in the same breath as Watchmen, Marvels and Kingdom Come. And that’s where it belongs. This is art. This is literature. This is exciting, adrenalin-pumping and really, really funny. This is a book that’s getting a place of honor on my shelf, and it deserves a place on yours, too.

Rating: 10/10