UNCLE SCROOGE #401
BOOM Kids!
CARTOONIST: Don Rosa
LETTERS: David Gerstein
COVER: Don Rosa with Jake Myler
24pp, Color, $3.99 U.S.
Way back in my early college years, some comic book reading friends introduced me to Carl Barks. Barks was a Disney Studio illustrator, but he became famous as a comic book creator. Barks invented the town of Duckburg, where Donald Duck and his three nephews: Huey, Dewey, and Louie live. Barks created Donald’s tight-fisted uncle, Scrooge McDuck and McDuck’s frequent adversaries, the Beagle Boys. Known as “The Good Duck Artist,” Barks also created many other characters that populate Donald Duck’s world, including Gyro Gearloose and Magica De Spell, among others.
Many readers consider American comic book artist Don Rosa as the heir to Carl Bark’s legacy. Rosa burst unto the scene with his Scrooge McDuck story, “The Son of the Sun,” which was first published in Uncle Scrooge #219 (cover date July 1987; Gladstone Publishing). The now-retired Rosa apparently idolizes Carl Barks (who died in 2000), and Rosa does indeed build almost all his stories on characters and locations that Barks invented. Many of those stories contain references to some fact pointed out in a Barks story, and Rosa has even created sequels to old Barks stories.
Still, Rosa is also a great talent, and he was one of the best cartoonists working in comic books over a period of two decades from the time he began drawing Uncle Scrooge stories until his retirement back in 2007. One of Rosa’s exceptional stories is “The Universal Solvent,” a 1995 Uncle Scrooge story. First serialized in Denmark, “The Universal Solvent” made its U.S. debut in Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories #604, the story was reprinted this year in Uncle Scrooge #401 (cover date March 2011).
The story begins when Gyro Gearloose invents “the universal solvent,” which is a solution that can dissolve anything, for Scrooge McDuck. The bad thing is that this solvent, which Scrooge gives the trade name, “Omnisolve,” actually works. Scrooge wants to use it to create deep mine shafts in which he can mine “super-pure, flawless diamonds,” and to that end, he drops some Omnisolve on the ground.
Before long, Omnisolve is dissolving its way to the center of the Earth, which precipitates a crisis that could destroy the world. To clean up his mess, McDuck leads a team which includes Donald Duck and the three nephews: Huey, Dewey, and Louie on a mission that resembles the events depicted in Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. Now, can the Ducks save the world?
Like Carl Barks, Don Rosa can create comic book stories of 20 or so pages that could easily be stretched to three times the size. In “The Universal Solvent,” Rosa crams in enough drama, twists and turns, scenes, sequences, and set pieces that it reads like a graphic novel of at least 100 pages in length. This rousing adventure is an excellent read, and I hated getting to the last page.
As usual, Rosa’s strong drafting skills shine through; his meticulous line work and his subtle crosshatching create the most gorgeous, almost jewel-like compositions. The understated touches, like the use of light to create shadows, are the things that always capture the eye. The contraptions, sets, and the windstorms that the vacuums create in the story attest to the fact that Don Rosa is a great Duck artist and is certainly one of the best cartoonists of his time.
A-
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