Comics Review: MY LITTLE PONY: FRIENDS FOREVER #1 (IDW Publishing, January 2014)

I'm a little behind schedule when it comes to reviewing this first issue of the replacement title for IDW's MLP MICRO-SERIES, but it's all good.  After all, the subtitle itself claims that MLP:FF will be around...

To ensure such a happy, long-lived fate, however, the creative tag-teams who will presumably be taking turns on this book will have to up their game a bit.  "The Pie's the Limit!", the Applejack-Pinkie Pie joint that starts the title off, isn't quite a complete misstep, but it's definitely something of a disappointment.

* SPOILERS *

The plot setup here is frankly mystifying; Applejack gets involved with the shenanigans at the "Equestria Super Chef Competition" simply by virtue of delivering an apple pie to the contest site, but we never find out for whom the pie was meant or why it was delivered in the first place.  It's basically just an excuse to get AJ mistaken for a half-crazed "food performance artist" (if such people exist, I hope they're confined to one municipality; my money's on San Francisco) who subsequently vows revenge.  Said revenge comes in the form of an "icing gun" that paralyzes all and sundry (including Twilight Sparkle -- yep, the powerful alicorn princess who has mastered all sorts of arcane magic and battled dragons, Lords of chaos, and giant worms is supposedly undone by flying fondant). Applejack is among the victims of the cruel confectionary charge, leaving Pinkie to save the day with the help of the girls' newfound friend, Toffee Truffle.  You would think that an issue devoted to a specific teamup would allow the team to, you know, cooperate in the successful resolution of the plot.

Though her plotting leaves a great deal to be desired, writer Alex De Campi does capture the personalities of AJ and Pinkie reasonably well and throws in the occasional good joke (an offhand Pinky and the Brain reference is particularly bracing when delivered by Pinkie).  Carla Speed McNeil goes the Colorforms route in terms of art -- all two-D characters and flat backgrounds -- and the end product looks more like an actual MLP episode than most of IDW's previous releases.  Nothing wrong with that, but I'm hoping for better storytelling and more intriguing teamups in future releases.  The upcoming issue teams the Cutie Mark Crusaders with Discord, who's never before been featured in the four-color forum.  Its quality will tell us a lot about where this title is going.   

Nicky and the Brains

After searching for almost a year, Nicky has finally secured a new full-time position at the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, a Johns Hopkins-affiliated research facility studying abnormalities in brain development.  Her first official day on the job was today.  She will be serving as Lab Manager, assisting researchers in various capacities.

All together now...

Post-Sandy Posting

Hurricane Sandy wound up dealing Maryland only a glancing blow, but the residual aftereffects were not trivial.  Stevenson had to cancel classes on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and the campus is still dealing with flooding and leakage issues in certain buildings.  For example, the copier down the hall from my office was put out of commission when a ceiling tile collapsed and fell on it.  Johns Hopkins suffered considerable damage as the cancer research building next to Nicky's building had major flooding problems and power outages, resulting in the deaths of large numbers of genetically engineered lab animals.

No, I don't think they were among the victims.

We're hearing some horror stories out of the New York area, and I hope that my readers in that region are holding up as well as they can. 

Voice Greats "Strafe" STAR WARS at the Emerald City Con!

Many thanks to Nicky's brother Chris Caran for bringing Nicky's and my attention to this hilarious panel from the recent Emerald City Con in Seattle.  When sending me the link to the video, Nicky told me that she didn't know who these folks were or what voices they were doing, but she still found the video to be "wet-yer-pants" funny.  Kevin Conroy, Maurice LaMarche, Rob Paulsen, John DiMaggio, Tara Strong, Jess Harnell, and Billy West interpret the script from Star Wars: A New Hope in their own unique ways (heavy emphasis on the plural).

RIP Dick Clark

You probably know about most of the things he did; here's one role that you may have forgotten about, or, for that matter, may never have known about. An extremely funny one, at that.

I was never much of an American Bandstand watcher -- I knew better than to try to extend that Saturday-morning cartoon-watching time into the early afternoon -- so my primary exposure to Dick Clark came through The $25,000 Pyramid and his New Year's Eve shows. While I admired his willingness to appear this past New Year's Eve, I couldn't help but wince when I saw what had become of him. Sadly, "eternal youth" can only be sustained for so long before the heavy hand of Time descends.

Comics Review: RICHIE RICH: RICH RESCUE #4 (September 2011, Ape Entertainment)

You... ah... darn dirty Ape! After surprising and pleasing me with the thoroughly enjoyable RR:RR #3, and getting me excited about seeing the plot threads of what can now only laughably be called a "miniseries" neatly tied up in this final issue, you give me... a thoroughly blah, occasionally nonsensical yetis-poachers-and-ninjas tale that could have been chucked into any old stand-alone issue. I honestly feel as if I've been had. What grade can I possibly give for the four-issue "arc-that-wasn't" but an "Incomplete -- See the Instructor"?

I'm only mildly disappointed that Marcelo Ferreira, rather than James Silvani, was tasked with drawing "Yen for a Yeti." I would still prefer that Silvani handle the lead stories in issues of the continuing series -- and he does pen one of the backup stories here, which come with their own set of nits ripe for the picking -- but the real problem here isn't Ferreira's manga-ish artwork, it's a Jason M. Burns and Nathaniel Sharir script that forces me to dig back into my stash of out-of-date vocabulary and label "lame-o." How else could you describe a story that includes Reggie confusing the words "sherbet" and "sherpa" and the lead bad guy gloating, "We like our endangered species the same way we like our eggs... poached!" At least Gloria only used the line "Are we there yeti?" as a gag at the end. Logic takes a holiday as we are asked to believe that Mrs. Rich (who is said to be off on her own "mission" with Mr. Rich, whatever that means) sent Rich Rescue on a wild-goose chase after a nonexistent "artifact" just knowing that the team would run into a mission (saving a yeti from the poachers) that would remind them of the overarching importance of showing "compassion." As if the gang hasn't already displayed such commitment when they have had the opportunity to do so. But a bigger gaffe than any of these is the cynical refusal to perform the hard work of pulling the threads together and completing a satisfyingly whole narrative. I certainly think that a miniseries should accomplish THAT, if nothing else. Both newbie RICHIE readers and "old-school" sorts like myself would agree on that point.

Kevin Freeman and James Silvani's "Give a Dog a Bone" continues the book's "Uk-wuk?!" tone by giving us a story co-starring Dollar and... Buck. Buck Showalter? Buck Rogers? Bucky Beaver? Nope, a hitherto-unseen (at least, to MY knowledge -- Mark Arnold may know better) member of the Rich family K-9 Corps. The diamond collar certainly suggests as much. I'd like to believe that "Buck" is a reference to Dollar's original name, which dates back to the Dollarmatian's late-60s origin story, but that may be giving Freeman too much credit. I must admit that the byplay between the dogs is rather amusing; Buck is a little more "cartoony" and enthusiastic, while Dollar generally plays it deadpan. Perhaps Dollar was conserving his strength because of all the computerized bone-finding gear that he has stored in his collar. I mean, that stuff must weigh at least a hundred pounds. No doubt the origins of Buck, like the ultimate plans of The Condor, will be revealed in the continuing series... at least, I would like to think so. Otherwise, we're back to this famous scenario, which is not a place where Ape wants to be. (Oh, the plot... the dogs dig up a dinosaur skeleton. THAT, at least, I have seen before.)

"Unhappy... uh, Happy Birthday" brings back Ernie Colon and Sid Jacobson... and the original Irona, Bascomb, Chef Pierre, Gloria, Mr. and Mrs. Rich, I'm happy to say. Amazingly, we also get another (apparently) new pet, in this case a white cat with cent signs rather than Dollar's dollars. The brief plot doesn't really work unless you buy Richie as being REALLY STUPID, and Colon's figure drawing is a little stiff, but I do like the backgrounds, and the coloring is quite nice. As a sort of lead-in to the RICHIE GEMS reprint title -- which perhaps should have been advertised at the end of the story, somehow -- this was not a bad idea, though the execution is only so-so.

Even the usually reliable "Keenbean's Corner" gag falls a bit short here, as Irona (whose abilities the Prof is showing off) suddenly acquires the ability to multiply at will (or by magic, whichever you prefer). So I'm heading into the continuing-series era with mixed feelings, in the end. I've gotten more enjoyment out of this title than I had expected, but the missteps and oversights in #4 have made me a little more nervous about how the book is being managed and guided. Ape will get a fair chance to put my doubts at ease, though.

THE BEST (AND REST) OF KIMBA: Episode 5, "Fair Game"

Sometimes, refusing to accept the obvious can have severe consequences. Take this episode, for instance. An intriguing first glimpse into Kimba's past experiences in the civilized human world, a fairly dramatic conflict between the heir of Caesar and another heir (of sorts) who appears to resent the white lions' privileged status as jungle kingpins -- for most of its length, this ep has all the makings of a classic. Then, by refusing to acknowledge the obvious death of a character who perishes in pretty much the exact same way as did Caesar in "Go, White Lion!", the Titan crew in effect ties its own hands and forces the ep into a patently absurd ending. For mismanaged denouements, this makes the abandoned "super miniature bomb" of "The Wind in the Desert" look like a spent and sputtering Fourth of July squib. The episode still holds plenty of interest, but it could have been so much better had the performers trusted their audience just a bit more.

Lamenting a lost opportunity?

Link to episode at Hulu

An OUT OF NOWHERE opening (and a nice one, with a catchy musical theme tossed in) provides us with our first glimpse of Mr. Pompus (aka "Old Man Mustache"), one of the most famous members of Osamu Tezuka's unusual "rota" of supporting players. Tezuka used and reused a number of distinctive-looking characters in several of his manga, always playing different roles in the story. Mr. P., for example, served as Astro Boy's teacher and as a freelance detective in the Paul Murry MICKEY MOUSE tradition (assisted by a young version of Roger Ranger in the latter role) before getting assigned to the duty of being the grown-up Roger's uncle in Kimba. The excitable Mr. P. is the kind of guy who spouts cliches (already in full evidence with his string of French-isms here) and refers to tourist guidebooks (as will be seen later). Gilbert Mack has pretty much the perfect voice for him.

Kimba makes it sound as if Roger and Mr. P. picked him up "on the coast" (the same one seen in "The Wind and the Desert"?) and then traveled directly to Paris as some sort of modern version of the "Grand Tour." As you might imagine, the white lion's "period of acculturation" in the manga was considerably longer; when he adopted Kimba, in fact, Roger was still a young boy. It would have been remarkable, in any event, for Kimba to have been trained so quickly, to the extent that he would be able to visit museums and use public bathrooms.

How can the animals know the countries? Well, the later ep "Two Hearts and Two Minds" reveals that Pauley Cracker spent part of his life among humans, too. Being a parrot, he might have picked up some French quite naturally. As for the others, perhaps Roger filled them in. It's still kind of amusing, especially when you compare Kimba with The Lion King, in which the animals seem to exist in a world without humans.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, I ought to mention that Sonia Owens in real life is much nicer than Mary, who's even more of a whiny bitch here than she was in "A Human Friend," and for even less reason. Mary's so negative towards Kimba here that it's a wonder that she agreed to accompany Roger on his trip into the jungle in (the continuity-corrected version of) that episode. Her comment "why should we be kind to animals?" ties in with her attitude towards the human-animal relationship as displayed in the manga. For his part, Roger displays the patience of Job in putting up with her.

Dated visions of "The World of Tomorrow... Today!" are always interesting to mine for unintended laughs, and the "Paris World's Fair" -- entirely fictitious, BTW, though appearing to borrow the world globe from the 1964-65 Flushing Meadows fete -- certainly delivers at least some of the goods. "Melting the polar ice caps to make them livable" used to seem as good a way of dealing with the overpopulation crisis as allowing people to live on the ocean floor, but both "pipe dreams" have pretty much been fatally compromised. The obligatory robot exhibit, besides providing a golden opportunity for an Astro Boy cameo, is accompanied by the same "bleepy-bloopy" sound effects that frequently turned up in "lab scenes" in the Astro Boy series. (I wouldn't be surprised if some of those other robot models originally appeared on Astro Boy, as well.) And do we have "one-day flowers" by now? Perhaps the Coke Zero guy could inquire.

Geraldine's brief mention of the animals' farm "lets the white lion out of the bag" one episode early: the farm will be established in Episode 6, "Jungle Thief." It also suggests that this ep was recorded after that one.

Trivia question: Can you identify the two "farmer paintings" that Kimba sees in the museum? It took a bit of digging, but I found the originals online. Answers below.


The marble-mouthed Speedy Cheetah (Owens) gets the subplot of the episode going with a literal bang -- but where the holy hay did Speedy originally LEARN that Caesar "punished" his grandfather? As we'll soon see, this (false) charge may be all of a piece with a general sense of resentment that Speedy's clan harbors towards Kimba's "legendary" father.

Can you really blame Dusty (Sonia Owens) for "flushing" Kimba out of the bathroom? Even if he "really hadda go" (and it sure looks as if he did), Kimba couldn't have expected a human to take that "invasion of private space" lying down. The confrontation provides the (rather contrived) means whereby Kimba enters the domain of Ed Norton's hero, Pierre-Francois de la Brioche, and meets Speedy's Grandfather Quasimodo (Owens). Apart from his problems with "water on the face," Kimba, who must be pretty young at the time this tale takes place, actually handles himself reasonably well in the fight with the old cheetah, who seems to possess abilities far beyond those of the mortal Acinonyx jubatus. (To wit: Spider-Cheetah!)

The visit to the police, aside from providing a Gallic non sequitur (the Prefect [Ray Owens] quitting the premises with a "Bonjour!" -- no wonder we hear the flushing toilet again as a reaction), leads to an obvious question. From the looks of things (mostly the stains on his body -- and I'm not interested in their origin, thanks), Quasimodo has been in the sewers for quite some time. So why are the police just now getting around to searching for "the monster"? Did they make an earlier effort, only to -- I almost hate to say it -- surrender?

Hard luck and living underground for so long have evidently given poor Quasimodo a touch of schizophrenia. Consider:

(1) He promises to fight until he "destroys" Kimba, then suddenly stops when he realizes how much Kimba resembles Caesar and starts a conversation.

(2) He claims that he's "not complaining" about his status, then turns right around and begins to -- you guessed it -- complain.

(3) He "wants to go back to the jungle," then suddenly decides that he's too old to make the trip.

Addled though Quasi's mental state may be, he deserved much better than to be given a cheesy "extra lease on life" when he is obviously shot by the police. The police actually had more reason to shoot Quasi down than Caesar had to be killed by Viper Snakely, since the old cheetah was charging right at them. If Quasi's death had been acknowledged, then Speedy's angry, disbelieving reaction to Kimba's story of what Speedy would surely have regarded as a pathetic, unworthy death would have packed far more emotional punch. The last fight would have represented Speedy's last psychological stand against what he no doubt sees as the pride and arrogance of the "too-perfect" white lions, and the tender scene in which Kimba licks the defeated young cheetah would have symbolized Speedy's final acceptance of the truth.

The final sequence was originally a "dream idyll" in which Kimba imagines a future world in which humans and animals coexist peacefully. Given that humans show both nobility and meanness in this episode, this was probably intended to be sort of like an animal's-eye version of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Dream"; humans and animals have a long way to go to realize the promise of coexistence, but the goal is certainly worth striving for. Instead, thanks to the refusal to accept Quasimodo's fate, we're left wondering where the "animal airport" is, how Kimba's followers will exchange "animal money" for francs, and how one validates "animal passports." A real shame.

Trivia question answers: The Angelus and The Gleaners by Jean-Francois Millet, both on display in the Musee d'Orsay (though not in 1965, when this ep was produced; the Musee, a converted train station, did not open until the 1980s).

Up next: Episode 6, "Jungle Thief."

Comics Review: MICKEY MOUSE AND FRIENDS #302 (November 2010, Boom! Studios)

Sergio Badino and Giorgio Cavazzano's "Legend of the Robo-Presidents" turns out to have been a more substantial epic than I'd thought. I was expecting another "half-and-half" deal here, with one story closing and another opening; instead, "Robo-Presidents" takes up all the space. In said space, we learn that The Phantom Blot has retrofitted the giant robot Presidents that inventor Borzon Gutglum had been commissioned to build to complement the newly-sculpted Mount Rushmore attraction (make sure to read that again, slowly) with the help of software designed by Gutglum's slightly wayward grandson. For all of The Blot's pleonastic, pompous pedantry (at least translator Saida Temafonte is consistent on this score; s/he used the same characterization for vastly different versions of The Blot in the ULTRAHEROES and WIZARDS OF MICKEY tales), the villain's plot is what he himself might call a "dreadfully banal" strike at the gold in Fort Knox. This comes, it should be noted, on the heels of The Blot's channeling of Hugo Drax in Casty's "Mickey Mouse and the Orbiting Nightmare." Honestly, if The Blot's new image as an intellectual is to be taken entirely seriously, then he really should be above ripping off schemes by James Bond villains, much less relying on the help of goons with names like "Billy Bob." The Blot, in the tradition of Pinky and the Brain, seems not to realize that the flying Robo-Presidents couldn't possibly get off the ground if they were truly "stuffed" with gold, but at least he has writer Badino to blame for that little oversight. Morty and Ferdie get a rare chance to fill the HD&L hero role, and, as you might guess, the "Nintenduck" obsession that they displayed in #301 winds up being a key to the good guys finally winning. An absurd story, to be sure, but oddly engaging, with Cavazzano's energetic art, as always, a point in its favor.

In the wake of The Blot's appearing without his black hood and cloak throughout the WIZARDS OF MICKEY sequence and in civvies in part two of "Mickey Mouse and the Orbiting Nightmare," his partially-unmasked status here is notable. Once he captures Mickey, Minnie, Morty, and Ferdie, he pulls off his hood and spends the rest of the story with his head showing above the cloak. I suppose that this is an "Italian thing," and, after mulling over the events of both this story and "Orbiting Nightmare," it's a "thing" that I actually do understand. The Blot can't pretend that absolutely no one knows what he looks like anymore (otherwise, why use a disguise to infiltrate Space Hotel Olympus in the first place?) and, while he can still rely on the "full effect" of his costume to produce some "fright value," there is no real reason why his face can't be regularly shown. This, of course, provides the writers with a challenge, to make The Blot's schemes really imaginative so as to compensate for the "loss of mystery." If The Blot's next caper involves "toppling" Mousetonian rockets or swallowing up Duckburgian space capsules, then he has every right to lodge a protest.

Comics Review: MICKEY MOUSE AND FRIENDS #300 (September 2010, Boom! Kids)

OK, let's get the obligatory gag out of the way up front...

MICKEY, IN A SCREAMING FALSETTO: THIS... IS... MOUSETON!!

(Well, it officially has been since 1990, at least.)

But seriously... I'd like to toss the geniuses responsible for the $6.99 "Deluxe Edition" of this milestone issue into the nearest available "pit of doom." For your three extra bucks, you get (1) a Daan Jippes cover that I have a sneaking feeling I saw sometime back during the "Gladstone I" era and (2) a "foil-embossed" MICKEY MOUSE logo. Nothing so declasse, in other words, as, well, actually printing the lead story (Stefan Petrucha and Cesar Ferioli's "300 Mickeys") complete in an extra-sized issue. Just when it seemed as though Boom! were weaning itself off this multiple-cover routine, they squander a unique opportunity to do a "mega-issue" in favor of this cheesy gambit! The two "historical background" pages (including contributions from Casty, Jippes, and David Gerstein) don't really begin to make up for this, though they do add to the nostalgic feel associated with reading a "shoulda-coulda" Gemstone-issue-in-all-but-name.

"300 Mickeys" bears all the earmarks of a story that was originally slated to appear in Gemstone's MICKEY MOUSE ADVENTURES digest. Mickey uses Eega Beeva's "Pduplication Ray" to clone himself and keep simultaneous dates with Minnie (for dinner) and Goofy (at the arcade). Unfortunately, clones of "Mickey Nothing" unexpectedly continue to pop into existence even as Eega (who's suddenly got the "p"s back in his speech patterns -- this, plus the neat, MMA-style lettering, is a dead giveaway that this story was prepared a while back) returns to retrieve the gizmo. Adding to the inevitable chaos is the inconvenient fact that the clones, much like VHS tapes, "lose integrity" (in this case, become less intelligent) with every duplication. In the grand tradition of Pinky and the Brain's "Paper World," the increasingly mindless clones are soon fixing to set up shop for themselves on a newly-created island in the Tulebug River. Petrucha and Ferioli do their usual high-quality work, and the whiff of the Gemstone era is frankly quite refreshing after all those Italian WIZARDS OF MICKEY stories. Why Boom! didn't see fit to fit the entire story into issue #300 -- especially when the "300" conceit is part of the story's title -- is a complete mystery to me.

As he should, Floyd Gottfredson gets a nod at the back of the book with eight pages' worth of the quasi-continuity "Tanglefoot Pulls His Weight," essentially a string of gags in which Mickey tries to convert his knobbly-kneed horse into a "working animal," with decidedly mixed results. Now that MM&F has been re-established, I'd really like to see a "Gemstone-lite" issue like this now and again in between all the Italian imports. But, please, can we keep in mind that the drive to serialize may not always be appropriate?

Comics Review: WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES #709 (July 2010, Boom! Kids)

The "secret" behind the existence of Quandomai Island is finally revealed in this third installment of Casty's latest gem, and -- not entirely surprisingly -- it turns out to be more "bizarre science" on the order of the elusive "World Equation" that was supposed to create "The World to Come." If anything, we're asked to take an even higher "leap of faith" to hurdle the notion of an "Eon Vortex" creating an isolated "cylinder" of frozen time. How does one "open a tunnel" into what amounts to an incorporeal force field, anyway? (The tunnel through the crater where the Vortex is centered makes sense, but wouldn't one have to penetrate the Vortex itself at some point?) And if the Vortex ceased to operate, wouldn't anyone inside at the time be thrust back into whatever present reality existed on that spot, as opposed to being "trapped inside" the world created by the Vortex in the first place? The phrase "too clever by half" comes to mind. In that off-the-wall spirit, it's entirely fitting that Our Gang's real enemies turn out to be murderous, shape-shifting, bug-like creatures from "the future" (Eega Beeva is starting to look mighty attractive right about now) who have managed to wormhole their way into this geometrically precise bubble of generated past reality. Somewhere, Bill Walsh is smiling broadly. The aliens -- sorry, I can't buy the notion that these guys represent our future; maybe they're "Newcomers" like the creatures in Alien Nation -- appear to have taken inspiration for their plans from MICKEY MOUSE ADVENTURES' Wiley Wildbeest and Prince Penguin. With Pete and Duke Hight's scheme thus turned back against themselves, "forced cooperation" between good guys and bad guys is now the order of the day... and that almost always works out great. If "World to Come" is any indication, however, the "Eon Vortex" will be a casualty of the battle.

If Minnie really is "Running Out of Time" in the backup story, she seems decidedly casual about the fact. After preventing a car crash (that heap big cliffhanger from last time, remember?), she walks about in a self-congratulatory mood. Umm... Attempting to reinstitute the natural laws of physics isn't imperative at some point? Before Minnie does the deed -- whatever that might be -- it appears that she's going to revisit "Time Teasers" territory, preventing a bank robbery. I assume that WDC&S #710 will feature the end of this story to coincide with the conclusion of "Quandomai Island," but the last panel of part three contains a "To Be Continued" box instead. I imagine that's a misprint. Time can't stand still forever, can it?

... Say, what's this? A THIRD story at the back of the book... a two-pager complete in this issue? I haven't been this shocked since the flight attendant gave me a second bag of "savory mix" to enjoy with my thimbleful of soda. "A Goofy Look at UFO's", written by Jos Beekman, dialogued by David Gerstein, and drawn by Michel Nadorp, is a charming call-back to the days of GOOFY ADVENTURES. It's especially likable because, unlike some of the lengthy "costume tales" we got during the second incarnation of Gladstone comics, it makes its obvious point and gets off the stage. Kudos to David for including a reference to Pinky and the Brain that almost made up for the lame concluding gag (which didn't originate with David himself). The formatting of this story is unusual, more like the current DARKWING DUCK comic than any of the Italian material we've been getting in other Boom! books. Was it originally produced that way in Holland, or is this a Boom! original? If the latter, then, by all means, let's have more, please.

Comics Review: DONALD DUCK AND FRIENDS #352 (Boom! Kids, March 2010)

(I'm playing it safe and inserting some up-front...

S
P
O
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S
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... for those who haven't yet read the conclusion of the first "Double Duck" story arc and don't want to be unpleasantly surprised by my comments.)

Ah, me... I was always just a little afraid that the mysterious "Red Primerose" would turn out to be our charming Kay K. But I wanted so much to believe that Kay was nothing more than (1) Donald's Agency partner and (2) a potential rival for Daisy that I shoved the notion to the back of my mind until I had incontrovertible proof of her guilt. Said proof was not long in coming in this issue (and, IMHO, I think that Donald was deserving of a much more shocked reaction than merely sticking out his tongue in a pathetic manner akin to Wile E. Coyote just before the falling boulder strikes him). I am, however, legitimately disappointed that all Kay was after was The Agency's money and that the list-of-agents "McGuffin" was merely a ruse. If this "master spy" was willing to go to the trouble of pitting Agency agents and Marlo Burke against one another and impersonating the imprisoned Jay J with the aid of a mechanical robo-suit (does The Brain know about this egregious copyright infringement?), surely she could have had a slightly more sinister plan in mind than simply filching funds? ("Ah, but it's all part of her MASTER plan," replied David Xanatos, with a knowing chuckle.) There does appear to be one ray of hope for poor Kay K. Judging from the full list of existing Double Duck stories and the appearance of the December '09 TOPOLINO cover shown below, we can probably expect to see Kay (1) do battle with Donald and The Agency in future stories and (2) return to the side of the angels, up to and including teaming up with Double Duck once again. I hope this comes to pass; she's a good character and gave Daisy a serious romantic challenge that Donald's frequently exasperating inamorata desperately needs, to keep her humble if nothing else.


While the revelation that Kay was standing in for Jay J was not contradicted by any earlier gaffes of the "fourth Nephew Phooey" variety -- and yes, I did go back and check -- we did get a "left hand unaware of right hand" moment of sorts in that the opening scene of the arc, in issue #347, did not quite match up with what Kay revealed in this final chapter. If B-Berry had learned of Kay's treachery early on, then why, after stealing the laptop, did he warn Jay J that "lots of people are going to get hurt... starting with you!" and that he intended to "bring down the entire Agency!"? The story began and ended with different translators, and I suspect that wires got crossed somewhere during the transition. A pity; this was a surprisingly good read, given my low expectations at the outset.

The arc ends with The Agency's "Big Boss" being revealed to a stunned Donald. Place your bets, folks... mine's on Scrooge. Hey, the precedent was set (in Italy, at least) a number of years ago... and I just read the story in which the idea originated, no less. Watch this space for my review when I tackle the recently released DONALD DUCK CLASSICS: QUACK UP.

Gracias, Diaz

Competence and professionalism are drab virtues, but ones worth celebrating for all that... and no Disney comics creators exemplified said virtues quite as thoroughly as the semi-mysterious "strangers" who labored at the Jaime Diaz Studios in Argentina. The company's namesake, an animator and cartoonist who worked for Warner Bros., Cartoon Network, and Nickelodeon both before and after launching the Studios in the mid-70s, died this past weekend at the age of 72. Though the animation "arm" of Diaz' enterprise worked on such notable projects as Fish Police and Dexter's Laboratory, I'll always associate him with the Disney TV Animation comics published during the Disney Comics era and, after that unfortunate enterprise's demise, DISNEY ADVENTURES DIGEST (until it ditched TV adaptations for original creations, that is).

The TV-based Disney Comics releases are fondly remembered to this day, and the Diaz gang's efforts are part of the reason why. To be sure, the Diaz product didn't have the quirky details and distortions of the Italian school, the oddball designs frequently used by Bill Van Horn, or the hyper-detail of Don Rosa. What it was, for the most part, was straightforward, on-model depiction of the script -- no more, no less. Unexceptional, perhaps, but pick up an issue of Marvel's DISNEY AFTERNOON comic and compare it to a randomly selected Diaz issue of CHIP & DALE'S RESCUE RANGERS, DUCKTALES, or TALE SPIN -- not to mention an early issue of DISADV DIGEST -- and the difference in craftsmanship will immediately pop out. Branca and Vicar they weren't, but they always treated the TV characters with respect, and you can't imagine what a relief that was to those of us who merely hoped that the TV-based comics would be readable. These efforts had unexpected side effects, as well: the Disney APA WTFB, for which I wrote for over a decade, wouldn't have come into being had fans of the RESCUE RANGERS comic book not been royally tweaked by the book's cancellation.

Of course, Diaz' bland approach didn't always succeed in capturing the essence of the characters the studio was working on. The studio's adaptations of the Warner Bros. shorts and TV characters were somewhat hit-or-miss, with the level of success depending more upon the skills of the individual artist than anything else. (Walter Carzon's fine efforts for LOONEY TUNES, ANIMANIACS, and PINKY AND THE BRAIN come quickly to mind.) Their batting average, however, was very high indeed, and their work still stirs fond memories in my mind. Ah, for the good old days when Disney's TV product was a source of pride -- irrespective of the medium being used.