Scrooge McDuck: Back to the Klondike
This review was commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire. I suspect because of my own background. And, heh, it actually did give me a little bit of nostalgia when I saw Scrooge McDuck walk down the streets of what looked a lot like my own hometown.
It's not my own hometown, to be clear. Putting the context clues together, I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be Skagway, another town in the same general region. But, similar scenery, similar buildings, similar mom-and-pop seaplane companies operating off of wooden shipdocks, similar dopey pink paint on certain large buildings.
It's accurate in a way that only personal familiarity can give you. I would have thought that the artist took a Southeast Alaska cruise before penning this, but this comic was created in the 1950's, shortly before those Alaska luxury cruises became a thing. We still had tourism back then, but not on nearly so large a scale, and so there may have been a bit more of a story to this.
Hmm. Reading up on this a little, the creator and longtime Disney comic artist mainstay Carl Barks was born and lived much of his life in Oregon. Not exactly right next door, but still, Pacific Northwest cultural sphere. Makes him having travelled up north less surprising. Well, anyway!
Scrooge McDuck is a really, really weird character. He's named after the thoroughly antiheroic protagonist of "A Christmas Carol," and his characterization is all a play on that character's pre-redemption folly. And yet, somehow, Scrooge McDuck isn't a bad guy. His all-consuming greed is usually portrayed as somewhere between a harmless eccentricity and a moderately annoying personality defect. Sure, he often gets taught Important Lessons about why he shouldn't be so greedy, but they never stick, and his relapses are framed as "oh, that whacky old Uncle Scrooge.~"
As time goes by, Scrooge's character and how we're meant to see it seems ever more questionable. Getting back to my own childhood again for a bit, one of the first toys I ever remember playing with was a jigsaw puzzle that featured Scrooge and his nephews rowing down a jungle river with a canoe full of gold, while angry natives glared at them from between the trees. One of the kid nephews was pointing a gun at these natives. A pop-gun, sure, this is G-rated, but...we aren't fucking kidding anyone with that, come on. I remember asking my mother why the natives were mad at them, and she told me, very nonchalantly.
I couldn't have been more than four years old at the time, but I still knew there was something wrong here. Isn't Scrooge the greedy-but-still-nice uncle who takes his family on fun adventures? Aren't theives supposed to be the bane of his existence? Why is he the one stealing? Why do the natives all look so ugly and sinister if they're the ones being stolen from?
Scrooge McDuck gave me my first ever awareness of colonialism. Come to think of it, it might have also been the first time I ever applied critical thinking to a work of fiction as a work of fiction. At least, it's the earliest one I can remember.
Now, is that part of Scrooge McDuck's baggage relevant to this particular comic? Well, sort of, yeah. Not directly, but very closely adjacent.
We start with a slice-of-life-y gag about Scrooge battling the onset of senility. A bunch of hiijinks that he dismisses the importance of at first, but then starts to take seriously when he realizes he might be risking leaving his fortune vulnerable to thieves with him in this state.
Or, well, "senility." He gets a medical diagnosis of Blinkus Of The Thinkus Disease, which is fortunately much more treatable than its real life counterpart.
The main plot kicks off when Scrooge takes his cartoon Alzheimer's medication, and finds himself remembering things that he'd forgotten many years ago. Including the location where he hid a substantial amount of gold near where he discovered it in a Canadian rainforest. I don't recall if Scrooge having struck it rich in the Klondike Gold Rush is a consistent backstory thing, or if he has a different whacky "how I made my first million dollars" background in each episode, but at least this time it was gold-panning (EDIT: it's a consistent thing after all, and this story had a lot of foreshadowing because of it). And apparently he actually made his first two million dollars doing this, but left half of it buried in the wilderness and forgot about it until now.
Most of the comic consists of hijinks as they travel back through Southeast Alaska and Northwest Canada in pursuit of Scrooge's memories (despite the gold he left there being almost meaningless in the face of how rich he's gotten since then) and his miserliness causing all kinds of comical misfortunes and inconveniences along the way. There's also a long buildup about this "dance hall" owner named Glittering Goldie who he used to know up in Yukon, and who he's eager to meet again if possible. Allegedly because she owes him a thousand dollars, which he calculates to now be worth a billion with fifty years of interest, but he sure looks and acts like he had and still has feelings for this woman. Both before and after the inevitable reunion.
A nice touch is that she's wearing typical buckskin and denim roughneck clothes at first, but gets her old "dance hall owner" outfit out of storage when she needs to lay on the charm to hopefully deter Scrooge from collecting on the debt she can't pay.
Anyway, the final act of the story has Scrooge and his nephews discovering that the site where he hid the gold is now inhabited by an elderly Glitterin' Goldie. Her "dance hall" failed after the Gold Rush ended, as most of the "dance halls" in this time and place did. She used up her fortune caring for mining accident orphans, and has spent her twilight years living in this old cabin in poverty with her shotgun and her guard bear.
How to tell between a black bear and a brown bear? Climb a tree. If it's a black bear it'll climb after you. If it's a brown bear it'll tear the tree down.
Once they pacify the bear and get passed the shotgun, Scrooge overcomes Goldy's charm and tells her here's here to collect with interest. She starts to morosely hand over her last few heirlooms and keepsakes and head for the nearest homeless shelter, but then Scrooge suddenly tells her that in the interest of good sportsmanship he'll give her one last chance to save what she has; they'll have a competitive gold-digging contest, and whoever finds a fleck or nugget first gets to keep this property as well as the find. And then he manipulates her into digging where he hid his old gold cache, while pretending to have mixed it up and given her the spot by accident. He attributes the "mistake" to him having forgotten to take his amnesia pills today, but the nephews learn the truth when Donald counts the pills and realizes there aren't any extras.
I'm not sure why Scrooge is so invested in keeping up his reputation for miserliness. Maybe because he doesn't want his family expecting handouts from him in the future or something. Reading further into that, it does add a bit of a tragic dimension to Scrooge's character if he thinks the only way to keep opportunists from taking advantage of him is to maintain a reputation of absolute greed and mercilessness...but like, in order to care that much, he'd need to be legitimately greedy and ruthless enough for it only to be a slight exaggeration of his true self.
Well, at least Goldie got to walk away feeling like she won rather than feeling like she was granted mercy by a capricious god that decided not to smite her after all on a whim. Definitely more empowering and less anxiety-inducing.
Anyway, the real gold that Scrooge had forgotten about was the golden-hearted woman named Goldie, and remembering her and her value was a redress of old mistakes, yada yada.
Like I said, Scrooge McDuck is a character who always sat in the grey area of likability by design, but as time goes by he has a harder and harder time staying there. This comic's purported origins for him in the Klondike Gold Rush are...well, it's not as bad as him and his kid nephews literally stealing Inca gold at gunpoint, but it's only a few steps away. The lesson he learns at the end of the comic is...well, it's a lot like the arc that the original Ebeneeze Scrooge underwent, but the difference is that in McDuck's case we know that it's just a momentary act of mercy rather than a change of art. He'll go right back to being awful in the next episode.
I'll give this comic its due respect for the accurate depictions of a part of the world you don't often see featured in this medium, either back in the 1950's or today. Also, this work is surprisingly dance-hall-worker positive. There's not even any implied shame in Goldie having owned a dance hall, or in Scrooge having been a patron of hers. Her portrayal is mostly positive, but not in a way that others her or infantilizes her like you often get with "token virtuous dance hall worker" characters from that era of fiction. She has her impressive charitable works, but in her old age she's also a cranky old redneck who shoots at anyone who comes on her property unannounced. And she's got plenty of traits that aren't part and parcel of being a former dance hall person. So, that's good.
