"Grandma's Present"

"Hey! You got your Barks in my non-Barks Christmas!" Well...yes. It's true. I came upon this in a Christmas Parade and realized, WHOA, Barks Christmas story I haven't done, and it kind of seemed unavoidable, especially when I realized I'd miscounted and had an extra day open in the schedule. Anyway, this is really your fault: when I was doing the last of Barks' holiday output last year, I specifically asked you people to point out any I'd missed, but did any of you point to this one? Like fun you did! Therefore, you must suffer, by reading about a good story.

Well, maybe that's needlessly jaundiced. But I've been reading a lot of these non-Barks things and thinking about the things about them that work and (more often) don't work, and sticking a Barks story in the middle of that really underlines what we does right that other people don't. So, let's check it out!

There's just so much to like right from the start. Gyro using an ear trumpet to try to hear the silent rocket launch chained to the ground? That's a level of sophisticated absurdity that others could only dream of. And "I should be thrilled about having mastered these problems [like hairless doorknobs] that have baffled mankind for years?" Hilarious. This is the kind of stuff that Barks just casually throws out there. It's not, by his standards, a particularly notable story; it probably wouldn't be in anyone's top ten. But holy crud, it's still just so effortlessly great.

Also, look at the art here. In a way, I wonder what exactly I'm saying when I call Barks' art "better" than his contemporaries,' because it's all anthropomorphic waterfowl. None of it's "realistic," so what does "better" mean? Well, the draughtsmanship is clearly better, with characters very rarely looking unintentionally malformed or otherwise unappealing. And then there are just the extra details. Look at a lot of the previous stories we've looked at here, and you'll notice that the background are kind of barren and uninteresting. Sure, the Strobl art is okay, but there's clearly a significant difference. Just check out those machines in the above: no other duck artist would've been able to manage them, and they make the admittedly fairly trivial story a lot more interesting to look at.

This Gemstone reprint kept the year of the ship sinking, I'm glad to see. A 1987 Gladstone version said--surprise--2007. I've said this before, but it's always annoying and momentarily confusing to me when the publisher tries to pretend that stories like this are being published for the first time.

And, I mean, just the way Barks characterizes Gyro. As you know, there's a strong tendency among a lot of your more hackish sorts of writers to really just use him as an invention piñata: you need some sort of magic gizmo to move your story alone, so you take a whack at him, and BAM, instant plot device. But here...I mean, as I said, this is nothing groundbreaking or particularly amazing. But this inner conflict of him trying not to think about inventing, harkening back to his childhood, but then not being able to avoid it--it's just low-key good. They don't all need to be towering epics.

See, this idea is totally absurd, but it's not absurd in the dubious, "you have no idea what you're doing, do you?" way that we've been seeing. It's gleefully, hilariously so. A winner is Carl.

And I'm not even saying anything about the Helper portion of this story, which predominantly consists of his ongoing battle with a duck. You could easily read the whole story and miss it altogether--which, I have to admit, I've done myself. But there it is. Just being in the background and being delightful. Barks didn't have to include this stuff to get paid. He didn't even have to do it to be head and shoulders above his fellow artists. But he did it anyway, a strong indication--it any more were needed--that this was not, in fact, just a job for Barks; that, probably unique among his peers, he actually was creating l'art pour l'art, at least in part.

I wonder, with a story like this: it first appeared in 1956, in CP 8 (which was headlined by "Reindeer Roundup"). It's the only Barks in the issue. Just eight out of a hundred pages. So if you read that issue, was it glaringly obvious to you that one of the artists here was substantially better than the others? I know when I was a kid, I was much less critical: I realized on some level that the stuff appearing in Uncle Scrooge and the ten-pagers in WDC were indeed better than the rest, but I still read the rest with a fair amount of enthusiasm. But still...I feel like, if anything, Barks's work could've hurt the brand: "hey!" The Plain People of Comics Fandom might shout. "We can see what you're capable of, so why are you giving us the rest of this dross? Up your standards!" But clearly, it never happened. So much for The Magic of the Free Market.

Look at Gyro's conspiratorial look there, and imagine anyone else getting that right. Once again, Barks FTW.

So when one criticizes a story like this, it should be understood that these criticisms exist on a higher level than criticism of, like, "The Big Switcheroo" or some such shit. But: you know, stories that center around cartoon farms tend to carefully tiptoe around the question of slaughtering animals, whether by explicitly stating that that doesn't happen here, or just by never bringing it up. Because, you know, we're talking about cute cartoon animals. Thinking about killing them is just morbid. So all I'm saying is, not doing that probably would've been preferable here.

Like I said: I'm fairly sure the pigs, at least, would be okay with having nothing to do, if "something" means being slaughtered for their meat. Really now.

Aside from that, though, it's all good. Not a complicated message, and not one we'd be likely to agree with in the so-called real world, but well-executed and fun.

We can also take a moment to look at the denouement of Helper's story. Just look how smug that duck looks there! Pretty amazing, given how little detail there is.

But now, Helper is become Death, destroyer of worlds. So fun. And Gyro's rueful amusement and Grandma's acceptance of his eccentricities makes for an extremely agreeable Christmas trifle.