What makes Donald Duck an interesting foil in any adventure is his combination of absolute confidence, a hair-trigger temper, and a complete inability to understand his surroundings. He plunges in, completely sure of himself and ignorant of the details. He just plugs ahead to get where he needs to go. With varying success.
Buy Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: Tales of Andold Wild DuckIt makes it fun to see what this particular character can get up into in completely different times and settings. That’s what happens in this collection: Tales of Andold Wild Duck. Andold is one of Donald ancient Caledonian ancestors, charged with protecting the shores of Scotland from Viking invaders. And he’s just as intense, and intensely incompetent, as his descendant.
The first tale in this book, “Big Little Bo,” starts with Donald reading a book about the exploits of his ancestor. He gets bonked on the head, and dreams of mid-10th Century Scotland. There, Andold must train up his men to protect Walstaen Castle from invasion. When they arrive, he finds a skeleton crew of wasters. Little does he know, they’re all experienced soldiers, far more competent than him, including the terrifyingly huge titular character, Bo. But Andold’s sure he knows more than they do. He puts them through training exercises that barely tax them and nearly kill him. It’s a typical Donald story, who survives through good luck and pluck rather than good sense.
Not every story in this collection involves Andold, but they are all written and drawn by the Italian duck master Marco Rota. The stories were published in a span of more than 30 years, from 1975 to 2007. Four of them involve the adventures of Andold. The rest are standard Donald stories, leavened with the sensible presence of his nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. There’s also an Uncle Scrooge story that, like most of that old Duck’s tales, traverses half the world in search of treasure.
Rota’s art, while fitting in cleanly with the standard Disney style, has a lighter feel to it in the Andold stories. The linework is light and sketchy, and when he uses backgrounds, they have a pleasant, watercolor haze to them. The artistic standout might be the semi-contemporary story “Commuter Crisis.” Donald is convinced to move out of Duckburg to the suburbs, where mass transit turns out to be severely overrated. His adventures trying to get to the city on time are almost as comic and thrilling and Andold’s wars against the Vikings.
I basically knew I was going to love this book from looking at the cover. I am completely biased when it comes to duck books. And I love when their stories take place in extremely specific places and times. Tenth century Scotland with an annoyed incompetent duck commander fighting off goofy Vikings is a great setting for Donald’s… Excuse me, Andold’s antics. Tales of Andold Wild Duck is the latest in the long and continuing line of Fantagraphic’s reprints of Disney character comics. It’s a high-quality hardcover, beautifully produced and printed. And the stories were routinely fun and amusing, with the underlining intelligence of a writer (and artist) who completely understands his character.
