Scrooge McDuck represents the very best and the very worst of manki... err, duckkind. On the one hand Scrooge is shrewd, resourceful, adventurous, brave and driven. There is, however, one little, tiny enormous problem. Scrooge McDuck's driving obsession is the relentless pursuit of money. Scrooge loves money for money's sake and would probably walk over his own mother just to get a buck; he most certainly would walk over his own nephew. He finds no greater pleasure than literally swimming in his money, tossing it into the air like a preschooler allowing it to rain on his head. Scrooge McDuck was the brilliant creation of Carl Barks who clearly intended for Scrooge to be an homage to the despicable and miserly Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens `A Christmas Carol' except in this case McDuck never learns the lesson that money is only a materialistic pleasure that can never bring true joy. Despite his all consuming character flaw Scrooge McDuck went on to be one of the most popular Disney characters of all time and deservedly so as he is a truly unique and multi-dimensional character. What's interesting is that Carl Barks in an interview actually stated that as a conservative he found nothing wrong with the conspicuous accumulation of wealth even if it requires exploitation saying, "everybody has to be exploited or to exploit someone else to a certain extent. I don't resent those things." Scrooge was presented as an admirable character because Barks saw him as an admirable character. Barks also believed that society has been on a steady decline since its peak in 1910 but personal and political beliefs aside his comics are genius.
`The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck' by Don Rosa is clearly and admittedly meant to honor Carl Barks. Rosa scoured through the great artists works to glean any scrap of information he could to construct the biography of Scrooge McDuck and only the stories by Barks were considered canon in his twelve issues series. What I decided to do was go back and read some of the old Barks stories. I have a book of about a dozen of Barks best Donald Duck stories including two with Scrooge McDuck. The first thing that jumped out at me was the quality of the drawings. Barks frames contained very little in the way of backgrounds with many containing nothing more than a single flat color around a characters head and torso. For instance, a character might be in the arctic but the background would be a solid light blue or orange. By contrast Rosa's backgrounds are meticulously crafted. The figures drawings of Barks looked like they were created quickly but in this case it's not meant as an insult. It's likely that Barks was so used to drawing the ducks that he could crank them out in his sleep. In his defense Barks was assuredly working under a far tighter deadline. Rosa had two and a half years to produce just twelve issues and he could afford to take his time and produce high quality drawings.
`The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck' is sort of high end version of a Scrooge McDuck tale. The amount of time Don Rosa spent in writing and drawing these issues is clearly evident in the results. Having said that I'm not going to say I was blown away by the story. Rosa focuses so much on trying to include every detail of Scrooge's history that he may have forgotten to make a compelling tale. Life and Times is so finely crafted and tuned that it seems to lose a bit of its depth and soul in the process. The collection of Carl Barks stories I have had a publication date of 1978 and that's somewhere around the time I bought them and yet 32 years later I still remember the stories well. I don't think that Don Rosa's collection will have the same impact. Of all the items I've reviewed this one was probably the toughest to put a rating on but in the end I've settled on four stars although four and a half is probably fairer. I just couldn't get past the fact that the story just felt too paint by numbers, It's still one of the masterpieces of Disney comics and if you love Disney and particularly Scrooge McDuck it's a must have. One last thing. BOOM! Studios did a great job in presenting this collection which includes lots of wonderful commentary from Don Rosa. This is coming from someone who has been very critical of BOOM! in the past.
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