by David Searcy
More lightning flashes. Cosmic circuits shorting out. Now Fitz in inexplicable combat with a tree as the earth cracks open. Koko passing among some ruins. What are these ruins—realistic, sad, historical-looking ruins so absurdly in the shadow of a silly, cigar-puffing, anthropomorphic volcano? It’s all crazy. It’s completely nuts that the world should end like this, with no consistency at all. It all breaks down. The way we see it all breaks down. More cosmic flickering as bewildered, terrified, disembodied heads of Fitz and Koko loom and vanish. Now as if from space we see them jumping up and down at the top of the writhing, detonating world somewhere near Greenland. Then it goes. It just blows up. That’s it, we think. But no, that’s only one world down. There’s more to come. See—he’s just tumbled into regular, giant three-dimensional space. Plop, onto an ordinary windowsill. Whose windowsill we wonder, several stories over Broadway or whatever street that is down there with actual, panicked, three-dimensional people racing around and trying to hang on as the earth (the camera) tilts this way and that. Now he’s inside, the window closed. We see him pressed against the glass. Outside the skyscrapers are falling. It’s that window, isn’t it. Same as the one before—proportions, framing, sill, and even the little thumb latch. Here we are back in the studio of course, where all this started. Don’t you suspect, when drawing Koko in the control room, the cartoonist thought, Hey, wait a minute—how’s he going to see the effects outside without a window? So he looked around and simply copied that one. Stuck it in. We look out that one, one last time. A steady view across the city—no more herky-jerky camera—toward the river maybe. Smaller buildings. Curl of smoke from a factory in the distance. What an odd, reflective moment—only a couple of seconds really, just this long sad shot of the city, sad and dingy and resigned enough to make you think the end of the world might not need special effects, might be like this—a long slow evening, red sun setting over the Lower East Side. Look at this now for a second, which is all you’ve got unless you push the Pause button, as I’ve done. It’s as if they’d paused, themselves, the makers of this film, and caught a real glimpse of the end. Have you ever read Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep? I’ve read about it and I pick it up every couple of years or so and think I really ought to read it but I don’t think I could stand it. Just the last page and the title and the cover—which this moment where I’ve paused reminds me of—is enough. The thought of that, like that of Koko as a monster, is enough. The red sun going down on the Lower East Side and all that guilt. The idea of that is enough.
And then they do a funny thing. They gradually superimpose the ocean over the city. What is intended, I suppose, is inundation. What you get, though, is equivalence. One scene merges into the other. Horizontals correspond—the rows of buildings, lines of breakers. It’s the city or the ocean. As the ocean. It’s the same. And it’s so gentle, which I guess is what’s so sad. But enough of that. We’re not allowed to pause and sigh for very long. The studio’s shaking. Fitz and Koko—ah, there’s Fitz—are running around on the drawing table as it tosses back and forth. They’re trying to keep from falling off. Is this it, finally? Where’s the inkwell? They should jump back into the inkwell. That would stop it. That would make it all a dream. That’s how it works. So, is the inkwell like the ocean? Where’s the inkwell? There’s no inkwell. There’s no sunset. There’s no sad, sweet consummation. It’s all crazy. It goes on. Now Fitz and Koko turn into ink—a little puddle on the blotter sloshing back and forth and soon to be absorbed into the ever-expanding consequences. End without end, we’re finally left to imagine, to consider from the window that we look out every day.
Uncle Scrooge Comics #6, 1954
The most perverse and philosophically ambitious of the Uncle Scrooge adventures sets the mechanisms of greed upon what seems to represent a spiritual quest. It’s got the customary image on the cover—Uncle Scrooge in his devotion to his money (taken together, all the covers from the fifties, there’s a quality of allegory; I can imagine a series of Holbein wood engravings of Uncle Scrooge in his miserly observances, repetitious and inevitable as the famous Dance of Death)—but anyway, here’s Scrooge with a wooden tub and a washboard actually laundering his money. Behind him, bills hung up to dry.
On the inside cover is the usual six- or seven-frame vignette, which further demonstrates Uncle Scrooge’s profound skinflintiness in a form intermediate between the emblematic and the extended narrative to follow. The joke in this case—and it’s always a simple joke—is Scrooge’s impatient determination to wait for the library and its free reading room to open rather than shell out five cents for a newspaper proclaiming his own big oil strike.
Now, on the facing page the real adventure starts, as many do, with Scrooge in his money bin among the piles of money, hills and valleys, shifting dunes and wadis of money, gently undulating, semiarid vistas—coins primarily, with sheaves of bills here and there like weeds or clumps of drought-resistant grasses poking through at the hint of spring. Who knows what’s in the mind that finds fulfillment here? It’s hard to tell what’s going on. Of course we’ve seen how he disports himself, loves rolling in it, diving among the piles. And yet there’s evidence of husbandry, a strenuous sort of protocol involved. A bucket of coins in the foreground with a dollar sign on its side. A money bucket. Left there for some reason on a little knoll of money like a bucket of sand on a sandy beach. In the distance, visible just beyond a low moraine, a wheelbarrow loaded down with a single massive, sagging money bag. And sometimes there is even heavy equipment, as in #11, for example (on whose cover Scrooge is ironing wrinkled bills): a bulldozer, idle in the talus of a distant mound with Donald Duck, who’s visiting with his nephews, perched aboard, hands on the controls as if imagining how it feels to live and toil in a world of money—in his silly sailor suit, if he would have the heavy touch, the raw delight to do what needs to be done, to manage it, to not be overwhelmed, to hold, no matter what, the thought as crude and clear as thoughts of ancient ducks perhaps, of mythic ducks back when the real world must have seemed as bright and graspable as this, when ducks were ducks and maybe—who knows?—just emerging into wide-eyed anthropomorphism.
Right off the bat, though, something’s wrong. Scrooge dashes, trailing anxiety droplets, from the money bin. He’s flung aside his shovel. Have we nearly caught a glimpse of operations? What in the world could he have been doing? What improvements involving labor of that kind suggest themselves? And so compelling that he seeks refuge in them, apparently, from the practical requirements, all the business, all the daily, wild, exaggerated urgencies commensurate with his fortune and toward which he’s being summoned by his harried, desperate, semihuman underlings.
A word about the underlings. The seldom-seen accounting staff and file clerks. Like those more or less realistically rendered creatures—squirrels and birds and bugs and such—maintained in the unevolved state to provide a natural background, they belong to a sort of peripheral population. Not so much default, I’m beginning to think, as reserve. They’re generally pink and pretty much human but for round, black animal noses and, occasionally, floppy ears. But just that much is enough to keep that world closed in, prevent it from opening onto ours the way the world of Warner Brothers comics does—I’ve got a 1953 Bugs Bunny here and, sure enough, it’s just a cartoon-human-populated world with cartoon animal characters in it. We’re the background population for the most part, fully, uniformly schematized—no rudimentary animal characteristics—and invited to imagine Bugs just popping out of his hole into our midst without apology or excuse because he can, because as soon as we allow that cartoon gesture (like a rumor, like a dream) all bets are off. So what’s with Duckburg? All those people not quite people? We’re invited to imagine, it would seem (and this is what my wife once told me made her anxious, even queasy, as a child when given Uncle Scrooge or Donald Duck to read), that we are implicated, drawn into it under certain conditions, forced to compromise, to take odd jobs, ignore the slight disfigurement.
But anyway
, let’s see. It looks like Uncle Scrooge has more than he can handle—third-world despots wanting bribes, absurd demands from every quarter, wheedling letters piled as high as piles of money. It’s no better on the street. They spot him: fat lady bearing down with child in tow (it flaps behind her like a rag doll, little round nose still pink) for whom she seeks career advice; immense top-hatted, swallowtail-coated, spatted rich man blocking the sidewalk to remind Scrooge of a speaking obligation as, between his legs, Scrooge scampers to be grabbed about the neck by a screaming, bearded, rat-faced anarchist wanting a billion toward the abolition of wealth. This last requires an extra frame to set up the joke—and look what’s happened. Look at the anarchist, bearing in mind that it’s only 1954. He’s drawn from the intellectual school—a shirt and tie beneath his sweater. And his rat face, though still pink, shows marked development, with its giant ears and pointy snout and chisel-like incisors, from the range of nonspecific background types. He’s on his way to a full-blown character. “Rat-faced Anarchist”—one can only imagine how that might have played in the early fifties. It’s as if the not-quite-people and the more-or-less-realistic-background-animals felt an impulse toward each other, needing only a little dramatic provocation to combine.
But this is crazy. Scrooge can’t stand it. Back at work he flings the phone across the room. He kicks his money. He goes nuts. He heads for the park and takes up residence in a hollow tree. He wants to revert, wants to live the simple life of a squirrel, whose hoarding instinct he already shares, of course. No good can come of this.
At last his nephew, Donald Duck, shows up to take him to the doctor but before he can he has to coax Scrooge down out of the tree, which makes for a curious scene at one point. Donald stands on the other side of the low brick wall that surrounds the park and rests his arms on top as he reasons with his uncle. Scrooge has emerged from the tree and begun to descend. He’s lost his top hat but still wears his spats and purple Dickensian frock coat or whatever you call that thing he always wears. He speaks, responds. His eyes are clear, not goofy spirals. He looks fine. Except he comes down like a squirrel—headfirst, his hands and feet spread wide to grab the trunk the way a squirrel would do. What seems so odd about it—even spooky in a way—is that his reason has returned. So his behavior isn’t crazy, merely thoughtless. He forgets himself. Or forgets to regain himself quite all the way for just a second, just a frame—he’s fully recovered in the next, perched on the wall, upright and ranting to his nephew. It’s disturbing, I think in this case, to discover ourselves disturbed. That such a silly, oddly conflated figure as Scrooge (a sailor suit at least makes a kind of thematic sense) should seem enough himself to lose himself significantly. What sort of mordant stabilizes Uncle Scrooge? That we should catch our breath a little at his shift and sense this momentary transformation anything at all like Dracula’s, say—that passage early in the book when Jonathan Harker, gazing out upon the moonlight from his prospect high in the castle, sees the Count emerge from a window just below and slither headfirst down the wall. Or, looking even further back to Pleistoanax, young king of Sparta during the Periclean Age, who, according to A. R. Burn, impeached for the venality of his commanders and “fined a sum which he could not pay,” fled like a beast to haunted Arcadia to live for nineteen years in a house built half inside and half outside “the grim sanctuary of Apollo the Wolf-God”—imagine a sort of park—“where it was said that human flesh was mixed with the sacrifices, that he who ate it became a wolf, and that no beast cast a shadow.”
Well, on the next page we find Uncle Scrooge in the hospital much subdued, with Donald, Huey, Dewey, and Louie in attendance as the doctor, bag in hand, preparing to leave, recalls having heard of a legendary valley hidden somewhere high in the Himalaya Mountains and inhabited by a people with no concept of wealth. That does it for Scrooge. His pince-nez flies off his nose. He leaps from his bed. It’s off to India. Off on the same old mad, obsessive expedition. There’s no difference in the style—the continent-hopping, mountain-climbing, Junior Woodchucks’ Guide–consulting race to secure the heart’s desire wherever it is. And it’s where it almost always is, at the ends of the earth in regions so exotic and remote the cartoon gesture itself is strained, a documentary sort of accuracy seems to leak in so you get these photographic panoramas: here are the five of them emerged upon the Himalayan foothills, gazing up. You wonder how Uncle Scrooge can maintain his focus in all this and his desire not simply vanish, steam away in the thin, cold air of actual mountains, stupas, great-mustachioed Sikhs with human noses. Yet, if anything, they seem to gain in clarity, the cartoon ducks, against this marvelous National Geographic sort of background. It’s the outline of the world that looks uncertain all of a sudden—uncartoonlike, sketchy, deferent to reality. Standing there on the steps of a temple, all in a row, they’re clear as bells, as clear and strange as zoomorphic Hindu deities. They can do whatever they want. They can’t be stopped. God, how I loved this part as a child. It hardly matters what they’re after. They’re not likely to get to keep it. Hopes and fears will cancel out and they’ll return to life between the quarterly issues—Donald Duck to a house like ours and Scrooge to his money bin, the sweet ennui, the old dissatisfaction.
But for now they’re really after it. They hire a plane to find the valley, which is hidden below the clouds. No place to land. They have to parachute. It’s at this point (thirty years before the lives of Bushmen are identically disrupted in the film The Gods Must Be Crazy—maybe somewhere there’s a common source, some folktale) that there occurs the thing that seeds the tragic irony to follow. Uncle Scrooge, to summon his courage (not to jump but to pay the pilot), pops a bottle of his nerve tonic. Out the little open window flies the bottle cap. A separate frame observes its fall—receding plane above, the shrouded mountain peaks below. Then off they go. The plane swoops down beneath the clouds, ejects supplies, and then the ducks into what really ought to be an allegorical summing up, the last adventure, Scrooge having overreached this time, beyond desiring particular treasure, seeking finally to address the central problem, to idealize possession—here, as far from his actual money and its distractions as he can get, here at the antipodes of desire, he might at last assume a perfect form of ownership, become, as it were, completely self-possessed. And so he seems to bring himself to the verge of wisdom. Only a philosophical step or two away. “Here I shall be able to rest!” he proclaims, arms wide as he dangles from his parachute, “Here among people that have no desire for my wealth!” It goes no further. There’s no mystical leap. His money bin, the untranscendent fact, like Dracula’s box of native soil, is all that’s really in his thoughts and, in effect, as we shall see, he’s brought it with him.
