Don Rosa in Review – The Paper Chase (1988)

[AR-107] The Paper Chase (2 Pages, Gag)

The Story: Scrooge buys a newspaper, and must chase it down when the wind blows it out of his hands.

The Review: WARNING! THE FOLLOWING REVIEW IS INCREDIBLY DIDACTIC!

I grew acquainted with the Ducks from The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. Then I read some of Rosa’s stories, realized how referential they were to Barks, read some of Barks, more of Rosa, more of Barks, back and forth, until I had read all of Rosa’s stories and a good deal of Barks’. That background is how I knew that this story was not written by Rosa, because the Barks/Rosa Scrooge would never, ever pay for a newspaper.

“The Paper Chase” was written by Gary Leach, one of the higher-ups at Gladstone. As far as I can tell this is Leach’s first ever original comic script, having served mostly as a translator and letterer prior to this. Rosa would draw two more Leach scripts, both of them two-pagers. Of the three, this is the bad apple of the bunch, and earns that distinction by… well, you’ll see.

The story is ultimately harmless in that it isn’t some hyperbolically terrible monstrosity or anything, but it’s very easy to break down the problems of this script and why it needed another draft before it went to an artist. And since I like to give you some bang for your buck, I’m going to do just that with a session of Comics 101. Apologies in advance, Mr. Leach, I promise you wrote other gag pieces I really liked.

1. It violates common sense regarding how someone like Scrooge would get details about the stock market. If Scrooge needed a paper it could have been for a number of other reasons, but because the stock market has to do with money, it’s why Scrooge needs a paper. It’s lazy and obvious and worse yet, removes the opportunity for an actual joke about why he would need a paper.

2. It goes against the Barksian detail of Scrooge not paying for a newspaper. Some of you are going to think “Well, Disney comics as a whole don’t take place in any established canon, it’s all open to interpretation by the individual artists and writers”, and you’re right. Further, while Rosa’s comics take place in his own canon, this is not a Rosa story, it is a Scrooge story that has Rosa art. We’re going to talk about continuity a lot in this series, but for the purposes of this entry let’s confine ourselves to being true to the character. I think we can all agree that Scrooge wouldn’t pay for something unless there was a pressing need for it and there was no other way around it. At least, not when he’s on-panel. A character can act outside of his regular pattern if there is a convincing reason like a ticking clock or other extenuating circumstances, but that isn’t what’s happening here.

Scrooge has no need to pay for a paper for any logical or gag-based reason. There is no time crunch, so he can simply find one tossed aside in the garbage, on a park bench, or any number of other places, and has actually done so in other comics. This makes his chase seem not humorously over-reactive, just pointless and stupid.

3. I didn’t really think a two page story could be poorly paced, but I was wrong. The entire first page establishes that Scrooge has purchased the paper, is walking down the street, and has the paper blown out of his hands. The second page devotes three panels to actually chasing the paper (one being irregularly sized), and the last three to set up and deliver the final joke. This story could have been told in one page with more economical layouts, and I probably would have had less of a problem with it if that was the case. If it was going to be two pages anyway, the actual chase should have started earlier, been more visually varied, and given a better sense of visual continuity from joke to joke.

4. This one is entirely on Rosa, because the artwork for this story doesn’t work. He doesn’t create a sense of motion for the papers in the wind and far, far worse, Scrooge’s expressions during these action panels are oddly flat. Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes said that whenever he couldn’t come up with a good script he went all out on the art, but here Scrooge is incredibly subdued in the places he needs to (and logically would) BE at his most expressive. It doesn’t even match the visual jokes in the final panel, because Scrooge doesn’t appear to be exerting himself with these feats of acrobatic wonder.

And of course, to top it all off, Scrooge enters his office without the paper he had been chasing the entire story.

The complete failure of the artwork dashes the only chance the story had to redeem itself to me. I say ‘only’ chance because we have yet to come to the most difficult problem with the story…

5. “Paper Chase” isn’t funny. You can’t objectively prove something isn’t funny, that’s not how humor works, but this is my shot at trying. The opportunities for gags are either misfired or not taken at all.

And that’s that. The actual concept has a lot of potential for humor, but a story’s success is always, always in the execution. I’m not saying Leach can’t write (I actually really, really like “Fiscal Fitness” and think “Rocket Reverie” has a lot of good gags in it, but those are other entries), but I think whoever approved the script really failed him here by letting him turn in what should have been an early draft. Rosa’s art didn’t do him any favors either, being just vaguely serviceable rather than an enhancement of the script.

Despite all that I said, I wish Leach had continued working on gag stories like this. I very much enjoyed “Fiscal Fitness” and “Rocket Reverie”. The only non-Rosa story I’ve seen from him was a DuckTales story, “Flights of Fancy”, and I thought that had some great gags too, so it’s not like Rosa ‘carried’ him through those other two stories. But like many early efforts from writers and artists alike, this story just isn’t good.

Continuity: This gets the very first appearance of the non-canon stamp from me, simple as the story is, by virtue of it not being in character for Rosa’s Scrooge.

I will award the non-canon stamp to any story that irreconcilably contradicts established Barks or Rosa canon by virtue of ignoring plot points of past stories, character motivation, or other such factors.

But if it was canon, it would be Rosa’s first appearance of Scrooge’s secretary Miss Quackfaster.