[AR-106] – Cash Flow (26 Pages, Adventure)
The Story: The Beagle Boys, in an effort to raid Scrooge’s Money Bin, get hold of ray-guns that negate inertia and friction. The only natural result of such shenanigans? The Great Duckburg Money Flood!
The Review: Don Rosa has claimed that the finest comic book in existence is “Only a Poor Old Man” and the finest comic book panel to be the dam breaking in that same story. So it’s no surprise that his first crack at a Beagle Boys tale would reference that classic tale, with the flowing of money like water, Scrooge saying the titular phrase, Scrooge beating the Beagle Boys at their own game, and a final verbal callback joke.
There are a number of reasons “Only a Poor Old Man” worked so well, but the most critical one is the emotional core of Scrooge and Donald’s characters. For all the grief his money puts him through, Scrooge considers a swim in his money to be worth every bit of hassle he goes through, even after he almost lost it all. Donald’s characterization of a slyly amused assistant gives us a grounded proxy by which we can experience Scrooge’s adventures, and hook the reader in to delivering part of the moral at the end, where we question the reason Scrooge is so invested in his money, and when the famous closing lines are delivered the reader feels they are being answered directly by Scrooge, without breaking the realism of the story.
The way Rosa interprets “Only a Poor Old Man” will be the most important influence throughout his entire body of work, and I will go in to more detail on that in later entries. But it must be pointed out that while there are references and homages to that tale in “Cash Flow”, they are not the same type of same story. Instead, this is Rosa doing one of the things he does best, taking real world scientific principles and applying them to the fantasy land of Duckburg. It gives a great balance of tension, humor, and a little bit of education thrown in there on the sly, but it does not delve in to the characters’ emotions, nor is it meant to. That type of exploration would be saved for other stories which Rosa is so famous for.
All things considered, it’s a great adventure tale and rare for Rosa in that it’s an adventure story that takes place entirely in Duckburg. The anatomy of the characters is excellent, there’s a much better use of composition this time around, and for a story where playing with inertia and friction is so important there is a real sense of motion.
Sound effects are incorporated more frequently, lending some atmosphere to the science fiction elements of the story.
The last page is the most important (in this story) in terms of his artistic development, showing a use of cross-hatching to create a sense of foreboding to Scrooge’s dialogue. This technique would be used more often and to greater effect in stories to come.
Continuity: This story gives confirmation that Leavenworst Prison (a take on the real-life Leavenworth, and first mentioned in “Recalled Wreck”) is the official Duckburg prison and not simply a throwaway gag, and another Barksian reference in Two-Gun “Buck” McDuck, a name which will take a far greater importance when we examine The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck.
This story is unusual in that the Barksian reference of the Cabbage Professor from “The Mysterious Stone Ray” kicks off the plot, but “Cash Flow” is not actually a sequel to that tale. When people discuss Rosa, I often hear a lack of distinction between ‘reference’ and ‘sequel’ and it bothers me. Almost all of Rosa’s stories are references to Barks (or his own stories) in at least a cursory fashion, but his sequel tales are a horse of a different color, and one that we won’t see until 1988’s “Last Sled to Dawson”.
Mathias DeRider