The Eternal Life of Scrooge McDuck

Sure, sometimes corporate ownership of a character ends up diluting it into an endless, lifeless stream of licensing tie-ins and reproductions by half-hearted hacks. But sometimes it's fun! Take Don Rosa 's Eisner award-winning series The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. Through the magic of Disney's corporate immortality, a character made great by a great writer and artist can be passed on to another great writer and artist. Rosa's biography of Uncle Scrooge takes an appropriately worshipful attitude toward Carl Barks 's signature character. It is, in effect, the ultimate retcon (i.e., retroactive continuity), fleshing out a whole life story for Scrooge McDuck out of hints dropped throughout Barks's original tales. In the Gladstone collection of all twelve episodes of The Life and Times, half the fun is in Rosa's "The Making of..." essays at the end of each chapter. Here he reveals himself as a true obsessive fanboy, detailing his struggles to make consistent the sketchy Scrooge timeline he inherited from Barks. The end result of this obsession is greater than sum of its two creators: a character that takes on a life of his own. And of course nothing could be more in keeping with that character's spirit than the project of squeezing every last penny out of his life story.

Tezuka Explores Ethics of Cute Engineering

Imagine that you're reading a comic from the late 40's featuring a boy genius named Doctor Shikishima and a cute talking rabbit who looks Disney's Oswalt. The story promises to be an adventure in the Carl Barks vein, until on p17 the bunny explains, "You see in the Doctor's laboratory he takes the brains of animals and surgically changes them into the brains of humans!" Welcome to The Lost World, an early work by Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy. There's no irony here: the cuteness is always sincere, and unrelenting. But there is self-consciousness. One character remarks to the bunny: "you're like something straight out of a comic book!" The Betty Boop lookalikes made out of seaweed take the notion of engineering cuteness to even stranger places.

With this dark utopian fantasy about the technological realization of fantasy, Tezuka reveals himself as a descendent not only of Disney but also of Wells and Verne, and as a progenitor of cyberpunk anime.

The Lost World is available from Amazon.