DRL: “An Eye For Detail” (1997)

Three years ago, I began reviewing stories from Fantagraphics’ “Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck: The Don Rosa Library” collections. It’s been a while since that initial burst, but I picked the books back up again this week and fell in love with the stories all over again. The nice thing about it is that I haven’t read any of these stories in years, so I’ve forgotten more than I remembered. It’s nice to give these stories a second chance at a first impression, don’t you think?

Capsule Summary: Uncle Scrooge realizes that Donald Duck has an eye for detail, and so puts him to work at spotting quality differences along the production line of his high tech factory. Naturally, things don’t go as planned and a series of escalating failures ends in a large blow-up.

Naturally, a story titled “An Eye for Detail” is obsessed with tiny details and littered with background gags that pay off for those who aren’t rushing through every page to just get through the story.

You know how the new Smurf in “Who’s That Smurf?” works well as a foil for the tendency of every smurf to use the word “smurf” too much? This story keys off of Donald’s ability to tell his three nephews apart when they don’t have their hats on. The hats are really the only obvious tell for us readers. But for Donald, there’s a myriad ways he can tell them apart. Scrooge? Not so much.

Scrooge is so laid back and matter-of-fact about this. You can tell he’s goading Donald into something just by asking him about it, but also can claim it’s something he’s always wondered about. He’s only using it now because he has an ulterior motive, and Rosa draws a look on Scrooge’s face that proves it.

Only adding to the craziness of the situation is Donald’s detailed accounts of the nephews’ differences. As the story goes on, they only get wilder and wilder. At the end, Donald points out a mosquito bit behind one of their ears and it takes Scrooge a bet to realize how silly that sounds. (In case you miss the gag, look at the next panel and point to anyone’s visible ear.)

And as a running gag, the three boys are shocked that anyone would think they look alike. While Donald and Scrooge are sparring, the three nephews are deep in conversation on the other half of the panel debating the level of either disrespect or stupidity it would take for someone to think they all looked alike.

“What a ridiculous notion!” they all say. This gag works really well with the three identical ducks talking in unison.

A visit to the eye doctor to prove out Scrooge’s theory on Donald’s eye for detail leads us to a goofball optometrist straight out of central casing from a sketch comedy show or an old school Vaudeville routine. The great Dr. I. C. Nihl calls out the window for his receptionist instead of the opening to her desk. His diploma and eye charts are upside down on the wall. He talks to Donald’s hat on top of the hat rack rather than to Donald.

But I bet he was available at short noticed and had a cheap rate. That’s all Scrooge would need, after all.

The rest of the story is Scrooge setting up Donald with new jobs while the boys negotiate Donald’s pay scale. The highlight of this negotiation is this panel, where the boys make sure to carve out every benefit they can get for him. The list includes daily coffee and donuts, vacation, royalties, and “return of artwork.”

That last one is something Rosa had his differences with Disney over. If you haven’t heard the whole story on that, Google around and I’m sure something will pop up.

Story Structure

I’m not going to spoil the rest of the story, but it follows the typical structure of a short comedic story like this one. (It’s likely also the Homers Gets a New Job formula on The Simpsons.) In the span of ten pages, Donald gets a new job under Scrooge, Donald messes it up a few different ways, with each failure landing a new position that is theoretically more important but could it more disastrous. In the end, of course, the disaster happens and things return to their normal situation.

This is not a bad thing, by the way. Rosa has proven plenty of times that his Duck stories aren’t by-the-book and formulaic. He just knows how to use one to hang lots of great gags and interesting visual situations on.

He can also work the comic book medium, itself, into the story, as we saw with “The Coin” and “A Matter of Some Gravity.” Eventually, I’m sure I’ll get to “The Universal Solvent” for another great example of this.

Don Rosa Doesn’t Like This One

Before I wrote this review, I forgot to check Rosa’s notes in the back of the book. Turns out, he doesn’t like this story, but I can easily see why. He says it’s a good idea, but he had a hard time turning it into a story.

When I read that, I immediately knew where he struggled. It’s the escalating actions of Donald. He starts in one job and that escalates a couple of times, but then Scrooge moves him to another job entirely for the purpose of setting up a big half page grand finale where everything comes crashing down around them.

It would have been a better story if the same job had been held throughout the story, only with the payoff of each mistake getting bigger and bigger. That would have required a single job with as many as 5 or 6 complications to get Donald to that point without it seeming forced that Scrooge didn’t fire him sooner.

That all said, he dressed up the main story with enough funny bits and visual gags to fill out the ten pages well. It’s very entertaining.

Rosa said it’s a story idea he wished he could go back to and improve upon it with a better story, but his retirement ended that goal. He leaves it up to the next generation of writers to use the idea, if they want. It’s a great idea. I hope someone does.

Summary

“An Eye for Detail” is a very funny 10 page story with a familiar structure that’s executed extremely well. It includes some meta commentary on Don Rosa’s ongoing battles with the Disney corporation and the question of how anyone can tell Huey, Dewey, and Louie apart.

Rosa matches the “eye for detail” theme in the plot with an eye for detail in his storytelling and background drawings. The opening splash panel has a picture hanging on the wall of Scrooge standing by a sack of money, hung as if he had just fished it out of the lake. Scrooge vending coffee and donuts to his own employee is funny enough and in character, but the one panel where he breaks out the coin changer belt got a laugh from me. Rosa is good at packing every page with things worth looking at to add to the reader’s enjoyment beyond “just” the plot.

You can pick up this book as a hardcover or digitally on Amazon today. You’ll probably have to go with the digital edition, though. I’m pretty sure it’s out of print and Disney has edicts on this series that make reprints tricky… (As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.)