DRL: “Forget It!” (2002)

Don Rosa’s first two Magica De Spell stories, “On a Silver Platter” and “A Matter of Some Gravity“, were so good that they deserved to be part of a trilogy.

Welcome to Rosa’s third De Spell story, where her magic wand causes anyone it touches to forget anything about what is mentioned after their names. This selective amnesia leads to some hilarious results and great twists in what could have been a far simpler and more straightforward story. This story is a great capper to the De Spell trilogy — creating enough surprising new elements while sticking to the formula of the first stories. The reactions from Scrooge and Donald to their newfound forgetfulness is particularly funny.

This story was originally published in 2002, so it’s pretty far into Rosa’s career. It’s reprinted in book 9 of 10 in the Don Rosa Library.

Rosa was a seasoned veteran artist at this point, including all the little background gags, visual gags, and tiny details that sharp-eyed Duck readers came to look for and appreciate.

Just look at that first panel of the story. There’s so much going on in it. On the surface, it’s just Donald asking for his pay and Scrooge looking at him with no small amount of derision. This is the game these two often play. Donald works for Scrooge, but still has to beg him for his money.

It’s particularly hilarious when Scrooge is pushing a sack of money around his office in a two-wheeled cart (which is leaking coins behind him), and money is squeezing out the sides of the closed door to the money bin.

Donald is emphasizing his point in a most ridiculous fashion: holding out his hand while holding up two signs with arrows to point to the hand. He’s rolling his eyes as he does it, too. This is the dance between Scrooge and Donald. Donald doesn’t even take it seriously anymore. He knows this is how the system works with McDuck.

There’s more, of course. The little aquarium in the background has a “For Rent” sign on the castle in it. Naturally. Scrooge would never miss out on a real estate deal.

The two frames on the wall hold more gags. One has a close-up on Scrooge’s eye — or maybe a relative of Scrooge? — watching this unfolding scene. The other has Scrooge chasing down a rolling coin with a fishing net.

In the foreground, a table holds a few loose coins and a pair of scissors that is sharp enough to cut them in half. I’m not sure if I’m missing a reference there to an earlier tale, or if this is a play on words I’m missing, or just a silly little office gag.

Finally, there’s the wad of cash with a rubber band holding it together on the far right side of the panel that’s enclosed in a glass jar.

It’s just a lot of stuff in one panel. It’s so much fun.

Oh, and check out the look on Scrooge’s face:

I love the raised eyebrow and the cheek showing up above his bill there. The little speed line effects lines by that eyebrow and coming out of his eye help, too. It’s a super expressive face that I wanted to take a moment to point out here.

You’ve read this story already if you read “A Matter of Some Gravity.” It’s the same outline with different details. Instead of Magica causing Donald and Scrooge to have to fight against the laws of nature while chasing Magic down to the airport, here they have to chase Magic down to the airport while forgetting what more and more things are. The story even has an early gag dealing with the stairs leading out of Scrooge’s office, just as in “A Matter of Some Gravity.” (“Have engineering tear this dangerous contraption out of here! Somebody could get killed!” says Scrooge, much to everyone else’s confusion.)

As with the “Gravity” story, there are all sorts of unexpected implications to forgetting how basic things work — from doors and windows and steering wheels all the way to riding a bike or walking. Things get more ridiculous as the story goes on, which is just what you’d want. Rosa doesn’t play it safe. He throws everything at the Ducks in this one, and then they act strongly on it.

As the situations get crazier, so do the character’s faces and their body language. It goes so far as to get to the point where Donald can’t stand and Scrooge can’t walk, so they show up in one panel like this:

And, yes, you can play games with this story hook and make all the quibbles about the plot you want. (“If Scrooge forgets how to walk, why can’t he prance or trot or run or run-walk?”). The second you start thinking that way, though, stop it. Just enjoy the ride. Don’t be overthinking this funny story about talking ducks and the evil Italian duck who is after the Scottish-American duck’s lucky ten-cent piece.

The other thing that Rosa excels at here is his pacing. Comedy relies on timing above all us. There are several gags in this story that work as well as they do because Rosa paces them with such comedic skill. A bit of selective amnesia strikes so hard and fast that the very next panel shows the results in slapstick fashion.

The best example of this is this two-panel sequence that made me laugh out loud:

The pacing on this moment is super quick and perfect. We go straight from reading the dialogue where we know Donald is about to forget what glass is to Donald slamming up against the glass in the window. Donald goes a long way between panels, but it’s the only way for this gag to work. Any intermediate panel wouldn’t have slowed the moment down and sucked the energy out of it.

It also helps that this comes deeply enough into the story that the reader has seen this one-two punch multiple times already. The reader knows something is coming after that “BING!” sound effect. Rosa gets straight to it. He’s piling up the gags now and moving faster to keep the reader interested. He can use the tricks of sequential narrative to pull it off, too. That time jump in the gutters between these two panels sells the gag.

And that angle on Donald’s flat face through the window works. With the right silly body language, I could see a medium side angle shot working here, but the choice Rosa made delivers the moment perfectly. This story is filled with choices like this one that just work.

Comics Language

It’s another bit of comics construction in this book that Rosa makes sure to highlight the moments when Magica’s spell is invoked. He has a little burst balloon on top of the dialogue balloon, like a chime going off in the background to indicate what’s happening.

Remember the film strip projectors where the audio tape would beep when it was time to turn to the next slide? I’m really dating myself now, but it’s what I thought of immediately in this department.

It’s a smart idea. Using character names in comics is generally a good idea, just so new readers can figure out who’s who. Repetition helps cement the names in the readers’ minds. Here, that’s part of the plot, but only specifically when the next line of dialogue includes something for that character to forget. (There’s one or two moments in this story where a name is used at the end of a word balloon and the conversation shifts into another direction right after that. In those cases, the spell doesn’t “catch.”)