DRL: “Metaphorically Spanking” (1988)

Capsule Review: The three nephews skip school for the day in a story that feels a bit disjointed and too coincidental. It has some funny moments and ends on a high note, but the plot construction is a bit of a letdown and the story suffers from it. But I did enjoy the grammar word play!

Nephews Go AWOL

Spring has sprung, and it’s a time when a young man’s thoughts turn to those of truancy. And so Huey, Dewey, and Louie cut school for a day of fun.

Problem is, they can’t escape their Uncle Donald, who is between jobs and has plans to take Daisy out for a picnic lunch, a movie, and more.

Everywhere the three boys go, their Unca suddenly shows up. Quickly they scramble to get away, only for the cycle to repeat itself.

This isn’t my favorite story. The lengths Rosa has to go to for everyone to keep winding up in the same place every time is just too coincidental. It cheapens the story and the gags.

I know it’s a silly 10-page gag story, but it feels like magic; anything can happen at any time for any reason. There’s no setup. It just is. That’s just not satisfying for me. Maybe I’m asking for too much, but that’s how it feels to me.

Put another way: “This happens AND THEN this happens AND THEN this happens” but there’s nothing to connect those happenings. Nothing happens because of the previous thing, save maybe the time the nephews go for a dip in the water by the old mill to clean themselves up after the disastrous movie theater hijinx.

That old mill sequence has a great series of panels where Rosa holds the “camera” still to show the boys as they dip in and out of the water as the wheel goes around, narrowly missing being seen by Donald when he looks through the tiny viewfinder. It’s one of those storytelling tricks that works just as well on the comics page as it does in the film medium.

As with all of these Rosa gag stories, it ends in grand fashion — this time with a riot at a baseball game that the boys both cause and then use to their advantage to escape. Don’t worry, though; they’re still good boys whose guilt about the whole affair gets the better of them.

That title, “Metaphorically Spanking,” is not a typo. I really thought it was “Metaphorically Speaking” when I first wrote this review. I only read the title more carefully and realized my error on the second draft. The nephews do spank themselves in the end, in association with some metaphorical wordplay. It does all come together.

It starts on the right foot on the first page. There’s a moment when the boys complain about having to go to school and deal with writing techniques like alliteration and simile.

To that, Donald responds, “I don’t know from alliteration or simile, but if you lazy little loafers don’t get to school, I’ll peel you like spuds!”

I hope people get the joke there. It’s a natural side effect of writing Pipeline for the last 25 years that I do. Obviously, it’s lost on the youngest readers, but I’m hoping the adults get a chuckle out of that line. The grammar and writing techniques lesson come back to play again at the end of the story as things come full circle.

Bonus points for using “Oh, so!” as an exclamation here. It’s something Carl Barks regularly used, and grew to have greater meaning in comics fandom: It became the name of the letters column in “The Comics Buyer’s Guide” trade newspaper in the 80s and 90s. (Maybe even in the 70s? I wasn’t there for those issues.)

Summary

“Metaphorically Spanking” is one of Rosa’s earliest stories. It appears at the end of the first book of the Don Rosa Library.

He shows great skill with characterization and gag formation. He makes sure to end the story on a big note. But there are other parts of the plotting and pacing that mark this as the beginning of a Duck writer’s career.

It’s also early in his artistic journey. The bones are definitely there, but Rosa hadn’t fully come into his own style yet with all the “needless and irritating detail” he so often speaks about. By comparison to his latter works, it looks more simple, yet it’s still filled with great backgrounds and on-model characters.

I’ve said it before, but the years he put in drawing things like “Captain Kentucky” gave him a big head start in creating these Duck books. He was hardly a newbie to comics art at this point. Still, it’s impressive to see how well he started, even if in retrospect we know he would continue to get better over the years.

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