DRL: “The Master Landscapist” (1990)

Welcome to a new series of reviews as I read stories from Fantagraphics’ glorious “The Don Rosa Library” series of books. We’re lucky enough now to have the complete library of Don Rosa’s Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories in print in magnificent form. Most of these stories were being printed for the first time as I was discovering the Duck comics, so they hold a special place in my heart, and I look forward to reliving those adventures and those gags.

Capsule Summary: “The Master Landscapist” is a relatively early outing for Rosa. It has its charms and a good avalanche of gags down the stretch. The final visual gag shows his inventiveness and sense of humor well, but there are a lot of better short gag stories yet to come.

You know those episodes of “The Simpsons” where Homer takes up a new job in a completely different industry and things go hilariously wrong?

Donald Duck has had those stories since the 1940s, also. It makes for a great set-up to get a reader into a story in a new world ripe with new ideas for a gag writer like Carl Barks to let loose in.

Now it’s Don Rosa’s turn to use that story structure and see what he can do with it. Maybe it’s because I’m a more experienced reader here, but I could see Rosa working in the first half of the story to set up all the dominoes to get to the inevitable ending where they fall in an unexpectedly explosive fashion. There’s a lot of front-loading in the story to set it all up and Chekhov’s Gun dictates that it’s all important.

In this story, Donald is suddenly an expert landscaper, with tools and tricks of his own making that allow him to do the most amazing job in the least amount of time. He’s starting a major job to fix the mayor’s spacious backyard with just hours to go before the company comes over for a fox hunt. Stakes are high; such a high-profile event in front of a Who’s Who in Duckburg could give his new company the boost it needs to be wildly successful.

There’s a rose bush that needs tending, a couple of trees that need shaping, edging that has to be done silently to keep the horses happily sleeping, and more.

One by one, Donald is able to complete those tasks out in creative and perhaps slightly silly ways. A collection of rabbits takes care of the grass silently, for example. Some crochet skills convert the roses into a beautiful centerpiece.

And then there’s this sequence that I swear I heard the music from “Rabbit of Seville” playing in my head as I read it.

The final trick comes in mowing the majority of the lawn, something for which Donald has a solution that marries two lawn mowers together. After expressing no reservations about Donald’s other crazy work processes, Huey, Dewey, and Louie worry about this solution. Once that part of the plan falls apart, everything else would be undone along with it. High risk/high reward. Junior Woodchucks don’t believe in risk.

Up until that moment, though, everything was going according to plan. Every hare-brained idea Donald had worked. Yet, suddenly, at the last step of his plan, the three nephews start bugging him about how his plan wasn’t going to work and how they should step in to save him when he didn’t need saving.

They caused the problem, not Donald!

The reason the lawn mowers separate and get loose is because the boys were pestering poor Donald so badly that he lost his temper for a moment and accidentally clipped something when he swung his arm. Without them there, he never would have done that and he could have finished the lawn in peace in the same smooth style as he handled everything else.

Why, those little brats!

The story has two notable half-page splashes in the final three pages. The latter one shows the utter madness of the destruction, with horses and rabbits running every which way but loose. It’s an impressive moment, and one which we see in top Rosa form in this library for the first time. Rosa tells the story in the back matter of how his editor thought the panel was too busy and asked him to simplify it. Here, we get the full gloriously overly-busy version that works better.

The first half-page panel, though, is a quieter moment before the animals are let out. We see the outline in the grass that the mowers made, as well as the torn-up roses and the fallen lollipop trees. From high above, they make the outline of a mouse sticking its tongue out at you.

Rosa isn’t anti-Mickey Mouse, but he is a big Duck fan. I can’t help but read more into that panel, though. It makes it even funnier.

Lettering Thoughts

Seeing the hand lettering in the book from Teresa Davidson and Travis Seitler takes a bit of getting used to. The Duck books under Gladstone or Gemstone or whoever was controlling the line at the time moved to computer lettering fairly early, but they kept hand letterers around for Rosa’s work. They had the great Todd Klein letter “The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck,” for goodness sake. When I picture Rosa’s work in my mind these days, it’s those stories that tend to overshadow everything else, fairly or not. There’s a certain look there that I expect.

Seeing a different hand letterer from an earlier time is a bit of a shock to the system. It works, but it shows all the shortcomings of classic hand lettering, often in the way they try to fit the words into the balloons or just the general inconsistencies of the letters and their line-ups. Those are the things that give hand lettering its own charm, but can sometimes also prove to be its downfall, as well.

It’s tough to be compared to Klein, I know, but this stuff is rough in comparison. Very rough. The letter shapes look like they were inspired by Carl Barks’ work with their more open letterforms, but it just doesn’t work for me here. I think the lumpy word balloons play a big part in that, too. The word balloon shapes are all over the place.

The hand letterer who I think compares better and with a completely different lettering style is John Clark. We’ll talk about him more in a future review…

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