Jack L. Chalker - Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck

Walt Disney Productions, the copyright holders on all illustrative matter that should accompany the text, have vigorously denied any permission to use any pictorial representation of any copyrighted Disney character in the preparation of the book, although their legal staff has very grudgingly admitted our right to publish the text, as its form is an established literary genre in and of itself. They also prohibited, directly or indirectly, several Disney employees and persons dependent on the Disney organization from writing any introductory, prefatory, or other textual matter to this book. We sincerely regret their decision and their strongly negative corporate attitude, and we have held up the production of this book for three years while conducting a legal dialog with them. The publishers ultimately decided lo release this work within the confines of the Disney legal department's strict definitions, and Ron Miller, a lifelong fan of Carl Barks, agreed to work within the confines of those terms as well. The author and publishers wish to thank those individual writers and artists in the Disney organization for their help, encouragement; and strong efforts on our behalf. In a way this book is dedicated to all of you.

by Jack L. Chalker

With a Bibliography by Kim Weston

THE MIRAGE PRESS P. 0. Box 7687, Baltimore, Maryland 21207 U. S. A.

1974

AN INFORMAL. BIOGRAPHY OF SCROOGE McDUCK, Copyright 1974 by Jack L. Chalker. All rights, including those of recording and translation, are reserved in the U. S. A., United Kingdom, and under the Pan American, Universal, and Berne copyright conventions.

A different and shorter version of this essay appeared in the privately circulated magazine MARKINGS in 1971. Its publisher, Kim Weston, contributed much that is hidden within the work.

ISBN 0-88358-502 2

Library of Congress Card Catalog Number

Printed in the United States of America, 2000 copies, 1974.

Cover art by Ron Miller

This book is affectionately dedicated to Mr. Carl Barks, without whom none of us would ever have heard of Scrooge McDuck nor his adventures. A few of you will also note the debt owed to the ghosts of Mr. Christopher Morley and Mr.W. S.Baring-Gould.

To anyone with any sense at all, it is a true mystery why no definitive biography of the richest duck in the world has ever been published. Except for one brief article (ten pages and a cover) in -Jolt magazine, and the few brief glimpses at this fantastic and fascinating individual that his official biographer, Mr. Carl Barks, cares to present, no consistent and coherent biography has appeared. These sources only make the historian and biographer yearn for the complete, authoritative, original biography.

Since Mr. Barks is now retired, one hopes that he will now be able to give serious consideration and ample time to the composition of the Biography. Until that time, this writer has attempted, using secondary sources such as the bits, snatches, crumbs, and occasional retellings of Mr. Barks together with a professional historian's knowledge of the times in which McDuck played out such a large part of his life, to produce a short informal biography, with a minimum of footnoting and a maximum of factual and inter-polative material from the Sacred Writings. Notes, where cited, refer to individual numbers of the fragmented biography of Mr. Barks to date. None of these sources has individual pagination, so the reference is strictly to the issue in which the particular fact or story might be found. Mr. Kim Weston has contributed a bibliography of the Canon and fictional works based on Mr. McDuck to which scholars are referred.

When one first looks at Scrooge McDuck, it is with a prejudice born of the middle-class man's contempt for a miserly, greedy, one-dimensional figure. One tends, beginning with the name and going from that into the glimpses of his extreme aversion to parting with any money whatsoever, to get the impression that this is not a man you'd be talking about unless he had all that money. But individuals are not one-dimensional; they are complex, and they do things for rather basic motives. Scrooge is not a sympathetic characterone hardly needs sympathy when one has three cubic acres of money, nor does one acquire that princely sum by being a loveable old codgerbut he is an understandable one.

Of course, his basic and most obvious flaw is his inability to rise above his lower-class beginnings. All money is dear because, when raised in extreme poverty, all money at one time was indeed dear, and the value of pennies, nickels, and dimes is far, far more apparent to one who has gone to bed hungry. Nor does one shake this world view even when things are better. Modern day television personality Johnny Carson is a multi-millionaire, yet he's more than once expressed shock at a $25 pen and displayed his own 19$ Bic. The man born to wealth, on the other hand, often has neither an understanding nor an appreciation of money and its worth. John F. Kennedy was notorious for borrowing small sums of money for tollbooths and the like. He never carried it and almost never used it.

Politically, too, self-made men tend to be conservative. They are prideful that they came up from nothing and made what they did of themselves on their own abilities. They are the most contemptuous of such things as welfare, government aid to the poor, etc. For one thing, their suffering to get to the top only has meaning if it is seen as an important and, indeed, integral part of their achievement. The one born to wealth, on the other hand, usually turns out fairly liberal; money is meaningless, acquired with no effort, and liberal programs for the poor they cannot comprehend are generally either from a sense of guilt at how easy they have it or, in the sense of traditional families of wealth, an aristocratic sense of noblesse oblige.

Yet, oddly enough, the one thing that seems to mark all self-made men is their desire for acceptance by those born to wealth, with whom they have nothing in common except an equal or superior fortune. Scrooge, for example, refuses to spend money for a newspaper (he reads them when he finds them abandoned in the park) yet he spent close to a million dollars outfitting an expedition to acquire the Candy-Striped Ruby (or, rather, to re-acquire it) simply because it was a major status symbol useful in getting invited to social affairs, of the very snobbish.

Again, the entire Whiskerville affair and the. expense of the trip that caused it was due to Scrooge's desire to find his clan tartan, to prove that his family did have royal bloodlines and that he should be socially accepted.

Scrooge also retains the superstitions of his lower-class origins (although they are by no means restricted to that class). The extreme abundance of his superstitions (not to mention his fascination with and knowledge of magic, as particularly see 3*), testifies to his lowly economic origins. He is a regular reader ofand devoted follower ofastrology, and makes many decisions based on it31; he is terrified of Friday the 13th, believes strongly in the supernatural and curses,25 and is even a strong believer in other forms of fortune-tellingmost notably the rather unusual coffee bubble method14 known to very few (and not very reliable).

Scrooge is undoubtedly a voracious reader, for he clearly had little or no formal schooling, yet his knowledge, particularly of subjects necessary to him, is fantastic. Time and again he shows a strong, professional's knowledge of geology and geomorphology, and he is undeniably a strong student of math and business methods.