Geoffrey Blum's "updated" Ducks

[Daniel J. Neyer]

I read the World Wide Witch story in Gemstone's second issue of UNCLE
SCROOGE, and was quite disturbed by Blum's plans for "updating" Duckburg.
Hopefully this is a trend that won't catch on among other creators, as it
could potentially ruin the Duck--and Mouse--universes. I'm an American
and Blum's "wicca" references were pure gibberish to me, nor do I want to
have them explained. Also, almost all of the computer talk was over my
head; I'm literate enough in computers to use them, but all the
pseudo-jargon that flys around is pretty meaningless to me--and I think
most other people are the same way. Blum seems to think that this is no
different than Barks' references to the events of his day, but it
is--Barks never built stories around current technology and fads to this
extent. Barks stories were adventures, and if they used technology it was
only as part of the adventure; Blum's new stories are apparently going to
be fitted to the technology, rather than the other way around. And fads
like this wicca nonsense aren't going to be popular for long; Blum's
stories will wind up a lot more dated than even Barks' earliest. Another
thing Blum fails to take into account is that the culture in Barks' day
was a lot cleaner than the current one; try to update the Ducks to modern
standards and you'll wind up with super-hero style slop. William Van Horn
is a perfect example of how modern writers should work--he's not above
mentioning modern technology, but the story always comes first, and his
stories are always in traditional Barksian mode. Even better is Don
Rosa's system of setting the tales in the fifties, but at any rate, both
Rosa and Van Horn deliver stories for other people's enjoyment, while
Blum seems to prefer delivering stories for his own personal
satisfaction. Barks wrote to please himself, but he also kept an eye on
his audiences and tried to entertain them, a vital ingredient to
comic-book work that Blum seems to have overlooked.

Just my two cents. 

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