A band of criminals who are after Scrooge's fortune.
The Barks panel with the highest number of Beagles in it is probably
in the Gyro story Mighty But Miserable
where
13 Beagles can be seen at once in a bus (some of them are only seen as
silhouettes, though).
That story is not written by Barks, though, just drawn.
In The Paul Bunyan Machine
12 Beagles can be
seen at once, and that story is both written and drawn by Barks.
In Hawaiian Hideaway
Scrooge complains about
having to wash the dishes for 30 Beagles.
In most later stories there seemed to be about seven Beagles, and that's why Don Rosa uses that number of them whenever he uses them in his stories. As he restricts himself to the most common six Beagle numbers (with 1, 6, 7) he never shows the numbers of all the Beagles in one panel though.
But even when it seems like there's only about seven Beagles in a
story there may actually be more of them. In the next section lots of
Beagles appearing in The Seven Cities of Cibola
are listed -- still
we never see more than six seen at once there.
176-and ending with those numbers in some order, so those six permutations are the most common Beagle numbers. But lots of other Beagles exist as well, and noone has gone through all Barks's work to note exactly which Beagles ever appear. (Some such data is collected in its own page here.) In their debut in WDC 134 they have no prison numbers, but they appear for the first time in their second appearance, in WDC 135. There we can se 176-82, 176-83, and 176-84. Later on the six 176 numbers became common. In
The Seven Cities of Cibolathose six can be seen, as well as 176-001, 176-301, 176-331, 176-360, 176-602, 176-616, and 176-711(?). On page 16 panel 6 there is a Beagle with no number plate!
Also in the Whitman comics there were often Beagle numbers
consisting not only of ones, sixes and sevens.
In the story Time Off For Good Behavior
for instance, the lead trio was 176-300, 176-301, and 176-302.
Sometimes they even had numbers that began with "761-" or something
unorthodox like that!
Normally they had no discernable characteristics in Barks's stories,
except that in some stories it's implied that 176-167 is especially
fond of prunes. That was first mentioned in
The Mysterious Unfinished Invention
(1954),
and then referred to again in The Giant Robot
Robbers
(1964).
(Barks also referred to prunes in Horsing Around
with History
(1994),
but there it doesn't seem to a quirk of just one of the Beagles.
According to Huey (or whoever it is...):
The Beagle Boys are fond of prunes, remember?
)
Now Egmont has a personality guide for
the three leading
Beagle Boys stating that
In Whitman comics, for example by Vic Lockman,
there were often special
members of the gang with
special names like Einstein Beagle
, Supersensitive-176
etc. with individual personalities.
They have strange oddities and hobbies and most of them appear in only
one story, flaunt their specialty, and are never used again.
One of those who did appear more than once was Intellectual-176 who
appeared for instance in Abner the Actor
(first appearance?), where he is shown as the most intelligent Beagle.
In The Fantastic Favor
he is shown as having
lost all his mental ability from a horrible disaster which is left to
the reader's imagination.
He has regained his old status by the time of Beagle
Bug-Off
(1995), however.
In DuckTales, there were seven leading Beagles, all with different
looks and personalities: Babyface Beagle, Baggy Beagle, Bankjob Beagle
(176-671), Bigtime Beagle (176-167), Bouncer Beagle, Bugle Beagle,
Burger Beagle (176-761), plus their mother Ma Beagle (no number).
Usually either Ma, Bigtime, or Bankjob was the leader. Burger's main
character trait was a large appetite, although it was for any food,
not just prunes. In comics, the DuckTales Beagles appear in S-coded
DuckTales
stories from the late 1980s and early 1990s. In some
stories, for example S 88054, they look as they did on the
TV show; in others they are called by their TV names even though they
all look the same.
Blackheart Beagle and his three sons
(apparently the grandfather and fathers of the current Beagle Boys
,
according to Don Rosa) appeared in Carl Barks's
The Fantastic River Race
, a story set in the past.
In Carl Barks's The Money Well
(set in the
present) was Grandpa Beagle
(convict number 186-802).
In Rosa's Life and Times of $crooge McDuck
, Blackheart
Beagle and Grandpa Beagle are the same person.
Vic Lockman also featured a Grandpa Beagle
(G-176)
in some 1970s comics. Some examples are:
Time Off for Good Behavior(with a different look and without prison number)
The Fantastic Favor
Beagle Bug-Off
Save That Tree, he has prison number
1.
In the story Passing the Buck
, set in a
flashback to the Beagles' childhood, the Beagles' Grandma was
seen.
A Granny Beagle is also seen in some stories set in the present.
In the Whitman comics the Beagles sometimes had three nephews: the Beagle Brats. They either had no number plates at all, or the numbers 1, 2, and 3.
Some stories with them are
[Facts from David Gerstein and Jonathan Markoff.]
Find the names in other languages for: Beagle Boys
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