Riley Thompson

[David A Gerstein]

	Dear Folks,

	Okay, it's official.  Riley Thompson is my least favorite Duck
artist.  Out of EVERYONE.  That Italian guy included, who drew the
pocket book intermezzos!!  (Fabio, I've lost his name again...)

	Thompson's art on such stories as "Pig in a Poke" and "Spirit
of '76" (both of which I own) is not exactly poor comic art all the
time (although in some cases it IS), but the problem is that Thompson
clearly drew some poses of Donald using Daffy Duck as a model, but
just not blackening him in!  This is absolutely the ugliest version of
Donald I have ever seen in my life.

	The stories are pretty bad too, each of them involving at
least one completely improbable bit.  

	Plots?  Sure, I'll give 'em.  In "Pig in a Poke" HDL get a pet
pig, and it drives Donald crazy, so they try to earn its keep by
entering it in a carnival's competition.  When it doesn't win, HDL get
into the pen themselves, take off their clothes, and act like ANIMAL
ducks!!  The pig, meanwhile, suddenly is on its hind legs acting as
their HUMAN owner!  And they win, and so the pig stays.

	In "Spirit of '76," Donald reads about the Revolution and gets
the idea that he's going to educate the nephews by doing everything
just as the colonists did.  He continues with this in spite of logic,
in spite of EVERYTHING -- I believe at one point the Ducks are
starving, or something, and Donald could get food for them in a
certain way but won't do it because the colonists couldn't do it two
hundred years before!!  Donald is just TOO monomaniacal here... kinda
fits the Daffy appearance.  Urlgk.

	Now that I've sufficiently described these, I hope that you
see just how poor these are.  Art is worse than Jim Fletcher's....

	David Gerstein
	<David.A.Gerstein at Williams.edu>