HD&L's emotional maturity and identical status

[Elaine Ramshaw]

OK, I'm not often going to post long messages here, but I can't help writing
one about the nephews. I have always thought of HD&L as being about 10 years
old, in the mid-50's "present" of the classic Barks stories and the Rosa
stories. In the earlier Barks stories and the animated cartoons where they
were hellions, I think of them as 8 or 9. This would be before they joined
the Junior Woodchucks, leading to the transformation Rosa portrays so
memorably in WHADALOTTAJARGON. 

I do not think the nephews would be aware of having a romantic interest in
girls. My 12-year-old godson (midwestern, suburban, public school) still
turns his face away and makes mildy disgusted noises whenever a movie he
likes (e.g. Mystery Men) has a mushy moment. As for Calvin, Watterson wrote
that "Calvin has never been a literal six-year-old" (The Calvin and Hobbes
Tenth Anniversary Book, p. 196). Watterson wrote (p. 24), "I suspect that
Calvin has a mild crush on [Susie] that he expresses by trying to annoy
her"--but that crush shows that his emotional/mental age is fluid. And
besides, Calvin doesn't understand himself to have a crush on Susie. A
closer analog to HD&L might be Jason from Foxtrot, who probably has a bit of
a crush on a smart girl classmate but is certainly not consciously aware of
it himself (not to mention being ready to admit to it anyone else). I am
mostly with Dan Shane on this issue; I would regard as noncanonical any
story in which one of the nephews thought himself to be in love. In my mind,
they might, like Jason or Calvin, express a mild crush by harassing a girl.
But it wouldn't be a cute, feminine type like April, May and June; it would
have to be a smart girl, like Lulu.

In reference to Santiago's statement, "They are not shown acting as *actual*
kids, but as we wished our children to behave"--I don't agree with that.
Yes, they are, as Dan says, the closest to ethical maturity among the ducks.
But in their ability to rescue the adults, they are a *child's* fantasy of
what a kid should be/really is, not an adult fantasy of what a child should
be (like, say, Shirley Temple in most of her movies). See Barks' comment in
Donald Ault's _Carl Barks: Conversations_, p. 107: "The kids can get
themselves in some pretty bad messes through something they do wrong, and
then Donald has a chance to rescue them, so I used that angle once in a
while. But mostly it was Donald who was the guy who was going to get
clobbered and the kids who were going to rescue him. It worked out better,
and it seemed that it appealed to more people that way. Because the readers
were kids themselves, they liked to feel a little bit superior to the uncle
who was strutting around." Kids want to imagine themselves as smarter and
more competent than the adults who order them around, to imagine themselves
in the role of rescuers on whose help the adults depend. 

My own interest in HD&L's psychology has long been in their identical
triplet status. As the younger sister of identical twins (who kindly shared
their comics with me!), I'm intrigued by how they are alike and different.
When Dolly the sheep got everyone hysterical about the prospect of cloning
humans, I and all other people familiar with identical twins were amused,
knowing that identical twins, who are genetically identical *and* raised in
the same environment at the same time, still do not emerge as identical
persons. Very similar, more similar than the most similar non-identical
siblings, yes. But still wholly distinct persons. This doesn't mean that I
object to Rosa's portrayal of HD&L as interchangeable persons. I am charmed
by Rosa's conceit that HD&L are "the same character times 3, with no
individual traits," as he wrote here in October '03, and I enjoy his stories
based on that premise. The nephews' indignation at Scrooge's suggestion that
they are "pretty much alike" in Return to Plain Awful was one of the
laugh-out-loud moments for me in that story. At the same time, I'm
interested in how other writers might view the nephews' identical
triplethood differently. I've written to Gemstone that the one story which
hasn't appeared yet in English that I'd like to see is the McGreals' "Happy
Birthday Times 3", wherein the nephews try to establish separate identities.
(I've even tried unsuccessfully to get a copy in French or Dutch or German
or some language I can read.) As you can see from my letter published way
back in DD 305, this is the sort of story I've been hoping someone would
write.