AM&J Chickadees

[Elaine Ramshaw]

OK, so it's possible no one else is interested in this--but I thought I'd
report on the bit of research I was able to do on the appearances of April,
May & June as Chickadees or other scout-equivalents. (Very incomplete
research, because I don't have access to many of the relevant comics and
could only afford to buy a smattering of them!) Robert Hutchings thought
Barks put AM&J in the Chickadees in "Whale of a Good Deed," but I've read it
now and don't see AM&J among the Chickadees. So unless they appear in "Music
Hath Charms" (which I haven't seen), I don't believe Barks enrolled them in
the Chickadees. They may well appear as lead Chickadees in a bunch of the JW
stories, but the only stories I was able to get hold of with AM&J as
Chickadees were John Carey's "There's No Luck Like Good Luck" (MM 124),
where AM&J (unnamed) appear among the Chickadees, and Carey's "The Big Fat
Prize" (JW 43), where AM&J (named) are on a floating parade float with the
rainbow sign reading "The Chickadee Scouts." I imagine the inclusion of the
word "scouts" means that Carey and others weren't confident that kids in the
1970's would know that the Chickadees are Duckburg's Girl Scouts. In Bob
Gregory's "The Great Twitter-bird Rescue" (JW 47), AM&J (unnamed) are
camping near the boys as members of the "Twitter-birds" (gack). In Kay
Wright's "Rescue Squad" (JW 36), AM&J (named) are camping as members of
"Nature's Princesses"! (I was amused to note on INDUCKS that the
re-translation of this group name back into English from some other language
produced the name "Queens of Nature"! A bit of a different feel, there....)
And in "Super Sales Girls" in Ludwig von Drake 1, AM&J star as "Red Robins,"
who sell cookies a la Girl Scouts. That is the only one of these stories,
incidentally, in which the girls wear a scouting uniform. In "There's No
Luck" they wear their usual blouses with scout hats instead of bows; in the
other stories they're dressed exactly as usual, blouses and bows. Barks's
Chickadees do have uniforms; in Jippes's re-drawings of the Barks-written JW
stories, they have the same uniform Barks gave them in the WDC stories. 

Of these five stories, Kay Wright's "Rescue Squad" is by far the most
feminist-friendly, not only because the girls rescue themselves and the boys
by their grass-weaving skill, but also because the last panel assumes a
female reader, as April looks out at the reader and says "But we know
better, don't we girls?" (I'm gratified that the woman writer wrote a more
feminist story, though I certainly don't think women are guaranteed to be
more feminist than men; after all, the feminist comic stories of my
childhood, balancing the male-dominated world of Duckburg, were Stanley's
Little Lulu stories.) 

And one last note: another story by John Carey in JW 43, "Woodchuck for a
Day," has April disguising herself as a Woodchuck. (She puts on "my old Davy
Crockett hat" and a black sweater, and her pink high-heeled shoes do not
give her away! Only HD&L see through her disguise, and that's apparently
because they recognize her face.) She does not do what any sane person who
infiltrated the JWs would do--glom onto a JW Guidebook--but leads HD&L in a
search for a missing girl. Not a feminist-friendly tale. She finds the
little girl by leading them towards anything pretty, but her success in
finding the lost child this way is not construed as a victory for girlhood!
She wails when she finds out once they've found the child that she's gotten
them lost (by not using the compass, since she doesn't even know what it
is), and then comes the truly illogical ending: HD&L save the day by using
the compass to get them back home. Huh? If you don't know what direction
you've gone from the starting point, knowing how to read a compass won't
help you get back home. Now, if they had a GPS device, the story might make
sense....

Elaine Ramshaw