Of course, Walt Disney understood it immediately: Donald Duck is a much more complex character compared to his Mickey Mouse. He’s not perfect, but that’s exactly why he’s so lovable. Donald is often angry, sometimes desperate, even in his exuberance he is close to a nervous breakdown. But he is, and this is crucial, always full of hope.
Even before Charles M. Schulz wrested endless facets from the precision mechanics of failure in life with his “Peanuts,” the drawn drake marked a turning point in the image industry as a symbol of the eternally human. In cartoons, the sympathies were always clearly divided until his first appearance in the Silly Symphony episode “The Wise Little Hen” (June 1934). There were the shining winners who triumphed over villains and other idiots cleverly and often with the use of sheer violence. Donald Duck developed differently.
It still took a while for him to mature into the main character, but as early as 1937 he fell in love with his Daisy, whom he would subsequently court, sometimes with luck, but often with no prospect of success. Just a year later, his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie were at his side. The beginning of a complicated family constellation that, at the latest with the appearance of Scrooge McDuck, matured into a social metaphor and provoked psychoanalytic treatises.
Carl Barks coined Donald Duck
Duckburg – a utopia or rather a scrawled copy of our urban dreams? As is well known, it was Carl Barks who took on the Ducks at the end of the 1930s with a fine touch and a passion for exotic adventure stories. The “Duck Man,” as he was lovingly christened, designed the duck cosmos as a playground for his ambiguous main character, who he never left alone with his own unsettled emotions. The entire arsenal of human temperamental impulses was reflected in Donald, who would never even think of seeing a therapist just because he literally couldn’t control himself.
In “Test of Courage” (The Terror of the Beagle Boys, 1951), Donald Duck defeats the tank busters almost single-handedly because he goes ahead more courageously (or more carelessly?) than the others. It shouldn’t be the only test: Already in the first story with his uncle Dagobert (“The Golden Christmas Goose”, Christmas on Bear Mountain, 1947) he is consciously challenged because no one can trust him to do anything, especially not his own clan.
In the numerous cartoons in which Donald Duck is sometimes more and sometimes less the focus, the duck still appears as the archetype of the modern, vacillating individual. According to cultural theorist Klaus Theweleit, the films – including war propaganda, for example against Nazi Germany (“Der Fuehrer’s Face”, 1943) – illustrated in a pointed way the frustrations and struggles of the average person in an increasingly technological and alienating world. With all his failures, Donald offers the audience a catharsis and at the same time suggests that there are limits to human autonomy and adaptability, says Theweleit.
Barks goes beyond this state. The illustrator suspended the slapstick of the eternally unlucky person in favor of a sometimes satirical, sometimes morally variable social comedy in which psychosocial themes such as greed, injustice and dealing with life’s challenges drive the stories. Of course, Mickey Mouse always remains connected to his creator. But unlike Donald Duck, she is only a symbolic figure, an empty symbol in which the narrative and economic energy of the Disney company is expressed.
Duckburg is a unique parallel universe
The highly sensitive drake, on the other hand, can claim timelessness as a literary character on his 90th birthday. This also goes back to the fact that its actual creator, Carl Barks, understood how to create recognition values with visual ingenuity and skillful typification. Video gamers today rave about the open world as an immersive concept, but Duckburg acted as the first virtual counterworld that was far superior to other comic universes such as Metropolis, Bedrock or Moominvalley. At best, the “Simpsons” sought more complexity with the Springfield kaleidoscope.
If now a huge illustrated book (“Donald Duck. The Ultimate History”, edited by Daniel Kothenschulte, David Gerstein, JB Kaufman, 564 pages, 175 euros) attempts to give the final verdict on the almost century-long development of this never-boring duck, then it is only understandable that it includes unpublished works by Barks as one of the many highlights. It is his stories that are worshiped by several generations.
The collection of material in an impressive book size (as heavy as ten volumes of “Funny Paperbacks”) is waiting to be discovered. It not only includes excerpts from the short films and comics, but also concept drawings, background images, photos from the authors’ and artists’ rooms, posters, storyboards, magazine covers, advertisements and, last but not least, a look at memorabilia. It’s hard to get enough of it. The pictures and illustrations completely outweigh the passionately written accompanying texts, which also provide an overview of the history of comics.
What else does Donald Duck tell us today?
But the prevailing impression is also one of nostalgia, which only gives the extension into the future a chapter and only dutifully ticks off the standardized, almost factory-like internationalization of the Duck comics (with a great variety of production, especially in Italy).
Donald Duck is still there because he can be anything from a chaotic father replacement to the superhero Phantomias. But what significance he has as a comic character in competition with all the other media universes remains a question that is best not asked too loudly. Apart from a somewhat snarky new edition of the “Duck Tales” and the eternal continuation of the comics that appeal to contemporary dramas, Disney hardly has any big plans for its anniversary duck. There is now, at least for the moment, an even more famous Donald…
And yet: Donald Duck asserts himself because he is not out of place in any scenario, because no ideological current can be projected onto him and because identity political discourses roll off him. Although Al Taliafero may have depicted in his newspaper strips the anarchic character that characterized Donald in the cartoons, Barks has already established a space for the natural diversity of his characters, independent of social debates, who remain accessible without prejudice to everything that gives them material offers new experiences.
This is also a legacy that wants to be continued and has long found a congenial successor in Don Rosa. The Duck comics, with their confident narrative approach and the self-confidence of their visual frame of reference, were already in the 1940s a forerunner of the pop avant-garde that actually only began to spread in the 1960s.
Anti-hero and pop culture good
And even if Donald Duck embodies a certain Faustian energy through his tireless involvement in everything and anything, despite constant setbacks and frustrations, and this is also reflected in this pleasantly large-scale book, it is above all clear that he is not just a ( comic) literature turned anti-hero, but simply a global pop culture phenomenon. At best, Donald Duck and his fellow Disney characters served as an introduction to the world of literature and cinema and theater. Because so many things unfold here in an entertaining and generally understandable way for children that obviously cannot be taught in schools.
Overall, it is now clear that even in those fields that have previously been spared from the adulation of cultural studies, archiving services have become the norm. This is astonishing: Just a few decades ago people were warning about the intellectual neglect caused by reading speech bubble trash, and Erika Fuchs, with her elegant translations of the Duck comics, had long since made room for the later intellectual circles, who continued to read “Mickey Mouse” even in retirement age “ and as Donaldists, we certainly don’t meet secretly once a month to assure each other that we can participate in the world even as an eternal child.
Another complaint here is that none of the comic scenarios in the book are available in translation. As is well known, the careful transfer into the German language has added value through its connection to the canon of the educated middle class and breathtaking rhetorical moves. Erika Fuchs had Daniel Todestrieb say sentences like “Nothing is too much to swear to the engineer” – and in doing so she also shaped part of the German language culture. Their onomatopoeias such as “Moan” and “Sigh” shaped the idea of how comics “work” linguistically for decades.
Donald Duck follows a massive Mickey Mouse book and a fascinating chronology of the first decades of Disney films at Taschen-Verlag. They are picture books and art bibles in one. If the tragicomic duck is suitable as a “mirror for the challenges and absurdities of everyday life,” as graphic novel master Art Spiegelman suspects, then its design can also be seen as a homage to the far too little-sung achievements of the average person, who strives hard and always has to start from the beginning for a variety of reasons. The Duckburg resident is a global citizen.
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