Donald Duck and the Grand Canyon: Taming the Rapids

Now this story really is a weird one. Taming the Rapids (WDC&S #58, July 1945) temporarily changes the ten-page format into an eight-page one, and it’s not a welcome development. Confined to a mere eight pages, presumably by his editors, Barks compensates by squeezing in twelve panels per page, and the pages become claustrophobic. The change only lasted two issues, thankfully.

Whether coincidentally or out of perversity, Barks chose to set the first eight-pager in the Grand Canyon, making a joke out of squeezing in grand vistas into tiny panels filled with text. Artistically, there are some marvelous and economical depictions of rocks and water, but everything looks dinky when the panels are verging on four square inches.

I like this page aesthetically. The arc from calm to rapids to disaster flows, the action is clear even when a lot is going on, and the water (a Barks specialty) just looks good. But if this is supposed to be the Grand Canoyn and their lives are at stakes, the treatment trivializes the material.

The whole story gets caught between the large scope and the dinky treatment. Donald is determined to be a hero and “save” the nephews, yet repeatedly makes things worse. Seemingly determined to toss in everything but the kitchen sink, Barks takes a huge twist four pages in by introducing…cavemen.

This is one of the few occasions Barks uses the X-ed out dead eyes for Donald. It provides a real shock, looking like a regression to the cartoonish burlesque of Fleischer cartoons, almost too brutal in style for Disney. I see it as a manifestation of Barks’s discontent with the new format. The tiny panels don’t allow for anything but the most caricatured portrayals.

The cavemen capture Donald to cannibalize him, so the nephews concoct a plan with their raft to scare the cavemen:

It works, and all that’s left is for them to return to civilization so Donald can brag that he saved the nephews. End of story.

Again, I read the whole story as an expression of frustration with the new constraints. Barks works hard in spite of them, but the sheer unworkability of the story does feel like a veiled riposte to the unworkable format: “You want an eight-page story? Fine, look at the mess you get.” The cavemen stuff comes out of nowhere and disappears just as quickly, while the earlier survival plot works but has no room to breathe.

Even themes of fate and the indifference of nature feel muted in comparison to past stories. The one new development is a hint of Donald as holy charmed fool, something we haven’t yet seen from him.

When the nephews wake up to Donald bragging about how he saved him, Barks shifts them to being the protagonists. The nephews, having done everything to keep the four of them alive, awake, exhausted, hearing Donald take all the credit. Their exhaustion is something Donald will wear at other times. It’s not so noticeable here, but Barks is sliding into having an ensemble of roles (victim, holy fool, unrecognized hero, and so on) that he’s willing to shift between characters depending on the story. Donald’s role as the unwarranted hero is uncommon for him, but it flows out of his initial posturing just as easily as his typical comeuppance does.

It does, however, relegate him to being a secondary character. At the end of the story, we are identifying with the poor nephews. If there’s a story where Barks allows his protagonist to win an undeserved victory and keeps them as the protagonist, I can’t think of it offhand.

Having already realized that Donald was flexible enough to take on drastically different personae while still retaining some essence of Donald-ness, the next step was to create reusable structures so that he wouldn’t be at a loss every month. This process was probably intuitive for Barks, but the accumulation of reusable pieces is there. Here, the assortment doesn’t work, but the toolbox is filling up.