Donald Duck: Too Many Pets

A lesser Carl Barks effort

Appearing in the same issue as the remarkable The Hard Loser and The Mummy’s Ring, the bloated and unintegrated Too Many Pets (FC 29, September 1943) doesn’t come close to matching the other two stories. I suspect Barks would agree, since Barks was handed a half-finished script by the overworked Merrill De Maris and asked to complete a 26-page story from it, in addition to the 38 pages he was already committed to.

The first half is proficient but rote sight gags based around a cute, anodyne pet monkey, but Barks chose to finish off the story in jarringly disconnected fashion, introducing an espionage plot of all things. You try figuring out how we got from this:

to this, twenty pages later:

The crook’s motives are never explained. Why he has Jingo stealing bombsight plans instead of, say, fancy jewelry is unclear. It was 1943, spies were the talk, and Barks likely just went with whatever occurred to him. The story is so perfunctory that as soon as the crook is knocked out by Jingo, he disappears from the story.

It’s not Barks’s finest hour.

Artistically, though, there are some points of interest. Being mostly a sequence of kinetic gags and action, Barks tries out some techniques that seem drawn more from live-action movies than cartoons, like this rotational sequence:

This heist sequence also seems drawn straight out of Saboteur or some similar movie of the time—except for the monkey:

It doesn’t even remotely fit the tone of the first half of the story, but Barks had 26 pages to fill, so this little excursion into perspective and angles probably helped him stay interested.

As for Jingo…he’s a monkey. Barks’s pets are usually more interesting than Jingo, and his sole eccentricity—that he has been trained to throw stuff whenever someone puts their hands behind their head—is not much more than a gag device.

If anything, the story just underscores the atypical excellence of the other two stories in the same issue—and of many of the stories to come.