7. Uncle Scrooge
Not breaking any new ground here, since Scrooge McDuck has already appeared (twice!) yesterday, but that means I don’t have to go into too many details about his background. I first became familiar with him in the 1970s when I went through an almost 2 year detour into funny animal (and Archie) comics, often picking up the regular Uncle Scrooge series (then published by Gold Key). Unbeknownst to me at the time was that the fact that these were reprints from the 1950s and ‘60s, and most of the stories were by cartoonist extraordinaire Carl Barks (again, I had no idea who that was back then). One of my all-time favorites then was Uncle Scrooge and the Golden Fleecing, a ‘Dynabrite’ comic published by Whitman (in 1978) on nicer paper with a cardstock cover at a slightly higher price:
Like another personal favorite of the time, Donald Duck and the Golden Helmet (also by Barks – I covered that one in another 12 days event back in 2018), I read this one over and over again. To reiterate – actually sort of plagiarize – what I wrote about the Donald book, what I really like about these stories is that Barks was mainly telling adventure tales, with Uncle Scrooge, most often with his nephew Donald and his grandnephews Huey, Dewey and Louie in tow, travelling to distant, exotic lands in search of riches or whatnot.
As with many entries this year, I ended up once more re-reading the above tale, but then a bunch more other Uncle Scrooge stories that I have in a number of reprint books acquired rather cheaply over the years.
(specifically, this time around I read “Only a Poor Old Man” from the first solo issue of Uncle Scrooge – actually Dell Four Color #386, as well as two other stories collected in the first book pictured above; everything in the second book, which includes all three appearances of Scrooge’s rival miser Flintheart Glomgold in stories by Barks, plus the only Don Rosa story I’ve read so far, “Son of the Sun”; and “Back to the Klondike” from the second solo Uncle Scrooge issue of Dell Four Color, #456)

However, given a discussion going on at another thread in this forum, I have to say that one thing that I often find jarring and a bit disappointing when reading many of these older Disney duck stories now as a middle-aged adult is the often casually racist depictions whenever the characters travel to some foreign land. They were far more common, and accepted, at the time when they appeared, but that doesn’t excuse them in any way. (It’s one of the reasons why this pick isn’t ranked higher on my list.)
Otherwise, stepping back a bit and viewing this from the standpoint of (American) comics history, I think it’s worth noting that Uncle Scrooge is possibly one of the greatest spin-offs ever. He was introduced as a minor supporting character in Donald Duck comics, was then given his own series which possibly became more popular than the series it was spun off from (and Uncle Scrooge comics have been more or less continually in print since then, not just in the US but also in Europe, Central and South America, etc.), and eventually made his way to the cartoons.

7. GCPD #1-4, August-November 1996

By Chuck Dixon, Jim Aparo, and Bill Sienkeiwicz

Spun off from various Batman comics over the years



This one’s an indulgence among my entries this year. I’m not much of a fan of police stories, and I’m not that much into the Batman Family of characters, to be honest. But I do love the work of Jim Aparo, who was being shuffled off to the sidelines at this stage of his career. DC still kept him on contract, but didn’t feel confident about using him for high profile, ongoing series, using him on things like fill-in issues of BLACK CANARY, SUPERBOY AND THE RAVERS, and STEEL.

This may have been the last use of Aparo’s talents in what could be considered “high-profile”, and even here, he was paired with the inks of Bill Sienkeiwicz, who inked several of Jim’s later efforts, bringing his dramatically different, more experimental and contemporary techniques in order to, hopefully, appeal to readers who might have found Aparo’s style dated. But there’s no hiding Jim’s distinctive page composition, his Dutch angles, his memorable use of body language, his use of “stage props” to provide layered depth to his pages. In the 90’s, many of the “hot” younger artists had grown up exclusively on superheroes: that’s what they loved, that’s what they knew how to draw, and that’s what they did draw. Many had zero interest in depicting the real world. To draw a man in a suit, they would draw a muscle man in spandex and then try to build a suit around him, with no care or comprehension of how fine clothes are crafted to define a silhouette, not to, say, emphasize powerful calf muscles. Aparo had worked in advertising, he understood fashion, he understood different body types, he understood that not everybody should be drawn based on the same ideal physique.

Aparo, though, was unabashedly old school, and for him, a more down-to-earth, realistic setting was something he was very comfortable with, something he could do better than the hotshots like McFarlane, Liefeld, Lee. Guys like that would have turned down an assignment like GCPD, or shown themselves to be incapable of pulling it off. No, a DCU miniseries that minimizes the use of costumed adventurers and high tech environments needed a guy like Jim Aparo, and in 1996, there few guys like Jim still around the business.

I don’t think GCPD was that much of a sales success at the time, but it did pave the way for later successes, such as the 40-issue GOTHAM CENTRAL series from 2003-2006 and the tv series GOTHAM. A good idea, and one I appreciated in its first incarnation as rendered by my favorite comic book artist, even if the genre isn’t a personal favorite.

#7 – Sir Edward Grey: Witchfinder (In the Service of Angels: 2009) + (Lost and Gone Forever: 2011)





This is an example of my being a fan of the spin-off, but I have never read the main, parent series in which the spin-off originated.

Sir Edward Grey first appeared in the pages of Mike Mignola's Hellboy and got his first solo mini-series in 2009. Grey is a nineteenth century paranormal investigator and there were two mini-series published before Jan 2014, and therefore eligible for this year's event.

The first, In the Service of Angels, sees Grey in Victorian London investigating a series of grisly occult murders perpetrated by a supernatural bear-like creature, and in the second, Lost and Gone Forever, he travels to the American Wild West to find a missing nobleman, requiring him to battle an evil witch and a bunch of undead cowboys.

Of the two mini-series, Lost and Gone Forever is by far my favourite, not least because it sees the marvellous John Severin on art chores. His highly detailed, but slightly unkept artwork is a perfect fit for a "Weird West" comic such as this. That said, Ben Stenbeck's art on In the Service of Angels is pretty nice too and very much in the Mignola signature style.

Mignola's writing is really good, with each adventure beng a well-crafted detective yarn, with deliciously creepy supernatural trappings. Grey is an engaging character: a Victorian English gentleman, possessed of a stiff-upper lip, and pretty good in a fight. He certainly makes for a memorable hero. I have no interest in reading the main Hellboy comic, but these Witchfinder comics are a really fun read.

7. Black Panther

Many of the same choices keep popping up again and again! I wish I could have been more original, but in all honesty many secondary characters didn't floor me when they got their own series. Even when top-notch creators were involved.



Much has been said about Don McGregor's run in Jungle Action, but there's another Black Panther arc that I really, really enjoyed (and no, it definitely wasn't Kirby's). It was Reginald Hudlin's and John Romita Jr's hard retcon, a new backstory for T'Challa and Wakanda that sidestepped all the continuity that had come before. And for once, however much of a traditionalist I may be, I thought it worked really well!!!

In the days of old (including the McGregor era), Wakanda was a small African nation that had just recently developed a high level of technology, mostly thanks to T'Challa having studied abroad and being a brilliant technologist. In the new version, Wakanda was always a scientific and technological powerhouse; that's the version Marvel used in its movies. It opened a whole new vista of possibilities, storytelling-wise, and corrected the rather absurd idea that a society would go from thatch huts to antigravity shuttles in a decade or so. 

Klaw was also no longer a supervillain made of solidified sound, but a normal guy. The murder of King T'Chaka, meanwhile, had occurred in circumstances evoking modern political thrillers and not old jungle movies. Plus, T'Challa got a sister. All of that was a sharp departure from established history, but I'd say all the changes were for the better.

The first story arc in that new series was a very good example of how an old series can be revamped thoroughly without driving old fans up the curtains!

This was almost on my list. I figured I'd only have one Wolverine entry, and considered this and the Miller series before ending up with Weapon X. An unfortunate choice, as this nicely doubles as a spin-off for two characters. Speaking of...