Today saw the release of the first-ever Scrooge McDuck comic book from the Disney-owned Marvel Comics, the one-shot entitled Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime written by Jason Aaron (Star Wars), and below are my thoughts on this release.
Uncle Scrooge McDuck got his start in comic books over 75 years ago thanks to his legendary creator Carl Barks, and now he’s made the jump to Marvel Comics with Infinity Dime, which takes huge inspiration from Marvel superhero stories like The Fantastic Four, one of its stars Dr. Reed Richards, and the villain known as Kang specifically. Because of this influence it also quite resembles the overarching plot of the Adult Swim cartoon series Rick and Morty, which has lifted heavily from the Marvel multiverse as well. The narrative here concerns an alternate-universe version of Scrooge who never lived through the events of Barks’s landmark story “Christmas On Bear Mountain” and thus remains an old miser without the love and companionship of his nephews Donald Duck, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. This Scrooge discovers that a magic mirror he commandeered from the evil sorceress Magica De Spell will allow him to travel to other dimensions and steal the massive fortunes of all the other Scrooge McDucks in existence.
Then Aaron cuts to “our” Scrooge– assumedly the one from the Barks / Don Rosa comics timeline as he returns home from another adventure with his nephews. They come upon the Beagle Boys lifting Scrooge’s money bin up into the air and through a portal into the “All-Scrooge’s” (think the Prime Kang or the “Rickest Rick”) dreary universe. So our Scrooge consults with Gyro Gearloose, learns that his number-one dime (or at least what it represented) was the key to traveling the multiverse– and then spends weeks collects up a super-team of his own, made up of a number of alternate Scrooges, to invade the All-Scrooge’s (also known in his universe as the “Lord of Dimes”) All-Bin, which contains– you guessed it– all the other money bins inside of it. From there we see a confrontation play out between this heroic Scrooge super-team and the All-Scrooge, and without spoiling too much I can say the conflict ends pretty much how you might expect, but it’s an entertaining ride along the way.
I do have a couple of bones to pick with this comic, however: the first is that it feels like a missed opportunity to not incorporate the alternate-universe Scrooge McDucks we already know about (if this is the comics version, he could have teamed up with both different DuckTales cartoon Scrooges and the one from the beloved video games, at the very least). I have to wonder if this was maybe the original plan and Aaron wasn’t able to use those versions of the character for legal reasons or something similar. The other gripe I have is that this issue cost eight bucks, and when I picked it up it certainly felt hefty enough to warrant that extra price, but then as I was reading along I realized that the back half of this issue is just a reprint of the above-mentioned “Christmas On Bear Mountain,” which any Uncle Scrooge fan worst his or her salt already owns in hardcover collected volume form or otherwise. That was a disappointment and made me feel just a tiny bit swindled in a way that Scrooge himself would certainly find frustrating, but otherwise I’m always happy to see more stories set in Duckburg with these wonderful characters, and the choice to have each chapter in this book illustrated by different artists was a fun and interesting one, in the interest of variety. Welcome to Marvel Comics, Scrooge McDuck and company! Here’s to many more stories hopefully coming soon.
Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime is available now wherever comic books are sold.