A Christmas for Shacktown
Anyone who has ever read Donald Duck knows that money is an important
part of the comic, to the point where money—and the lack of it—is
there before each episode starts: Uncle Scrooge has it, Donald doesn’t,
the Beagle Boys try to steal it, Gladstone Gander doesn’t need it,
and so on. One can express it in the abstract: money is the constant whose
variables are defined by the characters in the episode and the intrigues
which they create.
And it is the drama and humor revolving around money, as well as what
I’d like to call the wisdom surrounding it, which stays in your mind.
My friends and I often go back to a frame (perhaps it was more than one,
I haven’t managed to find it) in which Donald’s nephews ask
Donald if he has any rare and valuable coins for their collection. Donald’s
somewhat bitter answer is, “All coins are rare.” One of the
great Carl Barks classics is the episode which in Swedish was called “Jul
i Pengalösa” (A Christmas for Shacktown). The extra long episode,
which took up the entire issue, was published in Sweden as Walt Disney’s
comic no. 12 in December, 1954—a story about Christmas at Christmastime.
Here, money is already a part of the title. Shacktown is a slummy suburb
of Duckburg, “the part of town where so many poor people live,”
as Daisy puts it. The children suffer in Shacktown, they never eat enough,
and they get neither candy nor presents at Christmas, not this year or
any other. Shacktown is the flip side of the prosperous Duckburg’s
coin. The story begins when the goodhearted nephews happen to walk through
Shacktown on their way home a few days before Christmas. They react with
shame to what they see: “I am ashamed to be well-fed and warm,”
says one. Together with Daisy, they decide to arrange a collection so
that the children for once can have a real Christmas. Donald, who has
more money problems than usual this Christmas, is asked to help, along
with the Junior Woodchucks, Gladstone Gander, and—against his will,
of course—Uncle Scrooge.
And as befits a moral tale, “A Christmas for Shacktown” shows
how Scrooge’s greed comes back to haunt him. One little coin, which
he even stooped to beg for, causes the floor of his overfull bank vault
to collapse. All his money disappears into “a big, bottomless pit.”
The picture is also a metaphor for currency’s—and perhaps also
the stock market’s—free fall. The drawing showing the black
hole was one of the more exhilarating horror experiences of my childhood.
But at least some of the money ends up in the proper hands eventually
(one shouldn't reveal too much for those who have not yet had the pleasure
of reading “A Christmas for Shacktown!”). And the children get
their Christmas at the end. “A Christmas for Shacktown” is a
masterpiece. A long adventure, beautifully drawn, full of creative and
intelligent tangents and tragicomic details. Like when Donald begs money
for the children and is misunderstood by the poor couple of whom he happens
to beg:
This touching little picture is especially interesting. When “A Christmas
for Shacktown” was reprinted as number 12 in 1967, again by Walt
Disney’s comics, the entire story was gravely censored. All the pictures
depicting slums, as well as those showing people begging, were cut out.
The drawings of poorly clothed and sad children, houses in disrepair,
and panhandlers—including Uncle Scrooge and Gladstone, who both beg
for money at different points in the story—are missing from the 1967
version. Also missing are the pictures showing how Gladstone, the duck
who never has any money but lives well anyway, almost magically produces
money for the collection, at the same time setting in motion the fatal
plot twist which results in Scrooge losing his fortune. The loss of this
part of the story is especially unfortunate; it is the most many-faceted
in the entire episode. Gladstone is the duck-world equivalent of the demigod
Hermes: fast, unpredictable, independent, plugged in to supernatural forces.
Why they would cut his part in the story is a mystery. Perhaps they wanted
to reduce the frames’ focus on begging and class differences in Duckburg
(Gladstone panhandles in front of a luxury hotel and gets a glowing, magic
coin thrown to him).
The original 247 frames were reduced to 178 in the 1967 version of “A
Christmas for Shacktown.” The comic was truncated, and the intrigue
became illogical, almost impossible to understand. But like the notorious
Russian encyclopedias, the censors left hints. One such hint is the text,
the bubbles; when he tries to collect money for the children, Donald still
says to Scrooge, “The children are suffering! They can never eat
until they are full and never get a Christmas present—year after
year, it’s the same!”
Another hint—the only visual one—is the frame with the tattered
family from whom Donald begs. This still shows that Duckburg also contained
poor and suffering people.
Why did they keep this frame? Was it a mistake? A way of sabotaging the
censor, initiated by someone in the production process? Because it was
deemed less brutal than the pictures of the shantytown Shacktown? Because
it was seen as too good a drawing to be cut?
In any event, “A Christmas for Shacktown” from 1967 is an example
of active and intended suppression. I do not know what they were thinking
when they cut all the frames showing the slums of Duckburg, making the
adventure unintelligible and Duckburg into a town without any signs of
poverty and suffering. The 60s was the first decade in which the hypocritical
and ideologically untruthful depiction of America in mass media and pop
culture was seriously challenged, both nationally and internationally.
That the United States’ next most potent power—pop culture itself—exaggerated
its positive slant to compensate for this criticism during the decade
is well-known.
But still, many things are missing in the ordinary depiction of Duckburg
as well, things that otherwise are a part of “normal” American
cities, such as the existence of blacks. And nothing that has to do with
reproductive organs, heterosexuality and homosexuality, as has been pointed
out occasionally, has ever been included in the comic.
But here, in this comic that for once balances Uncle Scrooge’s enormous
surfeit of money by showing others’ frightening lack of it, we can
thanks to the two existing versions see the violence which the construction
of the duckish world could entail. A violence which consisted of muting,
removal, erasing. Poverty, slums, all the sad children, panhandling—everything
disappeared from the picture. But the actual disappearance is still visible.
Carl-Johan Malmbergwas born in Stockholm in 1950. An author and
cultural writer in among others the daily paper Svenska Dagbladet, he
has taught film and art at the Stockholm University, the Royal College
of Art in Stockholm, and the Södertörn school, as well as working
as a producer at the Swedish Radio. This year he published the book Sällskap
(Company Thoughts on Rooms, Ruins, Special People, Duels and Travels).
Translated from Swedish by George Kentros
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