"The Fountain of Strength"

Well, we recently learned from Mark Evanier that Vic Lockman had died on June 1 of this year, at the age of ninety. I felt that I should write something in...I dunno. Tribute? Recognition? Acknowledgement?

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"The Hammy Camel"

Give them credit: that title may have been applied after the fact, but it sounds very much like something Barks would've come up with himself.

Yes, okay. I will now simultaneously drink an intensely hoppy IPA (this one, to be specific) and write this blog entry. Good times. I mean, not "simultaneously" in the sense that I'm drinking at the same moment I'm typing, but...WHATEVER. Happy Third Day of Christmas.

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"You Can't Guess"

And now, the climax of our Christmas series! I've never quite held this in the same regard as "Shacktown" and "Letter to Santa," but I've still always felt a great deal of affection for it. As I read it over with a critical eye for the purposes of this entry, I was actually surprised by how many issues and oddities it has, but none of them really impact my overall feelings towards it. Welp, let's go.

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"The Thrifty Spendthrift"

And now, a silly, frivolous story with no thematic weight and no notable Christmas spirit that we nonetheless find highly amusing. Seriously, this obviously is in some sense a Christmas story, but holy crud is it not. I mean, say like you like about "Silent Night;" at least it was reacting to the holiday in some way. This one...well, not so much. As we will quickly see.

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"Christmas Cheers"

I don't know about all y'all, but I've always gotten the impression that this is Barks' most obscure Christmas story. It's been reprinted in the US often enough, but for some reason I just never think of it, and recently reading through a bunch of ten-pagers, I was surprised to see it come up: an unfamiliar Christmas story? Goodness! It can't have been the first time I'd read it, but I had only the vaguest of memories of it which sort of came back as I was reading. Well, now it shall be immortalized...in blog form!

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"Silent Night"

I know what you're thinking: "Did he sing six Christmas carols or only five?" Well to tell you the truth, in all this merriment I kinda lost track myself. But being that this here is a candy cane, the most festive treat in the world, and would fill your heart with holiday joy, you've gotta ask yourself one question: "Do I feel jolly?" Well, do ya, punk?

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"Wintertime Wager"

When I said I was going to write about the five Barks Christmas stories I hadn't yet covered, I kind of KNEW that someone was going to make my life harder by pointing out something I'd forgotten. And so, thanks to Pan Miluś: voila. He noted that a lot of people forget that this story takes place on Christmas, and it's true: I had forgotten. And for obvious reasons! Because if there's any story about which you could make the argument that just because it's set on Christmas it's not actually a Christmas story, it's this one. If "Weemite" is only tangentially Christmas-related, this is substantially more so. It doesn't even feint at being vaguely festive in any way. There aren't even any incidental holiday decorations in sight. BUT THAT'S OKAY! It's cold outside. The inside of the ducks' house DOES look pretty darned cozy, I must say.

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"Weemite"

Hello, children young and old! Time for some Holiday cheer. We bloody well need it after the year we've had. This year's theme is: "Barks stories I haven't covered yet." There are five such, unless I'm forgetting some. And guess what? We're going to cover them, at irregular intervals starting now and leading up to the twenty-fifth. Good for us.

We begin with one of those stories that uses Christmas as a setting but isn't really about the holiday in any significant way. That's a pretty festive opening panel there, but it's really just the jumping-off point. Let's not waste any time talking about how it's weird that ducks eat turkeys. That's just covering old territory.

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