By Sam King
DuckTales the comic series takes the characters from the 2017 reboot of the original cartoon that ran from 1987-1990 and puts them in new adventures. Having owned and watched every original DuckTales episode, I guess you could call me a pretty big fan of the "franchise" in general. I’m in the middle of the reboot and couldn’t pass on the chance to review the matching comics. I wouldn’t say that the new adventures beat out the originals, but for a fresh audience, it isn’t that bad.
In DuckTales #8, there are two separate stories, as is the case with every issue of DuckTales so far. Story one focuses on Scrooge McDuck as he plots a way to keep an eye on his company’s executive board, while he goes adventuring. Scrooge loves to go on adventures; the board thinks it is too dangerous and ultimately, nothing too major comes out of this one story wise. It is a pretty generic story, the artwork is true to the reboot’s animated style, and the focus is largely on Scrooge. Launchpad is here, but the main issue is Scrooge spying on his company and being too distracted to enjoy his adventure.
Story two on the listing was supposed to involve Ms. Beakley and Lena le Strange, niece of Magica de Spell, replacing her for a spy gig with British intelligence. That story is NOT in this issue. Instead, we get Dewey being bored with his dreams. He comes across a coin that is supposed to have supernatural powers since it belonged to a dream dragon. He takes it, in the hopes that his dreams will finally be interesting. He ends up sleep-fighting the dragon in his dream, waking up his brothers and Webby. In order to prevent the dragon from crossing into the real world, Webby uses the coin’s second half to go to sleep and help Dewey with the dragon.
The stories are definitely entertaining, but overall there does not appear to be an active arc going on through this comic series. It doesn’t add much to the show, so it feels like bonus material. If you need more of your DuckTales fix, this is pretty good for giving you a little more. If you haven’t gotten into DuckTales yet, this series is a decent place to start since nothing is very interconnected at this point. You just need to be able to recognize the main characters and know who they’re related to, which is easy to do with a quick Internet search. A few of the previous issues in the series have been more interesting than this one, so don’t expect a really awesome DuckTales adventure. This one is basically filler while we wait for another issue and another episode. It is generally fun, I thought the dream dragon story was the better of the two, but there have been better adventures. If you love the series or your kids are really into it, go for it. I’m hoping that this series will eventually develop some of its own entertaining arcs and not stick to just two one-shot adventures per issue. Both the animated and comic series are still rather new, so hopefully, they’ll kick into higher gear soon as far as plot over time goes.
Score: 3/5
DuckTales #8
IDW Publishing