3 out of 5

I understand that if Trondheim and Keramidas had repeated the exact format of their Mickey’s Craziest Adventures – positing it as a found “lost” collection of strips, and telling a surreal story thanks to “missing” pages and torn corners – it might draw some eye rolls, or beg a question of What’s New?, regardless of how quality the content may have been. So the idea to essentially fess up to the conceit in the intro blurb, but still use the ‘lost’ format for some cool design elements (faded / stained pages) and as sort of a guiding principle for the tone of the book makes sense, though I’ll admit it drains the story of some of its magic and mystery. I liked the bluff; owning up to it so soon feels defeating. Especially when there are some references in these Donald strips to the Mickey ones… suggestive of some whole world of lost Disney material to be explored, and I suppose I’m just imagining some greater purpose to that that we’ll now never need to get to. Still: if the contents are good, who cares?

…But the contents are not as good, and I do think it’s because we’re telling more of a straight forward story as a result of the change, and that story has a more familiar loose, Trondheim vibe. Which is always a joy to read, it just falls into the average tier of his work, whereas Mickey felt otherworldly weird. And getting to the truly joyful beats of the story also take some work, as the writer is really trying hard to bash this into something with deeper meaning, by having Scrooge send Donald off on a task to discover, uh, happiness. Pursued more ridiculously, this could work, but Trondheim actually tries to piece together “logic” getting us from A to B, and when Donald (and his various compatriots) find themselves in wild hijinks as a result of his pursuit, it’s gold, but whenever we slow down to remind that there’s a purpose to this stuff, the gears start to grind, and Trondheim has to kick it again for a couple pages to get it going. It’s also possible the translation (David Gerstein) is affecting things, as a lot of the dialogue would seem to rely on puns, and the puns maybe were idioms or somesuch that don’t work as well in English…?

Keramidas’ art is not perfect in some scenarios – again, I’d cite the lack of surreality maybe making me assess this stuff differently – as his action / slapstick choreography is actually a little mistimed, but the overall energy of the page and character designs is a delight, not to mention the aforementioned design of the book (Justin Allan-Spencer, Editions Glenat, and / or however Keramidas contributed to the page-by-page faux-aging), with color smears and whatnot.

As a singular Trondheim book, I am entertained. But as a follow to Mickey, I’m a bit disappointed. However, please make this an ongoing series, as it’s such a god concept overall (with a great creative team!) and I’ll be happy to be disappointed for at least a few more volumes.