Scrooge McDuck "Return to Xanadu"

This comic was created in the 1990's, by cartoonist Don Rosa. And, apparently, it styles itself as something of a sequel to "Tralla-la" among several other of the original Carl Barks Scrooge stories.

...

Also, when I first wrote these reviews, I mistook Carl Barks' name for "Banks." Which...I can't decide which is funnier, honestly. Scrooge McDuck having been created by a guy named "Banks," or an anthro comic about a caricature of a greedy capitalist being created by a guy named Carl Barks.

On further thought, I think we actually did get the funnier version. Just because I can totally picture Karl Barks the dog-person inspiring a workers' revolt in Scrooge's factories.

...man, it's too bad the communist heckler in "Tralla-la" wasn't a dog. No canonizing him as the author's self-insert for me.

...

Xanadu, aka Shangdu, was Kublai Khan's famously ostentatious seat of power during his reign over the Mongol Empire. It's also a pop culture byword for wealth and excess, which makes it a thematically logical place to have Scrooge fail to learn something. However, this comic is also doing something metatextual with it. Because of those connotations, Xanadu was used as a name for the fictional mansion of the fictional Charles Foster Kane, from the movie "Citizen Kane." And, this comic is basically a whacky adventure story strung around a Citizen Kane allusion.

Honestly, I think it's biggest weakness is that it doesn't lean harder into that. Scrooge McDuck having his rosebud moment is clearly meant to be the big takeaway of the story, but it (and the series of introspective moments he has leading up to it) are sort of tangential to most of the action. Easily lost in the action, and the action itself - while it does relate to the serpent-in-paradise nature of greed - is a little too thematically muddled to complement Scrooge's arc very well.

Where this story excels, on the other hand, is in its masterful use of tension and sense of rising stakes. As well as some really brilliant callbacks to the original "Tralla-la" story in a way that recontextualizes much of it and lends a new importance to then-innocuous details. Mostly the tension, though. I actually felt some real suspense and fear for the characters (despite rationally knowing that there's no chance in hell of any long-lasting consequences happening to them) while reading this Donald Duck comic.


So. Like many (most?) Scrooge comics, we open on the vault of Yre. This time in the more orderly corner of it, where the Priests of the Count keep their dying god's most esoteric treasures displayed and presented.

One of these items being the crown of Kublai Khan, which Scrooge acquired through a series of shenanigans involving an itinerant merchant, the rent-a-yack franchise Scrooge is apparently running throughout the subcontinent, and a marauding yeti. I'm going to assume that this is referring to one or more of the other Carl Barks comics that I didn't read, because it sure sounds like enough material for one or more episodes heh. The nephews happen to have been reading Marco Polo lately, and the mention of Kublai brings to mind the explorer's visit to Xanadu and the ridiculous riches he described in his journals. And, apparently, in Ducktales-world, the well-visited UNESCO world heritage site isn't actually at the ruins of the real Xanadu. The true Xanadu is still undiscovered by archaeologists, and the fact that Scrooge has this crown - which is said to have been left there after the khan's death - means that he might also have a lead on discovering the real place.

IIRC, there are (or at least used to be) some real world conspiracy theories to this effect. Shangdu not being the REAL Shangdu, the lost treasure of the Golden Horde still hidden somewhere waiting to be dug up. Sort of a "treasure of King Tut" type legend.

Well, Scrooge has now been informed that the global south might still have a smidge of money in it that he hasn't plundered somewhere, and that means it's time for another adventure whether his nephews like it or not!

I'm assuming that the later Scrooge comics are period pieces, and it's still the 1950's or thereabouts for the characters. Not that 30 cents an hour would have been a reasonable wage back then either, but it could at least let you eat lol. Man, why does Donald even do this, again?

Well, actually this comic does imply some things about why Donald does this. Ish. He kinda has his own character arc running through it. Sort of.

So, back to Tibet. Scrooge interviews the yak merchant who he initially bought the crown from however many years ago, and - after grudgingly parting with enough money to loosen his tongue - is told that he pried the teakwood box containing the crown out of the wall of a nearby ice cave. They explore the cave, break through some conveniently weakened ice barriers that for some reason didn't get broken by the previous treasure-hunter, and find themselves walking along an underground river. One with clearly artificial, medieval-vintage construction along it. Construction that correlates with the Marco Polo journals that the kids have read about the underground canals leading into Xanadu.

Eventually, they come to a place where they have to cross the river to reach the door that leads onward. There was a bridge here, but it's long ago collapsed, and the river is too fast and deep to swim or wade through. Fortunately, there's a sluice gate nearby that they can - with some effort - close to shut off the flow.

Beyond that door, they enter the huge cave on the other side of the sluice gate, in which the water free-falls through a hole in the ceiling before accumulating in an underground lake before the sluice.

Also, the art in this comic is mostly good, but there are a few places where it clearly doesn't measure up to the old Barks artwork.

It's not bad. But, looking back at the old Tralla-la scenery, of the moving water and mountainous descents, it just ain't the same.

Well, I'm sure you've all figured out the twist by now. They move on through the next doorway, and discover that the true Xanadu is the valley also known as Tralla-la. Hence, this comic being a return to it. The free-flowing waterfall is the underside of that crazy whirlpool in the crater lake we saw last time.

For a little bit here, the plot just sort of acts like a repeat of the middle part of the original Tralla-la comic. Scrooge and Donald consider staying here forever, now that they don't have any evil corrupting bottlecaps with them and enough time has passed for the locals to forgive them for almost crushing them under an ocean of bottlecaps last time. The only early faux-pas happens when the locals see Scrooge holding the crown of Kublai Khan, to which they react with extreme distaste.

Largely as a consequence of things barely ever happening in Tralla-la, they've retained very strong cultural memories of that time a foreign king discovered their valley, turned it into his secret refuge-palace, and enslaved them in their own home to build and maintain it.

Like I said, worldbuilding is one of the strong points of this story. There's a lot more nuances to the fictional history being built here than I think we'd have ever gotten in the 1950's.

The decision to connect the Shangri-la thing with the rumors of a secret True Shangdu is also an inspired one. Granted, to be fair, I think both of those stories were influenced (to varying degrees) by the same preexisting Mahayana folklore, so the similarities were already there. But then, when you consider the association of the True Xanadu legends with treasure specifically, and there's a precedent of Scrooge having already visited the setting's Shangri-La expy without being on a treasure hunt for once? It honest to god feels like Barks himself was planning this all along, even though he wasn't.

Anyway, since his nerve condition has mended over the course of the forty real-world years between the two stories being published, Scrooge is a lot less enthusiastic about possibly staying in Tralla-la than he was last time (mostly, he's just disappointed that the treasure of the Golden Horde - the Golden Hoard, if you will - is no longer present). Donald, on the other hand, finds that he's blossoming here in a way that he never could back in the USA.

Donald is used to being an incompetent screwup, but away from the stresses of his usual life he turns out to be a real skill monkey. I think the implication is that he's stuck following Scrooge around because he can't make it on his own, but that seems to be a consequence of stress rather than any personal failing. I think.

Meanwhile, Huey, Dewey, and Louey are enjoying Shangri-La's library archives. They had a large volume of historical texts onhand to begin with, and during the reign of the famously knowledge-hungry Kublai Khan he accumulated an even greater collection of books here. After the Khan's death (and after the rest of the Mongols apparently forgot that this place existed, for some reason...) the Tralla-laites quickly rid themselves of all the steel and gold he'd burdened their valley with, but they kept the books, so that's nice.

There doesn't seem to be any way for them to LEAVE Tralla-la this time. Previously, they had a combination of aircraft and hired Tralla-laite guides to help them leave and return to the valley. This time, the stone door has sealed shut behind them, there are no planes on call, and the Tralla-laites have gotten over their bottlecap addiction and can't be paid anymore. Hence Scrooge's irritability at being stuck here; he actually is STUCK here, and - again - he's undergone (negative? regression to baseline? idk) character development since last time. Although, once he spends some time here, Scrooge starts to warm up to it again. Something about the landscape reminds him of his childhood in 19th century Scotland. Or at least, the parts of that childhood that he didn't hate.

So, they're here for a while. And eventually the boys read something in an old book about the Mongols having designed a weapon to force the Tralla-laites to remain loyal even when none of the Khan's men were present. A sluice gate built into their lake's underground outflow channel, behind a door that can only be opened from the outside, that could be used to flood the entire valley if they tried anything. Naturally, Huey, Dewey, and Louey only make this discovery riiiight on the same day when the big cave finally finishes filling up with water, the whirlpool vanishes, and the water level in Tralla-la starts rising.

Turns out there was a reason that door only opens from the outside. I'm, uh...I'm guessing that during the Mongol occupation, they just kept that door wedged open and guarded, or something? Yeah, not sure how that's supposed to have worked lol. Logic of the builders aside though, this was a pretty masterful piece of setup and payoff. Especially since it's also paying off on the unintentional-at-the-time fifty-year-old setup of Tralla-la having that weird whirlpool in the first place.

On the topic of payoff, this last stretch of the comic is what I was talking about when I said that this Ducktails strip actually managed to put me on the edge of my seat. They have to - very quickly, as the water level rises and slowly causes more and more damage - get out the pile of bottle caps the Tralla-laites had to sweep up after last time, build a blast furnace, and melt them all down to make a steel saw that can cut that door's iron bar open. By that time, the door itself is half-underwater, and Donald is the only one strong and able-bodied enough to swim down and try to pull the sluice gate back open.

...

I'm...not sure why there wouldn't be a bunch of young adult Tralla-laites also willing and able to help with this. Kind of a weakness in the story. Sorta white savior-y tbh, even though the white-coded ducks were also the ones who caused the problem in the first place.

...

Donald Duck's ordeal as he free-dives through the flooded cave, swimming up to the ever-shrinking air pockets to desperately refill his lungs before swimming down to pull at the sluice gate more, is really nailbiting. And made more poignant by the fact that, all the while, he's berating himself for how he could never do anything right until he came to Tralla-la, but he needs to make sure he does this ONE thing right in order to save Tralla-la now.

And, when he finally, after nearly tearing his body apart, succeeds, he's left cut off from the way back by the flow again.

At least he's not the only one. The others went out on a boat to try and see if Donald managed to swim back the way he came after the door disappeared under the water, and ended up getting sucked back down the whirlpool when it reopened. Donald's newly-discovered competence had to be used to cut himself off from the apparent source of it. That's...definitely onbrand for Donald Duck, whether he's costarring with his own family or with Mickey and Co.

In a final callback, we reprise one of the clues that led the gang to Tralla-la in the first story by having the water wash them up into a temple reservoir in the Himalaya foothills where Huey once found a suspicious fruit tree branch.

Yeah, the crown - one of his most treasured pieces of neocolonial pillage - fell overboard.

The final panels have Scrooge inviting his nephews on a trip to his ancestral home in Scotland, which he is now feeling nostalgic for. In fact, he's more nostalgic for his country childhood than he is agrieved at the loss of one of his greatest treasures. Rosebud, etc.

Also, it turns out that the Golden Hoard was sitting in the bottom of that half-flooded cave all along.

The Tralla-laites threw it all in the whirlpool after Kublai's death. The teakwood box containing the crown happened to get washed down the waterway and frozen into the wall of that ice cave. Scrooge, Donald, and the boys passed right over the treasure pile repeatedly.


The twist of where the treasure was the whole time is a nice closer. However, the ending feels like it's trying to hang most of its weight on Scrooge's nostalgia, and...that just didn't get enough setup throughout the story. I didn't even spend enough time on it in my REVIEW, on account of how complicated the setup of all the plot components was and how I needed to summarize all of it in order for my overview to make sense. I feel like the story wanted to be ABOUT this, but this character arc of Scrooge's doesn't even start until fully halfway through the comic, and then the action ended up filling most of the back half without interacting with Scrooge's thing.

Donald's own arc was a lot more relevant to the resolution. But then it doesn't get addressed at all in the denouement. And it only got a tiny, tiny bit more setup in the first half either.

The comic spent so much time having excellent plotting and worldbuilding, and so much effort in being a perfect sequel to the Carl Barks story, that it barely had time to do the character stuff it wanted to do. I really do think the authors wanted to do a Citizen Kane thing, coming back to the name Xanadu over and over and having the action slow down around Scrooge for him to have childhood nostalgia when he's separated from some or all of his wealth. They just didn't have enough time and space to make it really count, and it ended up being a little bauble hanging off the side of this story about exploring a crazy underground construction and then Donald having to risk his life to do a thing. Ditto, all the thematic stuff about Scrooge's wealth threatening Tralla-la just like Kublai's did - despite the former's much less malicious intentions - kind of falls by the wayside next to the technicalities of the hydro-engineering plot.

Also...on one hand, I like that these new authors put a little more thought into what a lifestyle without wealth and ownership means. The Tralla-laites actually makes some more hard-hitting philosophical arguments here and there in this one, and there's no giant facepalm moments like this allegedly private-property-less society being built on barter. At the same time, the fact that this comic doesn't seem to acknowledge that contradiction at all - even if it also avoids repeating it - and still tries to paint Tralla-la as a perfectly egalitarian greedless society without retconning or explaining away what happened last time...I dunno. I still feel like the entire premise of Tralla-la might be damaged beyond repair by that, heh.

Still, while it's not as poignant as it wanted to be, or as incisive as I wanted it to be, "Return to Xanadu" is a masterclass in plotting and tension management while still keeping to the cartoony, lighthearted sensibilities of the IP.

What's really impressive is that it feels like it could have been written forty weeks after "Tralla-La" rather than forty years. Slightly weaker art aside, you could pass this off as a Carl Barks sequel that he wrote right after "Tralla-la" and I wouldn't think twice.