Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: Donald’s Happiest Adventures by Lewis Trondheim and Nicolas Keramidas
About a decade ago, writer Lewis Trondheim and artist Nicolas Keramidas made a bande dessinée for Éditions Glénat, the French arm of the global Disney octopus, about Mickey Mouse. It was called Mickey’s Craziest Adventures and pretended to be rediscovered pages from an obscure (probably American) 1960s comic, telling a long, convoluted and all-adventure story on its big pages. It didn’t entirely make sense, but that was the point: it was supposedly roughly half of the pages of a decade-long story that was all cliffhangers and hairsbreadth escapes to begin with.
A few years later, they did it again, though in a slightly less breathless register: Donald’s Happiest Adventures similarly pretends to be a serial from an incredibly obscure ’60s comic. But, this time, they happily state that they found the whole thing, and can present the full story of how Donald was tasked by his Uncle Scrooge with finding the secret of happiness. Happiest was published by Glénat in 2018, and an American edition followed in 2023, translated by David Gerstein.
The structure is the same as the Mickey story: Trondheim and Keramidas pretend that each page stood alone as a monthly installment of the story, so the story leaps forward regularly, with each page being a moment or a thought or a particular place. Trondheim’s Donald has the standard irascibility, though he doesn’t break into full-fledged tantrums here as he sometimes does in stories by other hands. He’s also more philosophical than Donald often is, a lot like other bird-coded characters in other Trondheim stories, like Ralph Azham or Herbert from Dungeon or Trondheim’s self-portrait in Little Nothings .
But if you’re going to have a story about Donald Duck searching for the meaning of happiness, you need to have a version of Donald who is capable of finding happiness and of talking about it coherently – not always a guarantee in every version of Donald.
Like the Mickey story, this one ranges widely – Donald is summoned by Scrooge to go retrieve a fabulously valuable artifact from an obscure corner of the world, but unwisely questions Scrooge’s motivations and finds himself instead sent to find the secret of happiness. In particular, the secret of making Scrooge happy, which is even more difficult than doing so for Donald. (Donald has moments of happiness throughout the book, as a careful reader will notice – but he’s not happy all the time, which is what he thinks he’s looking for.)
Donald meets and talks with a vast array of other characters – the fabulously lucky Gladstone Gander, the down-to-earth Grandma Duck, the genius Ludwig von Drake, and so on – as he asks each of them in turn what happiness is. Along the way, he gets into adventures that span the globe, including a stint in a nasty totalitarian country where, luckily, the shackles are all made of cardboard. He also runs across Mickey several times, helping capture Pegleg Pete each time and getting a reward from the police forces who pop up, always right after the hard work is done.
It’s a fairly talky story, because it’s about finding happiness, and Donald needs to talk to nearly every character about it. (He doesn’t have any conversations with Pete, which is a possible miss, since Pete has always seemed quite content with his lot in life, despite having all of his schemes fail miserably.)
As he must, Donald does eventually make it back home to Duckburg, and has an answer for Scrooge that makes the old miser happy, at least for that moment. It’s not the secret of happiness, but that of course is Trondheim’s point: there’s no such thing. Along the way, Happiest is thoughtful and adventurous in equal proportions, a good story for people who are willing to do a little thinking during their Donald Duck adventures.
As in the Mickey book, Keramidas draws it in a style that I can’t quite call off-model but doesn’t quite look right. (Though I mean that as a compliment: purely on-model is boring.) His characters are energetic in that cartoony way and his pages crisply laid out to accommodate all of Trondheim’s long speeches – and to look as if each one could have been a full entry of this serial.
Some reviews of this book have missed the fact that the ’60s origin is…how do I put this delicately?…not actually true. But you, my dear readers, are smarter and more perspicacious than that, so I’m sure the metafiction here will be no trouble for you. If you’re looking for a combination of philosophy and Disney adventure – and why not? it’s a fun mix – Donald’s Happiest Adventures will provide a lot of enjoyment.
Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.
