Donald Duck is one of world's biggest celebrities—a celeactor—which is defined as “…a fictional character who…becomes an institutionalized feature of popular culture.” (Rojek, 2001, 14). Donald debuted as an animated character in 1934 and has since become one of The Walt Disney Company's (TWDC) most widely used pieces of transmedia intellectual property (IP), and a cultural icon (Dorfman, 2018). He is omnipresent across the world; television, film, theme park attractions, walkaround/costumed characters, supermarket food items, designer goods, apparel, comics, and beyond. Disney's most famous characters often emerge from television and film media, but the overlooked mid-20th century cultural phenomenon of comics has produced some of Disney's most internationally admired IP (Piepenbring, 2019). This includes Donald's family; nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, his uncle Scrooge McDuck, and more minor characters such as Grandma Duck and cousin Gladstone Gander. In the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, Disney's IP was being used in comics around the world: Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck were the biggest stars of the stable, and in 1960 alone the bestselling comic in the United States was the Uncle Scrooge title—with over 1 million copies sold (Comichron).
By the 1970s, Disney's comics were not selling in the same volumes as they once had in America, and the most recent run of Uncle Scrooge comics of the past 15 years placed it as the 300th bestselling title in the United States (Bryan, 2021, 138). In international markets, they remain big sellers and have become cultural mainstays. 90 years on from the character's first appearance, Donald Duck comics are still sold in significant quantities across continental Europe and South America and have enjoyed commercial success in Asia (Mittermeier, 2020, 130). These characters' legacies in Anglophone markets might be reliant on television animation, but in many countries, they are cultural icons because of their printed comics presence first and foremost.
During Disney's first 100 years of operation, society has seen seismic changes: the dominance of the capitalist mode of production, changing attitudes to gender, sex, and sexuality, increasing demands for equality for the “Global Majority” (Campbell-Stephens, 2020), and fast-paced developments in technology, science, and knowledge. This paper aims to explore how some of these changes in society during Disney's first 100 years have been reflected in the Duck family comics—examining how these characters and narratives have changed (or not) over time and how this correlates with wider society. The paper will look at these themes through the lens of key characters and stories over time in each subsection.
Starting with the category of science, technology, and knowledge in Disney's Duck comics, official Disney Legend Carl Barks (D23.com) is who many
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