Guest Review: “The Mad Chemist” by Carl Barks, reviewed by Don Briago

Today, I'm happy to bring you another guest review. This time around, the subject is The Mad Scientist by Cark Barks, a finalist for the 1945 Retro Hugo Award in the Best Graphic Story category. So I hand over to Don Briago to share his thoughts on The Mad Scientist.

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"The Mad Chemist" is a ten-page Donald Duck comic by Carl Barks that first appeared in the May 1944 issue of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. It has been nominated for a Retro Hugo in the category of Best Graphic Novel or Comic. 

Spoilers follow. 

While the ducklings Huey, Dewey, and Louie play with a chemistry set, their impetuous Uncle Donald can’t resist dumping random ingredients into their flask, which bursts into the air and clonks him on the head. “I feel like a super man!” Donald says, and starts spouting a stream of chemical formulas, the basis for what he terms “Duckmite”, the world’s most powerful explosive. 

It is also, he and the boys soon learn, a miraculous fuel that enables their jalopy to travel at 836 miles per hour. Naturally, Donald then plans to pour Duckmite into a rocket ship and fly to the moon. The nephews worry that he’s too manic to embark on such a journey. 

A doctor examines Donald’s head and diagnoses him with “risus bumpoticus on the locus cocus”, a brain fever that gives the victim temporary super-intelligence. “But after the bump goes down,” the doctor predicts, “he’ll be as du- I mean, as good as ever.” 

The rocket launch is a success. As soon as Donald leaves Earth’s atmosphere his bump recedes, and he becomes terrified. The rocket orbits around the moon and slings back towards Earth, crashing, as luck would have it, into Donald’s backyard. His neighbors don’t believe that he went to the moon and poor Donald, no longer a genius, is unable to explain how he managed such a feat. 

“The Mad Chemist” is not one of the great Duck Tales. Most Barksist scholars agree that the comics reached their peak after the war, from the late 40s to the mid 50s. At this early stage Barks hadn’t perfected his Duck formula, a potent mixture of silliness, satire, and genuine adventure. “The Mad Chemist” isn’t as grounded as later stories, and the plot, such as it is, hops from one mishap to the next, with none of the ducks showing much agency, as we say nowadays.

All the same, this is a surprisingly suitable Retro Hugo nominee, less for its intrinsic merit than for the way it reflects the SF fandom of 1944. If you were a kid who read the pulps, you would have loved the “mad scientist” premise of the comic, and even more, its focus on rocketry. 

In the 1930s and 1940s, nerds were obsessed with rockets. Rocket ships of course featured prominently in science fiction, and in science fact, rockets represented the possibility that we would someday be able to travel in space. There was furious debate in the nerd community about whether rockets could ever be powerful enough to penetrate Earth’s atmosphere, until German nerds silenced the skeptics by aiming their frightening V-2 missiles at London. 

One Londoner named Arthur C. Clarke survived the barrage and speculated that, by using German-style rockets, you could in theory launch a satellite up into orbit and transmit signals back down to any location on the planet. Thus the space race was born, and the next thing we knew the Beatles were singing “All You Need Is Love” on TV to billions of hippies over the world at once, and we were, like Donald Duck, on our way to the moon. And it’s all thanks to "The Mad Chemist.”

Well, maybe that slightly exaggerates the influence of Carl Barks, but it’s a fact that “The Mad Chemist” did become a tiny part of scientific history. In the first panel on page 2, Donald makes a reference to a chemical compound that hadn’t been mentioned before, and in a serious chemistry paper published in 1963, the panel was reproduced in its footnotes. (You can read about the details here). One author of the article had been a childhood Duck fan who had carefully preserved his Barks comics. 

That chemist wasn’t alone. After working for most of his career without any recognition, late in life Barks received a lot of fan mail from historians, archaeologists, astronomers and other scholars who claimed that his Duck Tales expanded their minds and stimulated their love of learning when they were children. In the same way, many scientists began as avid SF fans who enjoyed asking themselves "Would this be possible in real life?" when reading a pulp adventure. 

“Would it be possible to release a vast quantity of energy by splitting an atom?” the physicist Leo Szilard asked himself when reading H. G. Wells’ speculations about the possibility in his 1914 novel The World Set Free. Although, to our shame, we have produced Wellsian nuclear weapons but have yet to produce a Wellsian time machine, who's to say we won't someday be filling our jet packs with Duckmite, and hailing "The Mad Chemist" as the inspiration for our golden age of interstellar exploration?

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Many thanks to Don Briago for this great review of The Mad Scientist, even if the novel itself turned out to be a bit dull.