"The Klondike Journals" and "A Christmas Crossing" (stories from Scrooge's youth)

Norwegian cover for "The Klondike Journals"

At the end of last year, we got a few new stories from Scrooge's youth. And we got to see several new relatives to other Duckburg characters. I've seen some interest and discussions about The Klondike Journals by Kari Korhonen online, and figured I'd show what relatives we got to see in the stories. Note: This is going to have spoilers for the series, but it's been a few moths since the European printings now, and I don't see this being published in the USA anytime soon.

The five parts of "The Klondike Journals"

The fist batch of The Klondike Journals have five different stories/parts, but with some continuity tying them together. The first part is 10 pages and the other parts 7 pages each. According to some online sources more parts are planned for 2020. The stories mostly take place in Scrooge's Yukon days while he is traveling around.
 

Uncle Scrooge traveling around

I enjoyed reading the stories, but think they could have worked better if they were longer. It's not much of a buildup and too much jumping around places, I think. Also, I personally think it was a bit silly having everyone being relatives of someone already known. A few new relatives are ok, but this felt more like forced fan service. And some of the them didn't need to be relatives for the story to work (especially the fathers of O'Hara, Casey and the mayor). The stories also have tons of references to other stories by Barks and Rosa. I normally like having references to older stories, but this case it went a bit overboard. And when you have footnotes every second page telling you to check out some other story it takes you out of the reading. This could have been nice things for fans to discover on their own. Overall, I thought this series was okay, but just that.

Here are some of the new characters we meet in the series.

Brunhilde Typefast (Brunhilde Quackfaster)

Clearly a relative of Miss Quackfaster, but it doesn't say if she's her mother.
 

Gadget Gearloose

Brother of Ratchet Gearloose and Gyro's granduncle.

 

Fathers of Azure Blue and Sharky

 

Canadian Mounties

Scrooge meet up with tree guys that would be the beginning if the Mounties. Also they are the fathers of O'Hara, Casey and Duckburg's pig mayor.

Father of Clerkly
 

Bhaltair McDuck

Scrooge's uncle and brother of Fergus McDuck

 

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Another recent story from Scrooge's past is A Christmas Crossing (Egmont's internal English title), printed in a Norwegian Christmas comic. And so far, it's not printed anywhere else I think. But I hope it will, because this is an amazing adventure that needs to be shared!

 

The story takes us from Whitehorse, Yukon to New York on an action filled journey with Scrooge and Goldie.
 

Lots of action in this story!

The entire story could be seen as an extension to The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck as the story follow up on events seen there and mostly takes place between two panels in The Billionaire of Dismal Downs.
 

The story in "A Christmas Crossing" takes place beween these two panels

And in the new story we see the clerks from Rosa's story asking for a stove, and Scrooge sending the letter home.
 

Clerks asking for a stove, and Scrooge sending a letter home

The writing team actually pitched the idea for Don Rosa before continuing to develop the story, and got his "blessing" to do it. According to interviews with the creators he was glad for someone to follow up on his stories.

We have a few interesting side characters in this story too. First, the driver is a caricature of Don Rosa.
 

We also have a background character looking a lot like Carl Barks

 

And we meet Miss Quackfaster as a kid.
 

Miss Quackfaster as a kid

In this story the young Quackfaster say she is going to visit her aunt in Skagway. This suggest that Brunhilde in The Klondike Journals actually is Quackfaster's aunt! But I'm not sure if this is a coincidence or something planned. Both stories were created for Egmont around the same time.

 

Quackfaster tells Goldie she is going to visit her aunt in Skagway

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You can see more great artwork and the drawing Arild Midthun made for Don Rosa on Arild's webpage.

Screenshot from Arild's webpage