Disney Uncle Scrooge & Donald Duck in Les Miserables and War and Peace (Family Comic Friday)

Topolino is Italian for 'little mouse'. It's also the name of Italy's long running Disney comic book that features original material starring your favorite House of Mouse characters including Goofy, the Phantom Blot and Pluto. In this volume devoted to Disney-fied 19th century European classical works, the stars are all from your favorite family of ducks! Uncle Scrooge, Donald, Daisy, nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie and many more appear in these comical adaptations of Les Miserables and Crime and Punishment. This being an Uncle Scrooge heavy work, you can rest assured that his biggest foes, the Beagle Boys are on hand to create some mischief as well!

Material from the pages of Topolino have been covered by me previously on several reviews of American Disney works. I usually state that poor translations from the original Italian text into English are the main problems with those works. Phrases would seem stilted or out of place. That's just not the case here.The previous works I reviewed were published by IDW Publishing. Here, Fantagraphics, who've been doing an amazing job releasing the complete works of Carl Barks and Don Rosa, are the publishers and their translations have been phenomenal.

Both original novels deal with some very mature and violent subject matter. Les Miserables sees a single mother forced to sell her body to pay for her daughters room and board as well as the cold blooded murder of a young street urchin. While the main plot of Inspector Javert seeks to apprehend the fugitive Jean Valjean is still covered in this comic adaptation, the violent uprising in the streets of Paris has been replaced with a farcical search for the missing crown jewels of Charlemagne. Don't worry, there's still plenty of adventures to be had in the sewers under those Parisian streets.

As for War and Peace, I've never read the book nor seen an version of it in film. (With Les Mis, my wife and I have seen the musical about a half dozen times.) So I don't really have a good idea of how much material was replaced with more family friendly situations. However I cannot find evidence of the main character of the original Leo Tolstoy work trying to hide his horde of gold by melting them down into cannonballs and then having to retrieve the spent projectiles from the battle field after they are accidentally used during the Napoleonic Wars.

Both stories were written and illustrated by Giovan Battista Carpi. He's considered to be the Italian Carl Barks. The quality of these two parodies proves that belief. The plots are brilliant mixes of the original source material and the world of adventure created by those American masters whose stories first appeared in the pages of Dell and Whitman Disney comics decades ago.

In no way should this collection be used as a replacement for reading the originals. However both works are nearly a thousand pages each. Plus a lot of the terms and sentence structure are over 125 years old. Younger audiences might have difficulty relating. Unlike Classics Illustrated and Pocket Classics, these Disney adaptations should not even be used as study aids. But this book could very well be the link to interest young readers to want to read more about both the authors and their masterpieces. Sometimes humor is needed to peak interest into serious issues and this pair of parodies are hysterical. 

Perfect for all ages; especially fans of either version of DuckTales!

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 9 out of 10 stars.