Donald Duck is a LOSER!

I didn't like Donald Duck as a kid. Still don't. Why not? Because Donald's a LOSER, that's why! I had hundreds of Donald Duck comics magazines as a kid, but threw them all away. The other kids had a real bonanza, when they found the mags in the garbage room on ground floor, LOL. The only Duck tale I could stomach was "Trail of the Unicorn". I preferred sophisticated French comics: Tintin, Spirou, Johan and Peewit, Asterix, Lucky Luke and The Smurfs! :D

So Donald's a loser. He's an underemployed, non-unionized, unmarried, childless bum living in a town called Duckburg. His filthy rich capitalist uncle Scrooge McDuck constantly takes advantage of him. Every time Donald tries to scam him (and in my book, he has the RIGHT to scam Scrooge), he's turned in by his three sneaky little nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie. Apparently, the kids are members of a fascist, paramilitary organization, modelled on the Hitlerjugend, known as "The Junior Woodchucks". They have a CIA-written spy guide to most of the known universe, and one of their rules is "LOVE BIG BROTHER, AND TURN IN YOUR UNCLE. HE MIGHT BE A COMMUNIST".

Donald also has an annoying cousin, Gladstone, who is always lucky and never tires of harassing poor Donald. In the Swedish version, Gladstone is called "Alexander Lukas". At least in my neighbourhood, that's a very posh, upper class, Uptown kind of name (he looks upper class too). Both Donald and Alexander, sorry Gladstone, have a incomprehensible crush on Daisy Duck, the worst womyn in Duckburg, a veritable showcase of Freudian neuroses. Donald usually gets her, another proof that he's a loser. They don't have kids either. (The three German ducks are his NEPHEWS, remember?). In some episodes, we also learn that Donald isn't very far removed from his rural roots in fly-over country, since he has a gluttonous goose cousin who lives at some barnyard in Deliverance County, West Virginia.

AAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!!

When "Donald Duck & Co" was introduced in Italy, the tuff-ruff Italian kidos actually *complained* about Donald always being a loser, so the Italian publisher created PAPERINIK, Donald Duck turned into a SUPER HERO. Apparently, it's not available in English, but it became very popular in Europe, including Sweden. I remember being *very* confused when reading the Paperinik comics, often found in the same magazines as the real Donald Duck stories, since Paperinik doesn't belong in the "Donald Duck universe", but rather in some kind of parallel universe which never meets the "real" one.

Weird, huh?

So the American original is a LOSER, while the Old Europe version (they refuse to help us in Iraq, blah blah) is a WINNER?

Well, the world is strange, LOL.

PS. Product specific review? Who's to tell?