A Christmas for Shacktown is a comic story written and drawn by Carl Barks. It features Scrooge McDuck, Donald Duck, Gladstone Gander, Daisy Duck, Huey, Dewey and Louie Duck and (as a picture and a disguise) Jake McDuck.
Plot[]
It's almost Christmas. Huey, Dewey and Louie Duck and Daisy Duck's charity decide to offer a real merry Christmas to the children of the poorest neighborhood of Duckburg, Shacktown. They quickly determine that they need fifty dollars for a toy train and a turkey. Scrooge McDuck, from whom they want to borrow the fifty dollars, immediately throws a fit and informs them that he'll play 25 dollars for the turkey, but will not give a single cent for something so "useless" as a toy train. Moreover, he will only give them the 25 dollars if they manage to gather the other half of the sum on their own. Be it thanks to Cousin Gladstone's luck or to Donald's repeated attempts to con the missing 25 dollars out of Scrooge himself, all the cast do their best to find the money.
Continuity[]
- The Great Toboggan Race (2016) reused the setting of Shacktown and established that the Umble Kids, from Carl Barks's earlier story The Snowman Contest (1950), are among its residents.
- The story-long flashback of Gyro's First Invention (2002) is a direct sequel to the events of A Christmas for Shacktown, offering an explanation for how Scrooge McDuck regained his money. The story also suggests that Statuesque Spendthrifts (1952), actually released shortly after A Christmas for Shacktown, took place slightly before it.
- Under Siege! (2017) once more has Scrooge's fortune begin to sink into the ground (though for a different reason) immediately after Scrooge throws in one last coin, causing him to mutter that it couldn't possibly be "like that time when—", clearly trying to allude to the events of A Christmas for Shacktown.
Behind the scenes[]
This story was first printed in 1952 in One Shot #367. It was then reprinted in Walt Disney's Christmas Parade #2, Walt Disney's Christmas Parade #8, Best Comic Series #1, Walt Disney's Comic Treasury #1, Gladstone Comic Album #25, Donald Duck Adventures #30, Uncle Scrooge #336, Walt Disney's Comics in Color 2nd Series #4, and, of course, in the Carl Barks Library.
As Scrooge McDuck loses all of his fortune at the end of the story without any obvious way he could get it back, Don Rosa later created a sequel to the story called Gyro's First Invention to explain how he retrieved his beloved money.