The Big Sneeze

The Big Sneeze
First page of the story.
INDUCKS	H 80001
Writer(s)	Freddy Milton
Artist(s)	Freddy Milton
Dates	1976 (release date as a Kalle Klodrick story) Summer of 1980 (release date as a Donald Duck story)

The Big Sneeze is a comic story written and drawn by Freddy Milton. It features Donald Duck, Huey, Dewey and Louie Duck, Professor Phineas McGuffin and Mr Billups.

Plot

Huey, Dewey and Louie Duck's official Junior Woodchucks pigeon, Wheezer, loses a key race, getting the ducklings to lose their status as supergenerals and be back at being simple scouts. However, they are relieved when they see that Wheezer only stopped on his way to rescue another carrier pigeon, Pandora, who was carrying a message from Professor Phineas McGuffin, who turns out to be an old acquaintance of Mr Billups, the curator of the Duckburg Museum. The ducks are off to rescue McGuffin on a very strange island where ageing potatoes grow, the fountain of youth flows and a sneezing purple dragon roams…

Behind the scenes

This story has quite a bit of history behind it. Freddy Milton created it as his first attempt at Disney comics and submitted it to Egmont, the Scandinavian Disney comics publisher. Egmont replied that they had no use for such a long story, although they did order him some shorter ones. Milton, however, was able to redraw part of his story and publish it as a standalone story, where Donald Duck and the nephews had been replaced by a goose called Kalle Klodrick in Danish and his two own nephews.

The story was eventually published in 1980 in the Dutch Vakantieboek 1980, a special Summer issue, although under a special license that did not allow other Disney publishers to reprint it. It was eventually published in English in 2016 in Donald Duck #384, although the dialogue had been subtly altered to flow better.

The same plotline was also used by Milton for a Woody Woodpecker story, and, in a heavily reworked version, for his own characters, the Gnuff Family, under the title of Gargantua's Cure.