I realize that this is no longer topical, and that I should have written this back in September when I first thought about it, but I’m still going to write a short review of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion.

The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion is, obviously, the companion piece to The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. The Companion collects all the B- and C-chapters that Don Rosa has written since finishing The Life and Times, and also includes a couple of other stories which contain glimpses of Scrooge’s life before Duckburg.

The stories themselves are by and large as good as I remember them. The Cowboy Captain of the Cutty Sark and The Dream of a Lifetime are high points in humor, The Vigilante of Pizen Bluff brings the action, and The Prisoner of White Agony Creek and Hearts of the Yukon the drama. I am especially pleased to finally have my hands on Hearts of the Yukon, it has been missing from my collection for far too long. The Sharpie of the Culebra Cut and Of Ducks, Dimes and Destinies are amusing reads there and then, but otherwise unremarkable. I was a bit miffed to find that Last Sled to Dawson was not included in its entirety, only the flashback to Scrooge’s youth was printed. While I understand this decision, as the bulk of that story has nothing at all to do with Scrooge’s youthful adventures but deal with the consequences of them instead, it was still a bit disappointing to suddenly have the middle of the story thrust upon my on the new page, without any form of introduction. I thought it might be an error at first, but further examination of the index page revealed that it was only intended to be an excerpt.

As with the collection of the original twelve chapters, each story is accompanied by commentaries by Don Rosa, where he explains some of the background for the story, what inspired them, and what sort of research he did while working on them. They also include guides to find the hidden D.U.C.K-dedications. These pages are as interesting a read as they were in the original, and frequently add to the appreciation of the story, retroactively like.

The design of the book is obviously made to fit in with the original collection. It uses the same colors, the same fonts, and the same layout, and to my untrained eye it seems to use the same kind of paper. I appreciate consistency, so I mark that as a plus. I very much like the front cover, even if it is an amalgam of two previously made posters. Scrooge in front of the falling coins bearing his likeness from various stages of his life is a nice parallel to the cover of the original collection, with Scrooge in front of pictures in a photo album.

All in all, this book is well worth a read, and a definite must for anybody who owns the original collection.