'Uncle Scrooge' Comic Is Returning This April From IDW

If there's one thing I think we can all agree on, it's that comics have been suffering from a distinct lack of Uncle Scrooge lately. He is, after all, officially ranked at #3 on ComicsAlliance's definitive but sadly unpublished list of the greatest comic book characters of all time, but while reprints of his more famous adventures have been making their way back to shelves recently, he hasn't had a monthly book in almost four years.

Fortunately, that's a problem that's soon to be remedied: Starting in April, IDW will be publishing a new monthly Uncle Scrooge comic as part of a new line of Disney books, kicking off the return of the whole line with Donald Duck in May, Mickey Mouse in April, and the long-running Walt Disney's Comics And Stories in June.

The announcement is an interesting one for a couple of reasons, mostly that Disney already owns a comic book company, and you'd think if they wanted to make Uncle Scrooge and the other comics available to an American audience, they'd probably go through Marvel. They have, after all, been publishing stories like Figment there, and getting the highly identifiable Disney characters might help unify the two brands.

That said, the Disney comics have a long history of being licensed out to other pubishers-- companies like Gemstone have been created for the sole purpose of publishing Disney comics, and the line was last seen in 2011 at Boom! Studios. Fantagraphics is currently publishing prestige format collections of stuff like Don Rosa and Carl Barks's duck stories and Floyd Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse, and while IDW recently announced Artist's Editions for Barks and Rosa, bringing back the monthly comic definitely comes as a surprise.

Judging by the credits of the first issue, which include Jonathan Gray, Rodolfo Cimino, Romano Scarpa and Giorgio Cavazzano, the series will likely focus on reprinting comics originally published in Italy, where the Disney comics remain far more popular than on this side of the Atlantic. And in this case, it's going to be about the Beagle Boys building a robotic criminal to steal Scrooge's three cubic acres of coins, which sounds pretty awesome.