Not every superhero is destined for epics. Not every superhero has an entire gallery of foes, their Kraven the Hunters or their Doctors Octopus; some barely have their Dr. Syclocks.
Super Goof was never meant to be a deep superhero parody in the way that his Callilosta compatriot Darkwing Duck was. He was created in a time when superheroes hadn’t yet established the cultural cache they have today: it was the 1960s, and the spandex set had only recently come back into favor thanks in part to the Marvel Age. Not many people were thinking about the genre analytically yet; it was still two decades before deconstructionists came along and thought, “what if we subverted this?”
Fantagraphics/Disney
So, no, Super Goof is no Darkwing Duck; he’s not even a Gizmo Duck. There aren’t any other super beings for Goofy to bounce off of, there’s no larger growing mythology around the gag of a Super Goofy. There is just Goofy, his special peanuts, and a sort of blind goodness inherent to the character that tells him: go. Do good.
The comics collected in Disney Masters Vol. 27: Super Goof and the Strange Case of Dr. Syclocks don’t present grand adventures; they hew closer to gag strips than to, say, their contemporary Carl Barks’ Duck stories. At his most adventuresome, Super Goof might jaunt over to Africa or go up against the Beagle Boys in much the way that Scrooge and Donald might, but his adventures are always a good deal tamer. They expect less investment of energy from the reader, rarely presenting shock and awe or intrigue.
The strength of these comics is that Goofy goodness, in the persistent gag that an oaf with good intentions might bumble his way through an adventure, but he’ll always get there in the end. There’s a genuine kindness to stories like these, stories more interested in passing the time of day than sparking conflict. When danger presents itself, it almost always does so without malice.
Disney/Fantagraphics
There are supervillains in this book. . . sort of. In the title story, some ghoul is going around blowing up jewelry stores. This sounds pretty bad, but the story tells you not to worry about it too much. In “The Twister Resisters”, there is an evil scientist with a Tornado machine terrorizing local farmers. He doesn’t show up until eighteen pages into a 24-page story, and he is summarily foiled with the help of Goofy’s oft-forgotten nephew, Gilbert. Goofy goes up against a freezing ray, meets alien creatures, and foils thieves, but none of these seems to faze our hero. The stories lack consequences, but they weren’t ever engineered with consequence in mind.
Super Goof and the Strange Case of Dr. Syclocks is a book for whiling away some pleasant time. A strip here or there, a fun longer adventure now and again. It’s a joyful but fluffy read, but it’s not going to challenge any discerning readers of superhero fiction – no matter how young those readers might be.
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