Each day in November, I will read and review/discuss/whatever one comic taken from a box of some of my childhood comics. Today, it's TaleSpin #7.

The Nostalgia November archive can be found here.

TaleSpin #7 by Bobbi JG Weiss, Oscar F. Saavedra, and Hector Saavedra is part of the comic series spun off from the Disney cartoon. I have fond memories of watching this show as a kid, although, honestly, it wasn't anywhere near as good as Duck Tales. The concept for the series was, basically, taking characters from The Jungle Book and putting them in a seaside town where Baloo is a pilot of a small cargo plane and has run-ins with air pirates and is romantically involved with the owner of the company, Rebecca...? Actually, not so sure about that last point. Anyway, to round out the cast, there's Kit, the orphan boy that Baloo has taken in; Molly, Rebecca's daughter; and Wildcat, the mechanic.

In this story, Baloo and Rebecca go away on business for the weekend, so Kit is put in charge of watching Molly. Their initial interactions are rather funny as Molly wants to play 'sibling rivalry' where Kit will break her toy and then their mom will yell at him... But, things get all crazy when there's a knock at the door and it's Witherspoon, an asshole who searches for stowaways on planes and tried to send Kit to an orphanage. Fearing that Witherspoon has come to take him away, Kit takes Molly to Higher for Hire -- but Witherspoon follows them there apparently! Kit realises that he has to run away and packs a trunk full of things. (We see that Witherspoon leaves an envelope with Wildcat...) After stowing away the cargo hold of a plane, Molly bursts from Kit's trunk having hidden away in it. The pilot of the plane discovers them, but that's no problem since his plane is safe travel for hobos, and he takes them to Kit's old place of residence where there's a little hobo enclave. This visit doesn't do much except set up Kit and Molly returning home... via an island where hobos never return from. That's because they're being captured and made to work on a plantation! But, thankfully, Molly snoops around and rescues the true owner of the place, so he and the hobos can overthrow the assholes who took over the place. Kit and Molly make it home, Kit having a new appreciation for other people, and we learn that Witherspoon just wanted to book a vacation with the company. Oh ho ho.

In the two-page back-up strip, air pirates attack the group on the way to a fishing trip, but the air pirate leader, Karnage doesn't believe they have no cargo... which leads to the gang using fishing and beach stuff to beat up the air pirates.

I was expecting something I wouldn't enjoy, but the storytelling here was rather engaging. The art is clean and basic, very much in step with the show's look without adding anything. The plot is a little heavy-handed in its message of how family and friends are good, that being alone isn't as great as you'd think, how running away from home just leads to more problems... but it's done in an entertaining way. Granted, the only joke that really got me was the 'sibling rivalry' one, it was still a solid comic. Much better than I expected.

Tomorrow, we continue our journey to the past with... well, I don't know. Come back and see!