Who is Darkwing Duck?
A rhetorical question, to be sure. The public has known who Darkwing Duck is, at least in concept, for over fifty years. Darkwing Duck Adventures was, and continues to be, the best-selling all-ages comic book of all time, bar none. Its acquisition by Disney in the mid-eighties turned out to be the company's best business decision of the Twentieth Century, which would only be eclipsed by its later acquisition of Marvel Comics in 2009. It was also a bit ironic that Disney bought a comic based around a satirical super-hero, one which ended up being more popular than many comics about straight-up super-heroes.
Still, despite the decades of cartoons, comic strips, TV shows, and merchandising, the most important figure to remember in the history of Darkwing Duck is his creator, Theodore Stein.
Stein was born in Salina, Kansas, in 1927, to a father, Benjamin, an accountant, and a mother Flora, nee Smith, who worked as a seamstress in the community. Ironically, he showed no particular proclivity for art during his years in school, and in fact, flunked the art class he took in his sophomore year of high school. This, however, may have been more due to his grueling evening paper route than to any lack of talent on Stein's part, as time certainly later revealed.
In the summer of 1943, Stein falsified his age on Army records and joined the United States Army Air Corps, where he served in several battles as a gunner against the Luftwaffe. Stein was particularly well known for the mallard duck he painted on each of the three planes upon which he flew. For fear of the German complaint against his father's people, he started referring to his last name as "Stones," even among other Allied troops, despite the fact that his mother's ancestry was not Semitic. After the war, he admitted to his comrades that he was a bit ashamed of this action. He echoed the sentiment in other interviews after his creations had become famous in the mainstream media.
After returning Stateside after the war's end, Stein discovered that he had found a passion: cartooning. While he had little interest in the visual arts prior to the war, Stein had found inspiration in the cartoons of Bill Mauldin and his contemporaries, and set out to make his own mark in the field. He had spent the last two years of the war drawing handmade cartoons on whatever paper had become available. By sheer coincidence, he encountered a salesman for a publisher in Minneapolis on the train home from the East Coast. He was hired as a penciler for Kapow! Comics, and started receiving scripts the next week.
Stein had little creative control over his earliest comics. The assignments ranged from science fiction to horror to romance. Some of the science fiction comics had a noted impact on his later work, at times where he repeatedly attempted to invert the tropes of typical genre fiction (see "Darkwing Duck in the Negaverse," where Darkwing discovers that the Negaverse is, in fact, the original reality, and that he and his St. Canard are merely a twisted reflection, and the constantly recurring "Darkwing Duck Multiverses," where nearly anything is possible, to Darkwing's occasional love interest/antagonist Morgana Macabre, whose appearance and family hearken back to the horror comics of the fifties).
Of course, none of these had as important an impact on Stein's later work as the hero he created himself, at the behest of Kapow!, the Dark-Wing Dirk. Told to create a super-hero to rival Batman, Superman, and the Sub-Mariner, Stein thought back to the heroes of his youth, such as the Shadow and the Crimson Avenger. In keeping with the standards of the time — prior to the Comics Code — the Dark-Wing Dirk sought out criminals in the night…and murdered them. Like his successor, the Dirk wore a double-breasted indigo coat and wide-brimmed fedora, not to mention a blue scarf, which he wore wrapped around his face, to hide his identity.
Unlike Stein's most famous creation, the Dark-Wing Dirk used a real automatic pistol with real bullets, which were often fired directly into villains or thugs in any given issue. Often referring to himself as the "Fear which Wings into the Night,' Dirk's adventures were abruptly shuttered after Kapow! closed its doors. While cartoonists and pencillers at the time were hardly paid any grand royalties in the current era, Stein had spent the last decade boarding in the same house with his widower father, and, having grown sick of the oppressively humid Kansas summers, moved out west with his wife and infant daughter.
Not coincidentally, the family moved to Salinas, California, not merely because of the similarity in name to Salina but also because of the climate, which was far more comfortable year round. It was in this new city that Stein began what would eventually become his signature title…