Propaganda in Donald Duck

When writing a book you often end up seeing examples of what you are writing about everywhere you look. You find endless ways to associate the world to your subject, in my case right now: propaganda in comics. And sometimes the examples are so obvious they just stare you in the face. This was the case with this week's issue of the magazine Kalle Anka & C:o (the Swedish Donald Duck magazine - the best selling comics magazine in Sweden).

Here you find a two-page story which is nothing but blatant propaganda about file-sharing and illegal copying of music. Donald gets the idea to copy a popular CD and sell it, and no sooner has he thought this than the symbol of corporate greed, Uncle Scrooge, jumps through his window and gives him a lesson in copyright... Now I'm not taking sides in this debate, but I can say that this comic was not very well done. Its sole purpose is obviously to convey the message of it being illegal and immoral to download and copy music. The author has done nothing to try to conceal this and the characters are only used to tell this cautionary tale, acting strangely out of character. You can of course speculate in the reason for including this story in a Donald Duck magazine, published by a major corporation, telling stories about characters owned by another big international corporation known to vigorously protect their copyrights, but I'll settle for saying that this was for all purposes, a badly done comic.