PKNA 7: Invasion!

Spores is the seventh regular issue of PKNA. It was written by Francesco Artibani, and penciled by Paolo Mottura.

It features the first appearances of Fenimore Cook and Rangi Fangus.

Plot Summary
Angus Fangus goes to New Zealand with the Duckmazes rugby team as a special guest commentator, despite hating the sport. After his passport is checked, a call is sent to Fenimore Cook, telling that Angus has returned.

Meanwhile, at Ducklair Tower, Uno is running a search to see if there are more places infested with Evronian spores (after Duckburg Desert last issue). Donald tells him a world-wide search could take years, and suggests Uno to connect to the hospitals' mainframes to check files for infectious diseases. If they find a biohazard 3 with the same symptoms of those affected by the spores' poison, they will find what they're looking for. Uno does so and reaches two coincidences at Mansfield, New Zealand; two Maori from the Cape Dominion clan, admitted at the Woahtaroa Hospital two days ago.

At New Zealand, the news team covering the Duckmazes must return to Duckburg, but as they cannot find Angus, they leave without him. Angus, disguised as a janitor, enters Cook Tower, but Cook is expecting him. It turns out that Cook has the Fangus clan mask (from PKNA 1: Shadows on Venus), but as Angus is not sentimental, Cook deduced what Angus really wanted was a disc with compromising information, hidden inside the mask. Cook destroys the disc, and doesn't arrest Angus for trespassing because he wants him to see the taking of his clan's land.

The Duck Avenger reaches New Zealand and watches a woman named Nebula Faraday telling the local Maori tribe that they are the heralds of a superior civilization, and brings as proof a sealed Evronian spore, and she orders her armed guards to keep everyone away from the Cape Dominion mountain.

The Duck Avenger reaches the mountain in a new tactical suit for the snow, and finds an Evronian army and thousands of spores. While he fares well against the Evronians at first, they shoot him down. After the Evronians leave the Duck Avenger for dead, he is found by somebody who drags him away.

At the airport, Angus rents a car and remembers when he found about toxic waste being dumped in the Cape Dominion natural preserve, his clan's lands. His informant, Captain Taratoa, told him that someone was getting rich by having half the world's industries skip on paying treatment costs for all that trash. The name of the dumping ship led Angus to Fenimore Cook, so he got a lot of incriminating information about Cook in a disc and blackmailed him into leaving Cape Dominion alone. Angus stops remembering when he reaches the mountain.

The Duck Avenger wakes up and meets the woman who saved him, who introduces herself by the name Rangi. She once was the Kaumatua, the clan leader of the Cape Dominion maori, but one day she saw the arrival of the Evronian ships and chose not to tell anyone about it, then came Nebula speaking about space lords that had landed on the mountain, and eveybody was either deceived by her talk or followed her out of fear.

Angus reaches his clan's village and finds it empty, then hears gunshots and finds the clan and Nebula celebrating as a benefactor from Wellington has brought them a dirigible with mega-screens to spread their message avobe Wellington's Stadium during the rugby game. Angus recognizes the benefactor "Mister Collins" as Pickett, Cook's secretary, so he sneaks into the ship to find what's going on. Without Nebula's knowledge, Cook's plan is to have the airship explode during the speech, which will be seen as a terrorist act and, with the maori pursued by the law, he will reclaim Cape Dominion.

The Duck Avenger and Rangi try to tell the maori the truth about the "cosmic lords" but are interrupted by an Evronian attack which brings the point anyways. The Duck Avenger protects the people and Rangi takes two guns to shoot two Evronians down, and the rest of the clan follow suit to make amends. The armed maori have the Evronians run away. The real alien presence makes Pickett repent of what he has done and he confesses the airship Nebula took away is rigged to blow up.

The Duck Avenger reaches the airship and crashes into it to warn everybody that it is about to blow up and evacuates everybody except Angus, to whom he gives a parachute to jump. Uno uses an inter-orbital capsule to drag the airship away to space, where it hits the Evronians' ship.

Back at Ducklair Tower, Donald is sad because, even though Cape Dominion is safe, there still are more spores somewhere else, and there was no evidence against Fenimore Cook. When Uno concedes that maybe there wasn't a happy ending, Donald also considers that there was at least one happy ending.

In New Zealand, Angus finds Rangi, his mother, who welcomes him with a punch on the face.