A quick guide to (advanced) I.N.D.U.C.K.S. searching
Since a few people have seemed a bit surprised at my ability to find out the origins of random panels I see on tumblr, so here's how I do it!
Step 0: look at the context.
Firstly - ask yourself: do I even need to do a search?
I often see people asking "which story is this from?" when there's a source in the replies, or worse, when the title is included in the post (or in the image itself!), but they haven't noticed.
You do not need to be this person.
Can't find anything in the replies, reblogs/tags or original post? Alright, then it's time for a search!
Step 1: narrow down your search as much as you can.
inducks has an advanced search that looks like this:
(This is, somehow, not the full thing.)
As you can see, you can filter on things like characters, year of publication, and even which artists NOT to include.
Oftentimes, there are some parameters that are exceedingly obvious, and I recommend filling in AS MUCH OF THEM AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN. Donald appears in 55,000(!) stories. You may potentially be scrolling through thousands of irrelevant results, most of which will consist of newspaper strips from 70+ years ago, if you do not do this.
Some things you can almost always fill in:
Story code (you can fill in one letter, like H for Holland or I for Italy, to narrow down the country of production)
Story kind (it's often immediately obvious whether it's a one-pager or if it's a story; if you have a full page without a logo or "end", you also immediately know it's 3+ pages)
Rows/columns per page (self-explanatory, but not always possible if someone is only sharing partial pages)
Which character(s) appear (fill in every character you see. this will be the main way you'll narrow it down.)
Date of first publication (at least the upper bound, just check the post date! Alternatively, look for context like "this was in last month's Donald Duck Sonderheft and..." and go straight to an advanced publication search!)
Keywords (if there's a really obvious descriptor, it's always worth a shot!)
and make sure you set the images to "thumbnails" so you can easily compare them to the panels you have!
Still got too many results? It's time for some more search filters.
Step 2: Exclude, exclude, exclude.
Now it's time for you to use all of your media literacy and Duck style knowledge. It's time for some educated guesses. Ask yourself the following and use it in your searches:
What are my keywords in other languages? (inducks descriptions are often only available in languages from countries where that story was reprinted, so if a story is about finding gold, try "oro", "goud", "kulta", etc.!) (the 20% of the time when this works makes up for the 80% of the time when it doesn't.)
Which artist(s) is it NOT? (check your results for artists who appear frequently who you can exclude. or set the results to be sorted alphabetically based on artist, so you can skip past them more easily.)
What's the colouring like? (some stories, like PKNA, have very specific colouring. colour standards also change over time, with the new Topolino stories using nice pastels, while the Dutch weekly hasn't really changed its colour scheme in decades. Similarly, beagle boys in Danish & Italian stories wear red, while they wear orange in Dutch stories.)
Which year is it from? (can be tricky based on colouring if someone happens to have uploaded a more recent reprint, but if you're already a bit into the comics, it's going to be pretty easy to narrow it down into a 20-year window. Maybe less. Trust me, this makes a difference.)
Don't have intuitive answers to these questions?
Try having a look at some characters' "Gallery" pages on inducks, so you can get an impression of how they were drawn by different artists over time. Here's 1940s Gladstone compared to 2010s Gladstone:
As a bonus, you get a bit of a feel for the colouring and styles used in different contexts. As you can see, Italian and Danish stories give him blond hair, while Dutch stories keep his original white hair. Do be aware of reprints, though - everything but the first Barks panel is digitally coloured!
Most artists also have Gallery pages, which can be very helpful if there's a prolific artist you need to exclude from your search results!
Still got too many results? It's time to do some real digging, now!
Step 3: Back to the Klondike context
Look at the post again (yes, including any notes/replies).
Is there any issue/publication information? (If the OP says it was "in this week's Topolino..." or if a reply says "hey, I read this in German when I was a kid!" it will help you tremendously.)
Where did OP get the panels from? (for example, if they're in German, tick "reprinted in Germany". if you know the OP is italian and has a subscription to topolino but not other publications, add "I TL" to the story code or say it was reprinted in "it/TL")
What other posts did they make recently? (tumblr doesn't always make this easy, especially if the OP doesn't have an archive enabled or deleted the post, but I'll often see people post about the same story a few times in a row. This is a clue!)
This is kind of all you can do in terms of layman's searches. If you're still unsure, you have two options: ask for help... or get more Duck knowledge.
Final tip: Know your Ducks.
If you read enough Duck comics, you'll get a feel for a lot of common artists' styles. You'll be able to say things like "those lines? that must be Guerrini!" or "man, that's such a Cavazzano pose" or "oh, Vian birds!"
Some examples in case you don't believe me. These are instantly recognisable to me.
Eventually you'll also learn a lot of Duck trivia that will help you. Like around which time airbrushed colouring was cool (the 90s), which comic series often get read (English releases are obviously popular - lots of Barks, lots of the 2015-2017 IDW run, but also Readly's digital releases of XPW-coded stories which aren't counted as publications on inducks), how different countries' story codes work, and even some fun facts about international duck publishing. You'll probably come out of it with your own collection, too!
Also, eventually you'll just develop a certain pattern-matching part of your brain that goes "oh, this looks just like that other story I read last week!" and you won't even need to remember an artist's name - just how to find them back again.
I hope this helps to clarify things!
Some bonus tips:
Topolino artists write their story codes as starting with I or IP. Inducks standardises that to I TL. (If you see "IP-3479-1", it's actually "I TL 3479-1".)
Stories often take a few weeks to be added to inducks. Indexing is volunteer work. Stuff that's more popular gets added first. If your story is less than a few weeks old and you can't find it, try again later. (This goes double for anything other than mass-produced European pocket books and magazines.)
Try not to pester the OP too much. There are tens of thousands of Duck comics. The chance of someone remembering exactly where a specific panel comes from and being able to find it back for you is pretty low. Feel free to send a reply, but don't get upset if you don't get an answer.
And similarly: know what's realistic. If all you have is a panel with background characters (i.e., characters you can't search for on inducks) the odds of you finding it back are astronomically small. Actually, anything that's just Donald-Scrooge-nephews is nigh impossible to find back, unless you have more specifics.
Know what's popular. Classic Barks & Rosa stories are often getting read and shared online. While Barks is obviously the model for the Dutch & Danish styles (and they look near-identical sometimes), the fact that they're being shared at all is usually enough to make me go "this must be Barks!" rather than "this must be a Dutch story." (Dutch stories are usually pretty short and not all that interesting, on top of not being easily accessible to English-speaking audiences in the way that Barks's comics are.)
Bookmark things! I like to draft reblogs of posts where I'd like to identify the comic and come back to them later. I think the longest I've gone between a draft and a reblog was 3.5 years.
and lastly... Don't forget to have fun! There are loads of comics out there and oftentimes an out-of-context panel doesn't represent the story at all. Take it easy and don't sweat it if you can't find something back. There are always new stories to read!
