The Beagle Boys

This postcard shows the Beagle Boys. The Beagle Boys are a group of thugs from the Scrooge McDuck comics, loosely based on the popular image of Ma Barker and the Barker-Karpis Gang. They are a gang of criminals who constantly try to rob Scrooge and were created by Carl Barks.

Their introduction and first appearance was in Walt Disney's Comics and Stories#134, in the Carl Barks comic Terror of the Beagle Boys. In more recent productions such as DuckTales and The Three Musketeers, the Beagle Boys sometimes appear as henchmen for Flintheart Glomgold, Magica De Spell, or Pete. They are still some of the most frequently appearing Disney comic characters, having gained huge popularity among Disney fans over the years.

In the comics, the individual Beagle Boys are referred to by their prison numbers, indicated on the tags seen on the chests of their distinctive red shirts (which appeared as orange in the comics). The three most common numbers are 176-167, 176-671, and 176-761. In fact, no digits other than one, six, or seven appeared on their prison ID tags. Carl Barks used to include the words "Beagle Boys, Inc." on their shirts under their numbers, which was later deleted. In later years, they appeared in the comics as a trio (some combination of the most common numbers with 671-176, 716-617 and 176-176), plus cousins and other relatives of various talents as spin-off characters. They live in a small tumbledown hide-out in Duckburg; in 1980s American-produced stories, their pet cat Ratty often lived there as well.

The Beagle Boys have lots of relatives who count each other as brothers and cousins: apart from their mother Ma Beagle, there are the Beagle Brats (their rascal nephews), the Beagle Babes (a trio of female cousins) and their grandfather Grandpa Beagle. The brains of the Beagle clan is Intellectual-176 (or I-176) who wears a mortar-board cap and glasses over his black mask. Grandma and Grandpa Beagle have appeared in the comics at various times.

Grandpa Beagle and his grandsons.

In Don Rosa's The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Scrooge first meets the Beagle Boys in his Mississippi riverboat days. Those Beagle Boys include Blackheart Beagle and his three unnamed sons. In the same comic book series, Scrooge first meets the modern Beagle Boys, during the Christmas at which he first met his grandnephews Huey, Dewey and Louie and met his nephew Donald again. Since then, the Beagle Boys have been a constant threat to Scrooge's huge money bin.

Sometimes they team up with other villains such as Magica De Spell, Black Pete, or Madam Mim, or they hire out their services to Flintheart Glomgold, Ollie Eiderduck or John D. Rockerduck. During these occasions, it should be noted, they continue to operate out of their own interests rather than their employers.

Sometimes, they antagonize Super Goof, Mickey Mouse, or other characters from Walt Disney's comic books. Although the characters are obviously based on dogs, they in no way resemble the actual beagle breed. The Italian band Banda Bassotti based its name upon the Italian name of the gang. [Disney wiki]