Magica De Spell: The DuckTales Sorceress, Explained

Magica De Spell is the sorceress who has spent sixty years trying to steal one coin. However, the reason she wants it is not the one most people assume, and her story ends somewhere far darker than a cartoon villain usually goes.

Carl Barks built her in 1961 as a deliberate rejection of the cackling-hag witch.

Then Disney kept her for six decades.

So here is what she really wants, what she can do, and how the 2017 reboot gave her one of the cruellest endings in Disney television.

Who Is Magica De Spell?

Magica is a duck sorceress from the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, just outside Naples. Barks created her for the Scrooge McDuck comics, and Disney has used her ever since.

First appearance: “The Midas Touch” in Uncle Scrooge #36, December 1961
Creator: Carl Barks, who wanted a third recurring foe alongside the Beagle Boys and Flintheart Glomgold
Home: A manor on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, an active Italian volcano
Voices: June Foray from 1987, then Catherine Tate from 2017

The name is a joke in two languages: Magica is simply the Italian word for magical, while De Spell does the English half of the work. Barks built a bilingual pun into her, and then set her on a real volcano outside a real city. So she is one of the few Duck villains with an actual address.

How Carl Barks Invented Her

This is where most write-ups go half right. They say Barks based her on Sophia Loren, and he did, although that is only part of it.

Model one: Gina Lollobrigida
And two: Sophia Loren
A third, added later: Morticia Addams, which Barks named in a later interview
His brief to himself: Seductive, amoral, and somewhat threatening

What he was reacting against: Barks had watched Disney do Witch Hazel in 1952, and he had seen Mad Madam Mim. Both are old hags, because that was simply what a cartoon witch looked like. So he deliberately went the other way and drew a young, glamorous enchantress instead. That decision is why she still works on screen sixty years later, while most of her contemporaries look like museum pieces.

What Magica De Spell Really Wants

Almost every summary says Magica De Spell wants the Number One Dime because it will boost her magic. That is not quite it, though, and the real version is stranger.

The plan: Melt the dime in the fires of Vesuvius and forge it into an amulet
What the amulet does: Grants the Midas Touch, turning anything the wearer handles into gold
The detail everyone drops: In her debut she explains that any coin of Scrooge’s would work
Why that one: Decades of contact have simply made it the most potent

Why the correction matters: If any old coin works, Magica is not chasing a magic artifact. She is chasing residue. Scrooge’s luck has soaked into that dime through sheer handling, so what she wants is a piece of somebody else’s fortune, distilled. That is a much better idea than a generic power-up, and it is the one Barks put on the page.

Poe, Her Brother

The Magica De Spell raven is not a pet. He is her brother, Poe De Spell, and a spell she cast turned him into a bird.
Plenty of write-ups get this backwards and describe a raven who became a sidekick. In fact it runs the other way, since Poe was a duck first.

Who he is: Her brother, transformed into a raven and left as her familiar
Who he replaced: Ratface, the raven from the original Barks comics
The literary joke: He is named for Edgar Allan Poe, author of The Raven
An older version of the same gag: German comics had already named her raven Nimmermehr, meaning Nevermore

The detail that reframes her entirely: In the reboot, Magica offered Scrooge everything. She would surrender her powers and her whole treasure if he would only help her save Poe. Scrooge ignored her. Then she searched the world for years and never found her brother. Every scheme she has run since sits on top of that.

Magica in the Original DuckTales

The 1987 series ran for a hundred episodes across four seasons, and Magica De Spell was one of its most reliable threats. June Foray played her with a thick pseudo-Russian accent.

The run: DuckTales premiered on 18 September 1987 and ended on 28 November 1990
Voiced by: June Foray, who kept the role in various media until 2013
Where you have heard it before: Foray used essentially the same voice for Natasha Fatale in Rocky and Bullwinkle
Her preferred method: Disguises, transformations, and long confidence tricks rather than direct assault

A small oddity in the casting: Barks wrote Magica as Italian, and set her at the foot of an Italian volcano. Yet the 1987 show gave her a Russian accent, and the 2017 reboot gave her Catherine Tate’s natural British one. So the most famous Italian villain in animation has never once been voiced as Italian on television.

The 2017 Reboot Version

The DuckTales reboot rebuilt her from the ground up. Instead of a recurring nuisance, she became the driving antagonist of the first season, and the design deliberately reaches back past 1987.

First glimpse: A black shadow with piercing red eyes, revealed at the end of “The Beagle Birthday Massacre!”
Design: Lanky and angular, a direct callback to Barks’ original drawings
Colouring: Green-blue feathers, a side effect of her magic, with slit pupils
Backstory: Fifteen years before the series she fought Scrooge and tried to banish him
How that ended: She lost, and found herself sealed inside the Number One Dime

Why trapping her in the dime is clever writing: The object she spent her life chasing became her prison. So she is not merely defeated. She is stuck inside the exact thing she wanted, unable to use it, watching Scrooge carry her around in his pocket for fifteen years. Barks gave her an obsession, and the reboot turned that obsession into a cell.

Lena and the Shadow

Magica De Spell escapes the dime by proxy. She creates a girl out of her own shadow, names her Lena, and sends her to befriend Webby.
That relationship is the emotional centre of the whole first season, because Lena starts as a weapon and stops being one.

What Lena is: Not a real niece, but a living shadow Magica conjured and controls
Her assignment: Get close to the family and reach the dime
The complication: Lena grows truly attached to Webby and turns on her creator
How Magica manifests: By warping Lena’s shadow while Lena wears the amulet

The best thing the reboot added: Magica does not have a sidekick in this version. She has a victim she made herself, and the show is honest about that. Lena is written as an abused child rather than a henchman, so every scene between them plays as coercion rather than comedy. Few Disney cartoons commit to that.

Her Weaknesses

For someone who can teleport, shapeshift into any animal and rearrange matter, Magica De Spell loses a lot. There are two reasons, and only one of them is magical.

Garlic: It repels her witchcraft, so Scrooge has been known to ring the money bin with it
Her own laughter: She gets carried away gloating and gives the game away
Her signature weapon: Foof bombs, which date back to her comics debut
One notable use: Hypnotic foof bombs deployed against the Phantom Blot in the crossover arc Dangerous Currency

The weakness that says the most about her: Garlic is a borrowed folk-magic rule. Laughing too hard is a character flaw. Barks gave her one of each, and the second one is the interesting half, because it means Magica loses to her own personality more often than to Scrooge. She is undone by enjoying herself.

Amelia, the Italian Magica

In Italy she is not really a guest villain. She is a lead, and she has been for decades in Topolino and the wider Disney Italy line.

Known as: Amelia
Tagline: “la fattucchiera che ammalia”, roughly the witch who bewitches
Raven: Gennarino, the Italian counterpart to Ratface
The difference: Italian stories regularly headline her and treat her sympathetically

Same character, different job: American Magica exists to lose to Scrooge. Italian Amelia gets her own stories, her own interior life, and frequently the reader’s sympathy. It is the same drawing and the same dime obsession. Yet one version is an obstacle, while the other is a protagonist, and Italy has been quietly writing the better one.

How Her Story Ends

The reboot finale gives Magica De Spell something almost no cartoon villain gets. She wins, and the manner of it is deeply unpleasant.
Bradford Buzzard, the vulture running F.O.W.L., had her captured and brainwashed. Afterwards she got loose.

Revenge: She turns Bradford into a mindless, non-speaking vulture
What she does with him: Keeps him as her pet and familiar
Why it cannot be undone: Her polymorph magic is irreversible, since only Poe ever learned to reverse it
The reading fans favour: That Bradford is a replacement for the brother she never got back

The cruellest detail in the whole series: Magica lost her brother to exactly this spell, and she spent years searching for him because she could not undo it. So when she does it to Bradford, she knows precisely what she is condemning him to. Then she puts him on her shoulder where Poe used to sit. A children’s cartoon ended its villain arc on a woman filling a family-shaped hole with a hostage.

The De Spell Family

Magica De Spell has a surprisingly documented family tree for a comics villain, built up across sixty years of Italian and American stories.

- Parents: Leone De Spell and Magnolia De Spell
- Brother: Poe De Spell, currently a raven
- Niece: Minima De Spell, plus Lena in the reboot, who is a creation rather than blood
- Older generations: Grandmother Caraldina and great-grandmother Tragica

Extended: Aunt Donata, uncle Gino, and cousins Matilda and Adelia

What the family tree tells you: Nobody builds four generations of backstory for a throwaway antagonist. The De Spells accumulated because writers in two countries kept wanting to know where she came from, and a witch with a great-grandmother is a person rather than an obstacle. Her magic is inherited, and so is the grudge.

Magica De Spell has never once got the dime and kept it. Even so, she has outlasted nearly every villain built to beat her, because Barks gave her something better than a win condition.

He gave her a want. Sixty years on, she is still on that volcano, still furious, and now she has a vulture on her shoulder who used to be a man.

Which version of her do you rate, the 1987 schemer or the reboot’s?

Let me know in the comments.