Walt Disney Donald Duck

by Carl Barks (Introduction)

Examines the development of the Donald Duck comics using the comic strips which have appeared in newspapers and comic books over the years

Genres: Graphic Novels

195 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1989

About the author

Carl Barks was an American cartoonist, author, and painter. He is best known for his work in Disney comic books, as the writer and artist of the first Donald Duck stories and as the creator of Scrooge McDuck. He worked anonymously until late in his career; fans dubbed him "The Duck Man" and "The Good Duck Artist". In 1987, Barks was one of the three inaugural inductees of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.
Barks worked for the Disney Studio and Western Publishing where he created Duckburg and many of its inhabitants, such as Scrooge McDuck (1947), Gladstone Gander (1948), the Beagle Boys (1951), The Junior Woodchucks (1951), Gyro Gearloose (1952), Cornelius Coot (1952), Flintheart Glomgold (1956), John D. Rockerduck (1961) and Magica De Spell (1961).
He has been named by animation historian Leonard Maltin as "the most popular and widely read artist-writer in the world". Will Eisner called him "the Hans Christian Andersen of comic books." Beginning especially in the 1980s, Barks' artistic contributions would be a primary source for animated adaptations such as DuckTales and its 2017 remake.

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

A scattershot overview of Barks' work. He wrote the introduction, and one wonders whether he chose his favorite comics, comics he considered important to the development of the Ducks, comics he heard most about from fans, comics the proper length to stick in the book, or whether someone else chose the comics and why. (The introduction is good. Barks talks about the Ducks' development and namechecks a few early Disney artists whose work he built on. He also says that most of his fan mail is from adults, which wouldn't surprise me now, but he was writing in the '70s.)

Lost in the Andes is in here. I grew up on Return to Plain Awful and I always squee when I read the source material. So is Luck of the North, which is a nice adventure from the days before airplanes were regulated and has the good sequence of Huey, Dewey, and Louie rescuing Donald while he's snowblind and wandering over polar bears. And there's an early Scrooge story where all the money from the money bin goes into the Duckburg reservoir and the Beagle Boys buy land downstream. But Christmas for Shacktown is reproduced here as well, and it's insipid. The Golden Helmet is stupid and should be buried, but it's in this collection.

Everything in this book has been collected elsewhere, and really, why go Donald when you can go Scrooge? If you find a copy of this Duck collection in your hands, read it by all means, but there's better out there.