I have not bought this book yet.
I have read comic books all my life but I didn’t ‘discover’ Barks works until after Duck Tales. I think I was about 13 when Duck Tales started, and I loved it. That show was filled with exciting globe trotting adventures. This wasn’t the Disney I had seen before (gag-fest shorts that paled next to Looney Tunes)
After the show ended I was in a Barnes & Noble and I discovered a 5 pound, 13 inches high book called “Uncle Scrooge: His Life and Times”. It was a collection of 12 Uncle Scrooge comic books with long text peices talking about each one in detail. My love of comics and Duck Tales lured me into flipping through the book for a little bit.
I noticed quickly that a number of these stories were plots from Duck Tales. I hadn’t realized Duck Tales was based on a comic.
Each time I went to Barnes and Noble I read another issue or another essay. Eventually I had read the entire book. So I bought the book because I knew I wanted to read it again. And again.
And then I started buying about any and all Carl Barks comics I could fine. I bought single issue reprints and treasury sized collections. Over the next year I spent way too much of my high school money on Disney Duck comics. I probably have a large percentage of Carl Barks’ work. I don’t have it all. And I don’t know if I ever read one that is bad. Much of it is great. I definitely own the stuff in this hardcover picture above, and these are some amazingly fun stories.
The only reason I am not buying it right this second is because it will be a nice easy gift for someone in my family to get me for Christmas. And I guess, for a lot of future Christmases. It’s going to be a like 30 volumes!
Carl Barks wrote and drew amazing comics for decades without ever getting credit, since they were “Walt Disney” comics and Disney’s name was the only one listed, even though he had nothing to do with their creation, and probably never even read many of them. Barks’ identity would later be revealed, but while he was making these comics, he came to be known simply as “the good duck artist.”
He created Uncle Scrooge and basically re-created Donald Duck and his nephews by making them fully-formed characters that they never even came close to in the animated shorts they appeared in. He put them in all kinds of dangerous situations, and a lot of those adventures were later re-purposed for the TV series DuckTales (although they had to ditch Donald in the pilot, since his unintelligible voice wouldn’t be able to handle the amount of dialogue he has in the average Barks comic.)
Barks’ comics are funny and exciting and now Fantagraphics is officially printing his entire body of work (which he didn’t even begin until he was over 40) in GORGEOUS and affordable hardcover editions. I bought the first one today. By the time they are done printing his complete works, I will be so old it’s almost hard to believe I will still care about anything at all.
But for today, this book makes me happy.
