Carl Barks: C/D?

My favorite at the moment is the one in which Scrooge and Donald are both hypnotized into seeing their past life, in which they were burying treasure for Queen Elizabeth on some Caribbean island, and start battling to find the treasure before each other. (Spoiler: The treasure turns out to be potatoes.) It has absolutely incredible artwork of the Caribbean in the middle of a gale.

I might recommend following this link:

http://www.google.com/search?q=beru%27s+disney+comics

Barks, Rosa, Gottfredson, other stuff. Just discovered "Dangerous Disguise," totally insane spy parody featuring an all-human (except for ducks) cast.

GYRO GEARLOOSE
GYRO GEARLOOSE
GYRO GEARLOOSE

Dude hell of thanks clotpoll!

interesting that don rosa has kind of joined the canon. he's pretty good, but it's hard not to think of him as second-hand barks.

"dangerous disguise" is the one with madame x, right? and the big bullfight scene? classic. my dad has a near-complete set of barks reprints, which are currently on loan to my 9-year-old nephew on the understanding that they'll move to my house when my kids are old enough to get into them. i'm looking forward to that.

This thread inspired me to look up Carl Barks at the library - they have a 375 pg book called "Uncle Scrooge McDuck: his life and times," CLASSIC!

It is in the REFERENCE section and cannot be checked out. DUD.

interesting that don rosa has kind of joined the canon. he's pretty good, but it's hard not to think of him as second-hand barks.

Rosa is not the perfect artist (something which I think he admits himself), and sometimes can be too clever for his own sake, but he has done a lot of great Duck stories. His biography of Scrooge has some uneven bits, but mostly it's very good, both funny and touching in a way few Disney comics of today are. And Rosa is pretty much the only one keeping alive the whole Duck legacy started by Barks. There's several great European Duck artists, but they mostly do their comics as one-off stories without caring much about the history of the characters, whereas Rosa has brought this sort of superhero style idea of continuity into his Duck stories, which is kinda interesting. I think both approaches of doing Duck comics are perfectly valid, but few people besides Rosa have chosen the latter.

Don Rosa is actually so popular in Finland (second only to Barks when it comes to comic artists) that he's done a 30 page Duck comic based on Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, to show his appreciation to local fans.

And apparently you can read it on the site Clotpoll linked to.

Thanks for the link, by the way!

holy jesus, clotpoll!! that is the best link ever! now i know what i'm doing for the next week...

has anyone ever read barks's last story, "king scrooge the first"? (ok i know it's not his "last" per se but i'm not counting all those junior woodchucks things he didn't draw, or the trojan horse thing he did in the 90s) i've never been able to find a copy of it, but apparently the original version he turned in was quite dark and got chopped up by the censors a bit.

aw man, no cbrs on that site? Guess I'll have to make 'em myself.

carl barks = one of my top ten choices for comics to read while yer gettin yer smoke on. so much unbounded creativity makes ya go "Woooooah." not to mention the gorgeous clarity of the panels.

has anyone ever read barks's last story, "king scrooge the first"? (ok i know it's not his "last" per se but i'm not counting all those junior woodchucks things he didn't draw, or the trojan horse thing he did in the 90s) i've never been able to find a copy of it, but apparently the original version he turned in was quite dark and got chopped up by the censors a bit.

It was drawn by someone else, right? I haven't read it but I think it's been released in some Finnish collection of Duck comics, might check it out sometime.

Oh yeah, a quick search reveals it was drawn by Tony Strobl, and they have that collection at the library near my place. I think I'll loan it the next time I visit there.

Interesting read here:
http://tokyohanna.blogspot.com/2010/11/art-historians-german-translators.html

and similarly fun:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrooge_McDuck

damn this stuff is dark

the reprint book is beautifully designed and easy to read but yeah, a lot of it not really barks's best material (apart from the title story and the short one about the game show). it should really pick up with the next book which is reprinting all the classic scrooge stuff.

it's chronological, right?

I'm only familiar with a handful of Barks' stories so almost all of this is new to me. I'm not complaining really - it's a beautiful book and it is funny - but even being familiar with Barks' rep as a cynic the sheer amount of assholishness on display is sort of jarring.

and I really don't know why they thought it was important to include the voodoo one.

they're sort of doing it chronologically but sort of not -- looks like they're alternating between 'scrooge' and 'donald' themed books.

the 'voodoo hoodoo' story is pretty messed up -- scrooge being depicted as a ruthless imperialist plunderer is genuinely unsettling.

voodoo hoodoo is generally considered to be one of the great barks stories, it is hella didactic

would like to put off explaining racist caricatures to my daughter for maybe a couple years tho

I mean I know it's par for the course for the media of the era but it kinda took me by surprise

Yeah, it's weird, does Scrooge ever face any consequences for being such a dick? Mostly Donald just gets fucked over.

Another kinda strange one is the Magic Hourglass, where Scrooge hires stereotypical Arab thugs to kidnap Donald and intimidate him into returning his hourglass.

Barks' stuff is generally a lot more humanizing than most of the shit of that era, to be fair
it's all still weird and racist fer shure but more in the eisner ebony style than, say
http://geek-news.mtv.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/eggfu.jpg

it's chronological, right?

― Authorities don't know who shot the 50 Cent the goose. (forksclovetofu)

sooooooort of - obv the books break everything up into long stories, short stories and gags, so not in exact publication order - but pub order wasn't necessarily the same order Barks drew them in. And by the time they finish, that aside, and the Donald and Scrooge stories being in different volumes aside, you'll be able to arrange them in essentially chronological order on your shelf, but they've started with (let's say) Volume Nine instead of Volume One, so that the most people get to buy the best periods of Barks - they'll go back to earlier, weaker stuff later on.

and I really don't know why they thought it was important to include the voodoo one.

― a dense custard of infinity (Shakey Mo Collier)

complete means including everything

i was just readin this the other day http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203771904574181722075062290.html

the idea of huey, dewey, and louie being called 'tick, trick and track' is kind of blowing my mind.

how did fanta suddenly get the rights to like everything?

Peanuts opened all the doors, and porn let them hold on until Peanuts. Here's to porn!

I contacted Disney and it took a couple of years to agree to a publishing contract. At first they told me they were going to publish it themselves, and I tried to talk them out of that without initial success. And then literally like a year later they called me back and said, “we decided not to publish it ourselves and that you’d be the right people to do it.”

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2011/01/exclusive-fantagraphics-to-publish-the-complete-carl-barks/

Really want the new books. Can't justify the cost right now, but I hope they stay in print long enough for me to snag.

While I was packing to move the other day I remembered that I have this, which my dad passed along to me a few years ago:

http://www.all-antique-books.com/uploads/antiquarianbooks/10/220271611423-1.jpg

It was published in '81, probably at the peak of Barks-mania, has great color reproductions of a bunch of the classics. Plus a signed/numbered lithograph, which I should probably frame or something:

http://d1g4sq00ps2bp3.cloudfront.net/images/scroogeBarks_2.jpg

that's awesome!

thanks for that robot6 piece.
i always wanted that leatherbound scrooge book

i think i kinda prefer don rosa... is that heresy?

don rosa himself would probably get mad at you for saying that!

i kno but

i have a good don rosa story.
i was a little kid and he and denny o'neil were doing a signing at a local comic store. I bought a copy of a random daredevil that o'neil had written and asked him to sign it. When he signed it I said "ahhhh now it's worth a lot more!" in true twelve year old fanboy mode. Rosa pitched a bitch and bawled me out, saying it's worth what I think it's worth and that the book is the thing, etc.

I skulked away.

Six years later, I went to college and the internet was fairly new. I found Rosa's phone number on a comic BBS and decided to call him to talk comics and apologize for twelve year old me. He picked up the phone on the fourth ring and proceeded to talk for like three hours about comics and life in general. Total sweetheart.

I think Rosa even did a Donald Duck story where he criticized the collector culture for not valuing things for what they are... I can't remember what they collected in the story, it wasn't comic books, but in the comments section of a Finnish Don Rosa book he explicitly states he was addressing comic collectors there, with their sealed plastic bags and stuff (the story came out in the 90s). So maybe you helped inspire that story?

I've seen Rosa talk twice... as in Finland he's a name on par with, I don't know, Charles Dickens here in Norway. Huge hero. Always seems a bit upset that the great Duck comics, his or Barks' or others, are not really acknowledged in his home country. Always takes a few digs at Mickey.

Bit odd that the WSJ article didn't mention the Nordic or other European countries that are as big on Donald, as it's really not a German phenomenon.

Reason I've probably read more Rosa than Barks is because it's so much easier to collect all his works. So many volumes of Barks' collection.

Yeah, the Duck comics are really big in the Nordic Countries. (And at least here in Finland it's specifically Donald who's the most popular; people seem to connect with the "loser" type, whereas Mickey Mouse isn't quite as popular, because he's more of an American "winner" type.) The Finnish weekly Donald Duck comic book has a circulation of roughly 300,000 and is read by over million people (one fifth of all Finns) every week. The Finnish names of the Duck characters are used in everyday language to depict certain kinds of people (for example: "he's a regular Gyro Gearloose" = "he comes up with wild ideas"), and so on... So yeah, they're big in here.

Barks visited here a couple of times, and he was practically treated as a demi-god. Almost of his major Duck comics were already collected in Finnish editions in the 80s, and pretty much everything else he drew (as well as stuff he wrote for other artists) has been reprinted in the 90s and 00s. I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say he's the most popular fiction writer of all time in Finland. If it hasn't been done already, I think it'd be interesting subject for some cultural historian to study why the Duck characters have resonated so strongly (much stronger than in their country of origin) in the Nordic countries, which generally have never been overtly pro-American.

"almost all of his major Duck comics"

, I think it'd be interesting subject for some cultural historian to study why the Duck characters have resonated so strongly (much stronger than in their country of origin) in the Nordic countries

otm - I'm super-interested in this, tho' think it wld require big $$$ for any kind of proper research into the question. Does Finland generally have a comics-centric culture, Tuomas - and does it produce any original Duck material, or is it all translated?

there's this article from 2009: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2009/12/nordic_quack.html

interesting article, tho' i think it ties in as much w/ european telecult phenom like this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinner_for_One

as it does with the comic bks themselves

From thst slate article:
The sadistic Aracuan (regularly mistaken in Sweden for Hacke Hackspett, or Woody Woodpecker)

Hacke Hackspett!

so. dudes. i just started collecting the fantagraphics versions of these. quality is awesome, essays are superb, and... i'm totally confused about the publication order?

haha yeah it is totally random

they're purposely avoiding publishing the very early stuff and the very late stuff until the very end of the project, i think. all of the material they've published so far is from what pretty much everyone agrees is barks's 'great' period, from 1947 to about 1955. agreed that they are totally beautiful and kind of a dream come true for me, it's genuinely crazy that this is the first time these wonderful and pretty much universally beloved comics have actually been widely available in the u.s. since their initial printing.

I've only got 3 of them so far but would love having em all

i may have bitten off a bit much. as a guy who owned, up until now, zero comics, i'm collecting

the mickey mouse collection (gottfredson)
the carl barks disney library
the don rosa disney library

but they are all so good, beautiful, and smartly supplemented

they are! it's kind of ridiculous that i'm buying these things for the third time but they're really nice!

i'm totally confused about the publication order?

as well as starting with stronger material, the other main idea is that kids don't care about getting all their books lined up in sequential order if they don't know about it, and can just enjoy the stories

there's numbering in the indica for 54-year-old nerds iirc

or what this guy said

Carl Barks: C/D?

Continuity doesn't really matter in Barks' comics, so the reading order is not that important. IIRC there may be a couple of stories that refer to earlier ones (though the reference is always made clear to those who haven't read the earlier comic), and I guess Scrooge has a character arc of a sort (from the grumpy miser of his first appearance to the guy who'd rather lose his fortune than let his trusty sled dog drown in "North of Yukon"), but other than that everything and everyone remains the same, you can read the stories in any order you want.

had never seen this cover piece before, holy shit
http://i.imgur.com/fivD8AO.jpg

Sexy Ducks Fucked Up My Psyche - Memoirs of an Avian Otherkin

Continuity doesn't really matter in Barks' comics, so the reading order is not that important.

Def., and I like the description of Scrooge McDuck consistency from TvTr0p3s:

• Scrooge himself: heartless bastard tormenting Donald for the sake of a few more cents, perfectly willing to exploit workers, destroy the environment and let his own family die in the name of profit? Indiana Jones-style treasure hunter? Jerk with a Heart of Gold who prides on having made his fortune "fair and square" and deeply cares by his family and his friends? Complete and utter badass? An eccentric old man who's not really good or evil?

• Scrooge's money bin may be a simple box made of stone or a blue and red dome; the Beagle Boys may frequently hide out in an old trailer or a shack or under the very foundations of Duckburg; Flinheart Glomgold may live in South Africa or in Duckburg as a member of the Billionaires' Club (or alternatively, he may not exist at all, with John D. Rockerduck in his place); Donald may range from being an average chef to a Lethal Chef; Magica de Spell may be a real powerful sorceress or a normal person who dabbles in sorcery; Granma Duck may be Scrooge's sister or not related to him at all; Gladstone Gander may be really lucky because a Triple Distelfink sign was painted on the barn door on the day of his mother's birth or because the goddess of fortune is in love with him.... The list goes on.

• The Beagle Boys' competence (and numbers) also seem to flip-flop (from few as three or as many as eleven). And do they use guns, or are they simply too poor to even afford those?

• Even Rockerduck himself, despite not even existing in most writers' minds, has flip-flopped between honorable businessman Scrooge likes to screw with for fun, slightly crooked bastard who enjoys spying, swindling and bribing to get his way, white-collar criminal, and murderous gang leader.

when i saw don rosa at phoenix comic con he had a big sign on his table explaining that he has nothing to do with "ducktales" so please don't ask him about it etc etc, haha.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51YGXVDZVHL._SS500_.jpg

Dorfman & Mattelart OTM