My First Carl Barks

I decided to become a cartoonist last year, so I started reading some old "animal" comic strips and books for study and enjoyment. I've already tried out Walt Kelly and George Herriman (the latter is funnier than the former, but I love former's characters better).

For my birthday I got one of the billion volumes of reprints of Carl Bark's Disney comic books from Fantagraphics. I had asked for Vol. 24: The Golden Nugget Boat at random, not knowing why there was no Volume One. Unfortunately, this was made up of the Sixties stuff, which is apparently The Good Duck Artist's low point of creativity.

I was a little confused with the stories, even though I liked them. First of all, they weren't in character. Donald was kind of a blank; no tantrums or anything. Huey, Dewey, and Louie weren't sadistic and were kind-of sidekicks. The stories were more of the Silver Age Superman variety than cartoony frolics. Were they all like this?

I had some problems with Fantagraphics handling of some of this, as I discussed in the last post. Overall, though, I enjoyed it, and hope to collect more. I also hope to learn from it!