Volume 33, Number 11 · June 26, 1986
Just Ducky
By Robin Johnson
Carl Barks and the Art of the Comic Book
by Michael Barrier
M. Lilien (M. Lilien, 68–50 Burns St., Forest Hills, NY 11375.), 228 pp., $49.95
The Carl Barks Library
edited by Bruce Hamilton, edited by Thomas Andrae, edited by Geoffrey Blum
Another Rainbow (Another Rainbow, Box 2206, Scottsdale, AZ 85252.), 30 vols (projected) pp., $1000
Yesterday's trash may become today's collector's item; this is true, these days, of old comic books. Before rock videos, before television, they were the cheap popular entertainment almost universally shared by American children from the Depression through the mid-Fifties, part of the collective experience of both Jules Feiffer's generation and Steven Spielberg's. Comics are now bought and sold by collectors for high prices, sometimes, apparently, out of pure 'nostalgia,' but also partly in appreciation; for this least pretentious of the mass media attracted a few first-class storytellers whose work ranks with the best of the cartoonist's art, along with Thurber and Krazy Kat and Little Nemo.[1] In the case of Carl Barks, rediscovering him as an artist meant uncovering his identity first, since all his work, like that of most comic-book artists, was published anonymously. But children who grew up in the late Forties and early Fifties knew his style and manner—he was the 'good artist' who drew Donald Duck in Walt Disney's Comics and Stories for nearly thirty years. He was, besides, the creator of Donald Duck's incomparable Uncle Scrooge.
Review, 3677 words
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