|
Editorial Review Product Description
Whether it's finding gold, journeying in the Klondike, or fighting ghosts, Donald will always have help with Huey, Dewie and Louie, his much more prepared nephews by his side! Carl Barks brought Donald Duck to prominence, and it's only fair to start off the series with some of his most influential stories! A “Greatest Hits”-like collection of classic stories! ... Read more Customer Reviews (3) 
Five Stars for Barks, One or Two for Most of the Rest
For readers who can't get enough of Jane Austen's Darcy and Elizabeth, there are, I think, literally dozens of sequels, alternate versions, and modern "inspired-by" versions of her great comic novel "Pride and Prejudice."Some of these are, no doubt, worthwhile in their own modest ways, but, luckily, no publisher is yet bringing out collections of works BY Jane Austen that also include UNDER THE SAME COVERS works by her imitators.I wish publishers of Carl Barks' wonderful comic book stories featuring the Disney Ducks would do the same.Don Rosa and William Van Horn HAVE done Duck stories worthy of appearing in the same volume with stories by Barks; I don't think anyone else has.Geoffrey Blum's scripts and (especially) Daan Jippes' art would also be worthy of inclusion in this category, but the storylines they were given to work with simply are not.I'm all for making the "international" Duck stories available to U.S. readers who are interested, and I'm not saying all of these stories are unworthy of their interest.(Likewise for the work of Tony Strobl, etc.).But I, personally, don't have such an insatiable appetite for Duck material, let alone the time to peruse or the funds to acquire all of what publishers keep telling us is "the best of the rest."I want BARKS, ROSA, and (the best of) VAN HORN.When ALL of Barks, Rosa, and Van Horn is simultaneously, inexpensively in print, publishers, by all means branch out.Or publish the material by other creators concurrently but in separate volumes.But please: don't put wretched and interminable drek like "Moldfinger" in the same volume with the classic work of Carl Barks.
Classic Barks, and a whole lot of filler
Whereas Boom! Studios' previous classics volume, Mickey Mouse Classics:Mouse Tails, provided a comprehensive and thoroughly enjoyable survey of Mickey Mouse's progression across the years, Donald Duck's first classic volume seems uneven and thoroughly unsure of what to do with him.It's not for lack of material.Donald Duck is, undisputibly, Disney's second most succesful comic book character of all time (Uncle Scrooge being the first), and he has been the subject of so many amazing comic book stories over the years.While many of them were written by Carl Barks (and two of his masterpieces are featured here), Donald also made his mark when written by masters like Romano Scarpa, William Van Horne, and Marco Roto, to name a few.Unfortunately, none of those other names appear in this volume, nor do the wealth of richness they added to Donald's character and supporting cast over the years.
Instead, what we receive in this volume are two wonderful, masterfully executed Carl Barks works (taking up 42 of these 112 pages), one enjoyable and seldom seen epic by Carlo Chendi ("Mission: Moldfinger"), and then forty pages of forgettable filler that seems to have been added arbitrarily.This filler doesn't reflect any particular aspect of Donald's personality nor evolution, and it's not all that entertaining.Where are the essential stories that are critical for understanding Donald and his legacy?Why not see a story featuring Paperinik (A.K.A. The Duck Avenger), Donald's superhero alterego that was a smash sensation in Italy in the 1970s, or notable supporting characters like Honkey Go-Kart, OK Quack, or Bum Bum Ghigno?This volume was a tremendous opportunity to open our eyes to the Donald Duck that has evolved in foreign media for the last forty years while he has remained relatively unchanged in American print since Carl Barks' time with him.Instead, one third of the book is dominated by Barks, and the rest is (as the last story is so appropriately named) "Nothing New."
Carl Barks was one of the greatest things to happen to comics in general, let alone Disney Comics or Donald Duck, but this introductary volume should have strived to stretch our interests beyond that and open our eyes to all the amazing things that Donald has become since Barks.Otherwise, why not just release a nice hardcover "Carl Barks on Donald Duck" series?
In terms of the actual presentation of the material, Boom! has once again put together a beautiful hardcover volume with quality printing and paper.Once again, I would have enjoyed a preface explaining the selections made for this volume, though, as well as a brief history of Donald's evolution as a comic book character.I am pleased to see that Magic Eye Studios has toned down their color restorations a bit, making their recolorizations of classic comics look a little more authentic and less modern than in the Mickey Mouse volume, and the non-Magic Eye restorations on the Barks' stories are absolutely perfect.Really, my only complaint with Boom!'s presentation of these stories is that the translation on the Moldfinger storyline is far too modernized, utilizing current cultural references as substitutions when the original jokes don't translate perfectly.I think this breaks up the tone and historical authenticity of the story much as the excessively modern recolorizations did in the previous volume.A story from 1966 shouldn't be referencing Pierce Brosnin, nor should an old attendant in a ratty gas station claim to be having his assistant look up a file on the computer when he's using a rotary phone to talk to him, and it just gets thoroughly weird when Uncle Scrooge claims to be turning up the "CD player" when he's clearly using an old radio.Boom! could have shown a little more taste in doing this.
All in all, this is a pricey way to read two lovingly restored Barks classics and the interesting (if unusually translated) "Mission: Moldfinger," but this is hardly an adequate introduction to Donald Duck, nor is it any kind of greatest hits collection either.Boom! really could have shown a little more care in choosing the scope of this volume.Hopefully, they'll learn from their mistakes here when assembling their next classic volume.
Boom! keeps the beat going with this Donald collection
The Boom! "Classics Division"'s first whack (or should that be "Wak"?) at Donald isn't quite as uniformly impressive as the earlier MOUSE TAILS, but it's eminently worthy of an honored place on the same shelf. The Boom!sters "had me at" the very first page with a beautifully colored new reprinting of one of my favorite Carl Barks adventure tales, "Luck of the North" (1949). This story was one of the "Big Four" in WALT DISNEY'S COMICS DIGEST #44 (December 1973), the venue in which I was first exposed to Barks' work back in the 70s (though I knew neither his name nor his significance until later), and I think it's a severely underappreciated piece of work. Like the earlier "Race to the South Seas" and the later "The Gilded Man," it's structured as a one-sided battle between Donald and his cousin Gladstone that "turns" only at the very last (as in: right down to the last bloody panel) moment. The "big idea" here is that it's Donald's fault that he gets into the mess. Driven beyond the point of endurance by lucky Gladstone's bragging and gloating -- and, given that Gladstone also manhandles Donald physically while showing off his luck in various Duckburgian venues, we can certainly second Don's emotion -- Don tricks his cousin into going off to the Arctic Circle in search of a phony uranium mine, only to suffer an attack of conscience later. With HD&L (literally) in harness, Don dashes North to "save" Gladstone, but the Ducks wind up stranded on an iceberg. An iceberg that holds more than a few unexpected treasures having nothing at all to do with uranium...
First and foremost, "Luck" is a spectacularly drawn story. Mike Barrier correctly notes in his Barks book that Donald's gradual dissolution from flippant indifference to Gladstone's fate into literally being burdened with guilt is a real tour de force of dialogue-free characterization. There's a later panel in the story that, to my mind, is just as impressive. After Don, trying to get the fake map, accidentally grabs Gladstone's horoscope chart, he shows the piece of paper off to the boys. HD&L have the usual (for the era) sentence-sharing verbal reaction... and have three completely different expressions on their faces, all of which are believable under the circs. There are excellent Duck artists who would never have thought of that and would have simply given HD&L three identical "takes." It's a small thing, perhaps, but Barks excelled at the small details during this period of his career. The story's dialogue and gags are sharp and first-rate, as well... especially the opening, which gets us on Donald's side even as he plays a mean trick on his relative.
Alas, this marvelous story, which has never looked so good reproduction-wise, is marred just a hair by some silly political correctness injected by Boom!. On three occasions, characters shout, "We've been gypped!" With Boom! evidently worried about perpetuating stereotypes about gypsies, the line is changed to read, "We've been hosed!" Never mind that the expression is totally anachronistic to those familiar with the original... and do very much mind that the fractured dialogue of the Eskimos who have dealings with Gladstone, Donald, and HD&L over kayaks is preserved intact! Inconsistent much, guys? Then, there's the whole touchy idea of Donald using his Nephews as sled dogs. Thank goodness Don didn't use a whip, or this story would have been buried deeper than Floyd Collins long ago...
From a Dell classic, we move to a happy reminder of the best days of Gladstone Comics with the reprinting of "The Master's Touch," a late-70s story plotted by Egmont writers, drawn by "Dutch masters" Daan Jippes and Ben Verhagen, and, most significantly, dialogued by Geoffrey Blum. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that Blum reinvented the whole notion of a Duck story as a highly literate, even educational experience when he worked for Gladstone in the late 1980s. Here, he takes a pretty straightforward "mastery" tale (to wit: accomplished photographer Donald, who specializes in prettifying ugly reality, comes unglued when he comes up against a subject that represents the ultimate challenge) and gives it a patina of extra class. "I found the great truth in the camera obscura of life!" Don gloats to HD&L before his big fall. For those like me who first read newsstand Disneys in the "Gladstone I" era, Blum's work established a level of quality that we've since come to expect from American writers. That's not to say that I take his work for granted -- far from it, in fact. All I have to do is dip into a new Whitman Duck comic from the late 70s or early 80s to realize what a quantum leap Blum's work represented.
Bob Gregory, author of this book's third reprint, "The Paper Route Panic" (1959), was also a fine writer in his heyday, but his reputation has suffered from the unfortunate fact that he drew, as well as wrote, a number of his stories, most notably those in DAISY AND DONALD. The D&D opi can only be termed "clunky," and that's a shame, as Gregory's work for the DONALD DUCK title in the late 50s was, if not up to the level of Barks' contemporary work on UNCLE $CROOGE, at least within shouting distance of same. "Panic," drawn by the fecund Tony Strobl, follows the Gregory template of tying seemingly disparate strands of plot together in a neat bow by the end. Here, Don messes up the absent HD&L's paper route while working on an invention that ultimately leads to a new hit record for the boys' favorite singing star, Paisley Mantee. Scrooge gets involved as a potential investor for Don's brainstorm, but his presence really isn't necessary; Donald could have sold his invention to anyone. Most lead stories in DD during this period included Scrooge, probably because his title was a better seller, and "Panic" doesn't do as good a job of incorporating Scrooge into the action as did other Gregory efforts of the era. Even so, it's a good, solid read.
Presumably, Boom! didn't see the irony of reprinting Barks' censored ten-page story, "Donald the Milkman" (1957), in the same volume in which it turned a gypsy insult into (I guess) a Canadian one. This is the third reprinting of a story (the first was in 1990, during the early Disney Comics era) that was originally rejected by Western Publishing because Donald was "too mean to the villain." Actually, the same dynamic that led us to root for Donald in "Luck of the North" despite his dishonesty is in play here, and amplified roughly 100-fold. In his efforts to become a "perfect" milkman, Donald shows no hubris whatsoever, remaining "humble and lovable" throughout, and so we're fully behind him when he finally "goes lactic" and takes revenge on the vicious pig character who's been trying to trip Donald up so that he'll get fired and the pig can claim his job. Truth be told, the "meanness" that gave Western the willies is downright silly, rather than offensive. Censorship is such an inexact science...
The Italian story "Moldfinger: or, The Spy who Ducked-Out on Me" (1966) goes on for 30 mostly tiny panels, and it's rather a slog, even given the fact that I'd been fully "prepped" for the casting of Donald as a "secret agent" thanks to DONALD DUCK AND FRIENDS' "Double Duck" saga. It's not really the fault of dialogue men Joe Torcivia and David Gerstein, who do the best they can with the raw material. No, this spy spoof has two big debits that can't be expunged: the artwork of Giovan Battista Carpi and writer Carlo Chendi's shameless swiping from Goldfinger (1964). Carpi was a contemporary of Romano Scarpa, and, while the Italian "Maestro" had his awkward moments artistically, they're minor when compared to Carpi's inartful inconsistency. The Beagle Boys appear first as roly-polies, then lose fully a quarter of their body weight within a few pages. Eric Moldfinger, the would-be looter of Scrooge's Money Bin, smokes a cigar roughly the size of a Hickory Farms Beef Stick and indulges in all manner of wild gesticulations. A human lackey suddenly appears at Moldfinger's hideout for no apparent reason. All I can say is, thank goodness the panels were so small. As to the plot, Donald the MIA (McDuck Intelligence Agency -- "The Cheaper Secret Service!") agent acquits himself reasonably well, but Moldfinger's scheme to "gas" the Money Bin guards hardly needed to be locked away for safekeeping, since it was lifted straight from the Bond movie. Joe and Dave made this one enjoyable in the end, but it was a close shave.
Happily, QUACK UP ends on a bright note with Lars Jensen, David Gerstein, and Cesar Ferioli's "Nothing New" (2007). Like a Mobius strip, the Ducks' "universe" bends back on itself here as Donald's second cousin Hackney McWebfoot, the burned-out author of the PUP COP! (read: SCOOBY-DOO) comic book, gets some fresh ideas simply by observing the Duck clan in action during an eventful trip to a county fair. Alas, "Unca Hack"'s plan to create a "universe" out of his relatives' world is nixed by an exec who claims "Nobody wants to read comics about Ducks!" (In the context of Duckburg's "ethnic" makeup, wouldn't this sentiment be considered, well, rather racist? Or perhaps "speciesist" is the proper term.) The funny conceit makes the tale work despite the odd fact that most of the specific activity in the story has nothing to do with the ultimate payoff. Oh, and Ferioli rules. I'd love to see previously-unseen Ferioli-drawn stories become a recurring back-of-the-book feature in these "Classics" titles. Despite the faults of "Moldfinger," this particular "Classic" lives up to the line's high standards.
... Read more
|
