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Carl Barks




Title Creator Publisher Series Price
Donald Duck: "Lost in the Andes" Carl Barks Fantagraphics The Carl Barks Library $19.99
($24.99 list)
Barks1big
Read more and comment... 		Over the past decade, probably the single biggest frustration we've experienced here at The Copacetic Comics Company was the inability to offer customers the opportunity to experience the magic of Carl Barks in book form. This frustration was then exponentially magnified by the fact that at any given moment, nearly the entire body of work of the comics creator who was measurably the most widely read and putatively the most beloved in the history of American comic books was out of print!  The influence on American culture of the Disney duck comic books Carl Barks wrote, penciled, inked and lettered for roughly a quarter century is incalculably large.  George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are just two of the literally millions of baby-boomers who grew up reading the comics of Carl Barks and who felt the imprint of Barks's wide-ranging spirit of adventure and pomposity-puncturing sense of humor; R. Crumb's entire sensibility is grounded in Barks; and this is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg – most of all was the influence that the millions upon millions of childhood hours spent reading works that were both wildly entertaining and subtly subversive had on the generation that came of age in the 60s.  Carl Barks is one of the true titans of comic books, one of the very few who can hold their own with the likes of Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman and R. Crumb.  Now, at last, well over a decade since Gladstone Publishing's incarnation of the Barks oeuvre went out of print, his collected works will once again become available for North American readers (his works have been in print in parts of Europe; elsewhere?) in what – based on the evidence of the first volume – is sure to be the most outstanding edition ever produced.  Rather than potentially put off novice Barks readers by starting the series right at the 1942 beginning of Barks's tenure on Donald Duck, Fantagraphics has launched the series with a period that is both one of the most popular and critically heralded (think Duke Ellington's Blanton-Webster era band):  the stretch in 1948 and 1949 that contains this volume's "title track," Lost in the Andes, as well as the equally classic March of Comics giveaway, Race to the South Seas, along with two other "feature length" tales, nine consecutive (and classic) 10-pagers, and a sizable helping of one-page gag strips, which, taken together, give a good idea of the tremendous range and quality of his work.  An eight page introduction by Donald Ault, one of the foremost North American Barks authorities, starts off the collection, and it concludes with twenty pages of notes on the stories by a bevy of Barks scholars from around the world, including The Comics Journal's Rich Kreiner.    So, thank you Gary Groth, Kim Thompson and Eric Reynolds, for undertaking to edit and publish the The Carl Barks Library.  Thank you Jacob Covey and Tony Ong, for your excellent design.  Thank you Rich Tommaso and Paul Baresh, for, respectively, your superb coloring and production.  Thank you Donald Ault and the host of other fine Barks scholars for your thoughtful contributions to aid in the understanding of and provide context for the work presented here.  And, of course, most of all, thank you Carl Barks for producing one of the greatest bodies of work in the history of comics.  Doubters among you may want to take a moment to read this generous 17-page PDF preview, but bear in mind that the experience simply won't be nearly as satisfying as that provided by the print edition.  Click on the image at left to read our full review and learn more about Barks and this fabulous book, the first volume in a fifteen year long project to collect the entire works of Carl Barks!
The Toon Treasury of Classic Children's Comics Walt Kelly, Bob Bolling, John Stanley, Harvey Kurtzman and more ... Abrams ComicArts $35.00
($40.00 list)
Toon-treasury
Read more and comment... 		edited by Art Spiegelman and Francois Mouly If the amazing kids' comics from the halycon days of yore are your thing, then you've hit the jackopot with this one!  Well over 300 pages of classics, all scanned from the original comics themselves, and printed at approximately 120% of the originals.  These scans have been digitally cleaned up a bit, so there's no newsprint background tones, just the flat white paper that they're printed on.  While this might upset some purists, it was probably a good call as this book is clearly going to be marketed as a gift for children as well as for older fans, and lay people will have difficulty appreciating the nuances of newsprint; and they did a more than decent job of balancing the tones.  The book is, somewhat arbitrarily, divided into five sections:  Hey, Kids; Funny Animals; Fantasyland; Storytime; and Weird and Wacky.  The book successfully draws across the spectrum of children's comics from the twenty years following the close of the second world war – the golden age of kids' comics that fed the baby boomers' imaginations before television took over.  While certainly no one is going to agree with every choice, the editors – along with the board of advisors – picked a good crop of comics that is certain to contain favorites of every fan as well as win the hearts of every reader and, more importantly, is sure to capture the imagination of the next generation.  Includes work by all-time greats Carl Barks, Basil Wolverton, Harvey Kurtzman, John Stanley, Bob Bolling, Walt Kelly, and many, many more (even Dr. Seuss, who started out in comics).  Get a sneak peek, here (just click on the image of the open book at the top right, under "Sample Toon Treasury").
Carl Barks' Greatest DuckTales Stories #Volume 1 Carl Barks $9.85
($10.95 list)
OUT OF STOCK!
Barksgem1
Read more and comment... 		Hallelujah! At last, Gemstone delivers on their promises with this nicely done 144 page comic book size volume printed in vibrant flat colors on bright flat white paper, very much along the lines of the high quality work of the Carl Barks Library volumes produced in the 1990s by Gladstone, only this time in the comic book rather than album format. The six -- count 'em! -- unexpurgated Barks classics presented here are: Back To The Klondike (Uncle Scrooge #2; technically Four Color 456), Land Beneath the Ground (US #13), Micro-Ducks from Outer Space (US #65), Lemming With the Locket (US #9), Lost Crown of Genghis Khan! (US #14), and Hound of the Whiskervilles (US #29). What?! You say you aren't hep to Carl Barks, possibly the greatest storyteller in the history of comics? Well then, this is the place to start!
Carl Barks' Greatest DuckTales Stories #Volume 2 Carl Barks Gemstone $9.85
($10.95 list)
OUT OF STOCK!
Carlbarks2
Read more and comment... 		Wow, it's here already, right on schedule:  Six more classic Uncle Scrooge tales by the greatest of them all, Carl Barks.  This time around we've got "Giant Robot Robbers," "The Golden Fleecing," "The Horseradish Story," "The Status Seeker," "Tralla-La" and more.  This is the rare item that can truthfully be described as "Sure to be enjoyed by ALL ages."