[go: up one dir, main page]
Scribd
Upload
270 views2 pages

Bob Karp Carl Barks Jack Hannah: Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold

The document summarizes Carl Barks' career writing and illustrating Donald Duck comic book stories in the 1940s-1950s. It details that Barks wrote and drew the first Donald Duck comic published in 1942, launching his career. From 1943-1951, Barks wrote and drew most of the Donald Duck Four Color issues, developing the characters. The stories sent Donald and his nephews on adventures, helping to enrich the characters and deepen their characterizations. As Barks' workload increased in later years, other writers and artists began contributing Donald Duck stories as well.

Uploaded by

Rengie Galo
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
270 views2 pages

Bob Karp Carl Barks Jack Hannah: Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold

The document summarizes Carl Barks' career writing and illustrating Donald Duck comic book stories in the 1940s-1950s. It details that Barks wrote and drew the first Donald Duck comic published in 1942, launching his career. From 1943-1951, Barks wrote and drew most of the Donald Duck Four Color issues, developing the characters. The stories sent Donald and his nephews on adventures, helping to enrich the characters and deepen their characterizations. As Barks' workload increased in later years, other writers and artists began contributing Donald Duck stories as well.

Uploaded by

Rengie Galo
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

The first American Donald Duck comic book story, Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold, was

published as Four Color #9, October 1942. The story was written by Bob Karp and illustrated by
Carl Barks and Jack Hannah, beginning Barks' decades-long career as "the Good Duck Artist".
Barks wrote and drew all 21 of the Donald Duck Four Color issues between 1942 and May
1951, ultimately penning 24 out of the total 29.

In 1943, Barks began his run of Donald Duck 10-page stories in Walt Disney's Comics and
Stories, often pitting Donald in competition with his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie, or his
next-door adversary Neighbor Jones. The stories published in Donald Duck enriched the
character, as historian Alberto Becattini points out: "In the longer adventures which appeared in
Four Color Comics, Donald and his nephews acted more like a team, and though luck did not
necessarily seem to favor him, the Duck was often the winner in the end, showing qualities and
feelings that made him even more sympathetic to the readers."[1]

The second issue, "Donald Duck and the Mummy's Ring" (Four Color #29, Sept 1943), was the
first long Duck story written and drawn by Barks, and it established patterns that would soon
become standards. Donald and the nephews are swept up into an adventure with life-and-death
stakes, although there are many comedic gags to lighten the tone. There are nasty criminals,
mistaken identities, humorous coincidences and a surprise ending. The boys also get a tour of an
exotic setting, with many detailed panels of Egyptian landmarks, painstakingly copied from
Barks' collection of National Geographic magazines.[2]

While Donald and his nephews mostly stayed close to home in the WDC&S 10-page stories, the
Four Color adventure stories sent the ducks to more exotic locales.[3] The third issue, "Frozen
Gold" (Jan 1945), took them to Alaska; the fourth, "The Terror of the River!" (1946), takes place
on a houseboat traveling to New Orleans; and the fifth, "Volcano Valley" (May 1947), involves a
trip to the Central American nation of Volcanovia. These periodic adventures helped Barks to
deepen the ducks' characterization—not just putting them in new settings, but broadening the
kinds of events and experiences that they could react to.

At first, the Donald Duck issues were released on a roughly annual basis—the first four came out
in 1942, 1943, 1945 and 1946—but beginning in 1947, Barks produced three issues a year. This
included "Volcano Valley", "The Ghost of the Grotto" (Aug 1947) and "Christmas on Bear
Mountain" (Dec 1947), the first story featuring Donald's uncle, Scrooge McDuck. Barks' second
Uncle Scrooge adventure, "The Old Castle's Secret", was published in Donald Duck in June
1948.

In 1950, the rate of Donald Duck one-shots increased to five issues a year, and then to six issues
a year in 1951. At that point, other writers and artists were enlisted to create the Donald Duck
adventure stories. The first three issues of 1951 were Barks creations -- "Dangerous Disguise"
(Jan 1951), "No Such Varmint" (March 1951) and "In Old California" (May 1951), but these
were followed by "Donald Duck and the Magic Fountain" (July 1951, written by Del Connell
and drawn by Bob Moore), "The Crocodile Collector" (Sept 1951, by Don Christensen and Frank
McSavage) and "Rags to Riches" (Nov 1951, Frank McSavage).
In 1952, Barks wrote four of the six Donald Duck issues, including the classics "A Christmas for
Shacktown" (Jan 1952) and "The Golden Helmet" (July 1952).

You might also like