Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes (The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library) [Hardcover]

I've been an ardent fan of Carl Barks' Donald Duck comics for over forty years. When I first encountered these stories I realized I was being entertained by a master storyteller. His rich and incisive characterizations of Donald and his nephews as well as his creation of a host of richly delineated supporting characters had me hooked from the off. In fact it is Barks's support cast, not least of which is Donald's miserly, money grubbing Uncle Scrooge, that informs and shapes so much of the stories that are presented in this introductory volume.

The first volume of what will be a thirty volume collection, is not chronologically the first of Barks Duck stories. Fantagraphics have wisely chosen to kick off their series with the stories from December 1948 through to August 1949. The stories are broken down into three sections, commencing with the epic adventures at the start, including the title story "Lost in the Andes", which many connoisseurs of Barks regard as his masterpiece and also including "The Golden Christmas Tree", "Race to the South Seas", a story dominated by Donald's insufferably lucky Gladstone Gander and lastly a truly weird story entitled "Voodoo Hoodoo".

These are followed by a run of the short ten page stories that Bark's created for the monthly Walt Disney's Comics and Stories as well as an eight page Christmas story from the rare Firestone Giveaway Comic. The stories are all mini masterpieces and add even more depth to Uncle Scrooge and the aforementioned Gladstone Gander. All the single page strips as well as all the relevant Barks covers are included. Readers coming to these stories for the first time (how I envy them) will by this stage be totally seduced and desperate for more of Barks.

Which is really the only area I have a slight scintilla of criticism regarding Fantagraphics admirable reprinting of these stories. Two books a year is simply too long to wait!

However that minor gripe aside and with the hope that the publishers continue to focus on the "Golden Years" of Barks output, this collection represents the best incarnation of these stories ever to appear, and this is from a reader that has owned many previous editions of these stories, including the 1980's Another Rainbow slipcased editions, the 1990's Gladstone color albums as well as the original comics themselves.

I should at this juncture make mention of the design of these books which adds so much to the sheer pleasure of leafing through these timeless tales. The choice of display type and the layout is entirely sympathetic with Barks artwork and add to this the superb coloring that Rich Tommaso has applied to these stories and you are looking at the optimum best that any lover of Barks artistry could ever hope for. It's worth mentioning that Tommaso has sensibly avoided falling into the trap of applying computer coloring effects and stuck closely (but not slavishly) to the color schemes employed by the original colorists working on these stories. The result is beautiful flat laid back colors that allow Bark's drawings to work their magic without the distractions of ersatz gradients and the other equally unpleasant devices that have so compromised a lot of previous reprints of these stories.

All in all one of the most exciting comic reprint projects Fantagraphics has undertaken (and they have some astonishingly good projects already underway).

I can only wish them every success and hope that in the process they will recruit new legions of Barks devotees.

There have been many attempts to reprint Carl Barks cartoons over the years.. But all collections fail because of poor choice in colour, paper, censorship etc...
But this new series is amazing. Magic even!. The format is same size as the original mags from the 40-60s.. the colouring is spectacular, the paper and book it self is totally well selected..
Finally - the book cover, layout and extra material.. again, so well done.
A super modern book paying a lot of respect to both hard core Barks fans as wells a newcomers.
And it's at a very good price.

Can't wait to get them all..

This volume reprints the Donald Duck stories of Carl Barks from 1948 and 1949. It is the first volume of a new `Carl Barks Library' dedicated to reprinting his comic book stories of Donald Duck and his Uncle Scrooge. It contains 200 pages of comics, along with an Introduction and Story Notes. The stories are separated into the longer `Adventures', the `Shorter Stories' and the `Gags' -
P001: Lost in the Andes
P033: The Golden Christmas Tree
P053: Race to the South Seas!
P075: Voodoo Hoodoo
P107: `The Short Stories"
P109: Toyland
P117: The Crazy Quiz Show
P127: Truant Officer Donald
P137: Donald Duck's Worst Nightmare
P147: Pizen Spring Dude Ranch
P157: Rival Beachcombers
P167: The Sunken Yacht
P177: Managing the Eco System
P187: Plenty of Pets
P197: "The Gags"
P198: Jumping to Conclusions
P199: The True Test
P200: Ornaments on the Way
P201: Too Fit to Fit
P202: Sleepy Sitters
P203: Slippery Shine
P204: Tunnel Vision
P205: Story Notes

The 8-page introduction by Donald Ault is a short biography of Carl Barks; the 22 pages of Story Notes, which include 4 full-page covers and several relevant comic-book panels, give a detailed analysis of each story, which can be skipped if you have the good fortune to not be an obsessive footnote reader... The stories will be collected in chronological order, but the volumes will be released `out of sequence', so this is not actually volume 1, but the beginning of Carl Barks' `golden age' of storytelling. The first volume of Uncle Scrooge, released next in this series, is actually volume 12 in chronological order.

For more than 30 years I have read comics fans, reviewers and commentators praising Carl Barks stories, but until this volume came along, I had not actually read any of them, being more of a superhero / adventure comics' reader since childhood. Being now in my 50s and having more mature tastes, and (I haven`t stopped collecting stuff) seeing that this was the first volume of a collected edition, I was tempted to buy it to see what all the fuss was about. Well, now I have. It is simply just superb storytelling and artistry. You soon forget these are talking animals you are reading about, and just get caught up in the storytelling. Start collecting now! And your children and grandchildren can also read them.