The word ‘cartoonist’ sometimes feels like a wide-open, free-flowing designation; anyone can be a cartoonist so long as one creates cartoons, usually strips and sometimes (when one is being ambitious), full graphic novels. The early-2000s webcomics boom was filled with ‘cartoonists’, sometimes hobbyists with real dedication but for whom the calling was not a career; early mainstays, like Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade, continue to produce ever-skillful strips like clockwork. We’ve currently got a healthy population of inspired autobiographical cartoonists like Noah van Sciver, Craig Thompson, and Liz Prince.
All this is setting aside the wild talents of the more four-color set we here at AIPT cover daily, a dizzying avalanche of sequential artists whose medium drives the beloved comic book.
Disney/Fantagraphics
Let’s call all these talented, driven craftspeople of the modern era cartoonists with a lower-case ‘c’ – not as any insult to their craft or careers, of course, because they are all honorable and enviable artists, but in deference to the capital ‘C’ Cartoonists. Titans and groundbreakers of the craft, the historic and powerful Cartoonist, with their inkwells and their nibs, their scarred and sacred drawing boards. Your Will Eisners, your Alison Bechdels, your Charles Schultzes. Cartoonists whose every line seems masterfully scrawled, perfectly measured, by the very weight of history.
Disney/Fantagraphics
Carl Barks is one such Cartoonist – he was, in fact, one inaugural trio of Cartoonists inducted into Eisner Hall of Fame back in 1987, alongside Jack Kirby and Eisner himself. He’s a mythical figure to a very specific type of comic fan – he’s been referred to as a “cartoonist’s cartoonist”. Laboring under the larger Disney comic stipulation that comics work went without creator credits, Barks did not come to be appreciated until the final years of his life – despite being the creator of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, the founder of Duckburg, and one of two creators whose work drove both series of DuckTales.
Disney/Fantagraphics
Thankfully, this no longer means that his work is obscure. A variety of books have been written about him, and his work has been haphazardly collected by a variety of specialty publishers throughout the decades. Since 2011, the task has been taken up by Fantagraphics, whose extensive collection of classic cartoons has always been laser-precise and archival in totality.
This all might seem like a lengthy, unnecessary introduction to a review for the twenty-eighth volume of The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library, especially for those already inducted into the league of Barks fans; however, review coverage of the series isn’t exactly breaking news or drawing readership on your usual comics news site – even here at AIPT. Let the groundwork be laid.
In Cave of Ali Baba, the series collects 29 masterful stories and gag-strips, running 160 pages of comics (and a healthy supply of end notes). Like any of Fantagraphics collections, the book is a treasure trove of content. As the cover implies, a bulk of the work is made up of Uncle Scrooge stories, wherein everyone’s favorite disaster capitalist either accumulates wealth or endeavors not to lose it.
Disney/Fantagraphics
Excitingly, the back half of the book is comprised of Gyro Gearloose stories, an absolute treat for readers looking to explore a different corner of Duckburg (though one that still regularly features both our miser and his mishap-prone nephew).
It’s hard, as an aging and skeptical critic suffering through late-stage capitalism, not to dive deeply into the occasional old-timey cultural misstep made by the stories, however “of the time” and benign they might be. Scrooge’s unseemly wealth would be, in any strip created today, illustrated as a gross overabundance, a weapon to be wielded, and his “misuse” of it here could be read as such by the very cynical (the police chief calls him for permission to arrest criminals, in “The Unsafe Safe”, which also sees him purchase an entire species of birds so that he can cage them).
Disney/Fantagraphics
More damning are the “oops, Orientalism” moments, wherein a foreign culture is both infantilized and made mystical, ripe for Donald and Gyro’s separate, missionary-like endeavors to “civilize” them. It’d be silly – and perhaps irresponsible – to turn one’s nose up at the work because of these outmoded, mid-century American mindsets; the work was created under those misconceptions. The world in which Duckburg resides is still filled with wonder and secrets, an adventuring spirit that might be rooted in colonial mythologizing, but which is tempered by the very nature of talking ducks. This is a world where Gyro Gearloose builds robots with lightbulbs for heads, after all, not a researched document of European ethnocentrism.
While none of the stories collected here are absolute barnburners, The Cave of Ali Baba is a book that wonderfully captures the exploits of some of Duckburg’s great characters, and it does an incredibly welcome and exciting job spotlighting Gearloose.
As with any of the Carl Barks Library volumes, the book does its best work spotlighting one of the all-time greats, a capital “C’ Cartoonist.
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