At the beginning of his career — well, the beginning of his Disney career; like Donald Duck, he had many failed enterprises before that — cartooning legend Carl Barks worked as an animator and story director at Disney studios, working on a variety of animated shorts. This was before the creation of Uncle Scrooge, or of Duckburg; there was no Gyro Gearloose or Magica De Spell, or any of the colorful cast of characters who would later go on to populate DuckTales.
Way, way back at the beginning, after Carl Barks had made the jump from animation to comic books, Donald Duck stories didn’t quite feel like Donald Duck stories just yet; they felt like those animated shorts. In several of the stories collected in the new volume of The Complete Carl Barks Library, we see Donald at odds with his nephews, trying to outsmart them as they go about their rambunctious childhood. In The Mighty Trapper, the nephews grow tired of listening to Donald’s tall tales, in which he insists that he was a mighty fur trapper. In response, they borrow an old fur from Daisy Duck and convince Donald that there’s plenty of trapping to do in a patch of wilderness adjoining their suburb. Hijinks ensue.
Fantagraphics
This story could have easily been animated and played with a short like Donald’s Snow Fight, in which he and the nephews go absolutely militaristic during a snowball fight. It’s got the same affably blowhard Donald and the same go-getter nephews, sick of their uncle’s nonsense.
What’s most interesting in Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold is the stories that hint at the sorts of adventure stories Barks would come to craft: big, globe-spanning epics which see Donald, the nephews (and, later, Scrooge) in search of something uncanny and whimsical. Donald Duck and the Mummy’s Ring, originally published in 1943, features action, peril, and a sense of wonder (it also features some light misunderstanding of foreign cultures typical of these types of adventures). The story sees a treasure stolen, a nephew kidnapped, and a villainous turn by Pete.
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This is what Carl Barks fans crave: Donald not as a bumbling everyman, constantly foiled by inanimate objects and annoying backyard pests, but the globetrotting duck. He’s still an everyman — Barks’ more gag-centric strips show him bouncing from job to job, never quite succeeding — but he’s an everyman getting pulled into exceptional situations and overcoming them (as unlikely as it seems). Pirate’s Gold has a few such stories, glimmers of the vast world-building Barks would undertake in his career.
The volume begins with the titular story, which is remarkable in its origins: outlined as an animated feature, it became a comic seemingly by contractual happenstance: Barks’ first Donald Story isn’t even fully his (both he and fellow animator Jack Hannah lend pencils). But that wide-open spirit of adventure is apparent from the jump. The seeds for Barks’ ongoing masterwork were there from the beginning.
Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold is a historic document, the eager beginnings of a decades-long character evolution. As can be expected, the Fantagraphics collection is lovingly compiled, the pieces selected with care and delivered alongside story notes. It’s a fantastic opening salvo for a series that is becoming all the more comprehensive and impressive with each subsequent volume.
Best of all, it shows a duck — and artist — with a lot of potential.
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