One of the great joys of reading the Complete Carl Barks Library from Fantagraphics is that you have no way of anticipating the sort of narrative experience you’re about to have. Barks’ stories have a way of veering in style and direction, both between stories and within the pages of the stories themselves. You might veer from a Magica De Spell story to a rhino hunting story; you might begin a story concerned with a Halloween party only to find Donald Duck flying around on one of Gyro Gearloose’s zany contraptions by the story’s end.
Fantagraphics/Disney
Those are a few of the stories you can find in the heart of Donald Duck: The Lonely Lighthouse on Cape Quack, out this week. The book largely covers stories Barks produced in the early 1960s, some 20 years after he started his Donald Duck career, and that experience is apparent in the quality of these strips. What’s more, the slow display of repeated narrative elements are illustrative of a cartoonist at play with his ideas, exploring themes and narrative novelties from repeated angles. Like Charles Schulz and the Kite-Eating Tree or Lucy with the football, Barks returns to ideas to discover new, funnier ways to play with them.
Magica De Spell gets two stories, here, and the setup is as it always is: she’s after Scrooge’s number one dime, and she’ll stop at no magical limit to get it. The stories may feel similar, but it’s up to Barks’ endless inventiveness to find new gags and elements to reinvent that classic set-up. Having two such stories so close together in the collection doesn’t undermine the effect of Magica on the reader, it somehow elevates their appreciation of her. It builds out the narrative possibilities in limited space.
Fantagraphics/Disney
Barks’ ease with the line – the flawless penstrokes of his cartooning – is on fine display here, as well. Each figure is immediately legible, their duckbills able to register the most sour of expressions. The world of Duckburg feels lush with detail; Barks wasn’t one to skip an elaborate background. There are few cartoonists as impeccable at Barks at his best, and those twenty years of experience have tempered him to his finest edge.
The book concludes with some much (much) later stories that Barks scripted and did rough art for, but these were finished by fellow Disney artist, Daan Jippes, and the visual distinction is noteworthy. Jippes is no slouch, but these strips feel distinctly of the larger Disney mold. A lot of what makes the Barks art sing is boiled out of the Jippes pages; the craftsmanship, while competent, reads more as if it belongs in an issue of Disney Adventures than it does in a career retrospective of a great artist (not that the great artist wasn’t publishing in Disney periodicals in the first place).
Fantagraphics/Disney
The Lonely Lighthouse on Cape Quack is a remarkable set of Donald-centered duck stories, and as such it misses out on some of the high adventure of Uncle Scrooge stories. It doesn’t suffer from that lack, however: Donald’s endless procession of jobs and the familiar tropes of Duckburg domesticity are consistently overturned, constantly reworked and reimagined. It might be prime proof of this great artist’s most simple – but endlessly inventive – subject matter.
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