Fantagraphics Books
Carl Barks, writer and artist
If money holds out, I guess I will keep buying these Disney Duck collections; I'm five-for-five so far on the collections featuring Donald as the headliner, and they've all been great reads, featuring a combination of one-page gags and longer stories about Donald and his nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie. This particular volume has a much heavier concentration of the longer narratives, including only a small handful of one-pagers. Still very good, though.
The first duck tale in this latest volume, the title story, has the distinction of being the very first appearance of Uncle Scrooge McDuck. The character in this 1947 story bears little resemblance to the globe-trotting miser from future stories, however. The physical appearance of Scrooge in this tale is close, but the crotchety uncle of Donald Duck is pretty mean-spirited and has difficulty moving around unassisted. His dim view of others prompts him to tempt Donald and the nephews with the promise of a resplendent holiday full of food and gifts if they will only spend the night in his hunting cabin on Bear Mountain. Then he plots to scare them away as unworthy cowards. But Scrooge's plot is foiled by the unwitting intervention of some real bears.
Other yarns in this collection have Donald and the boys planting flower gardens competitively; learning about dancing, music and magic; tracking down the whereabouts of a "lost" mine; and traveling to such far-off locales as Australia, the West Indies, and the fictional Volcano Valley.
In another Christmas-themed story, Huey, Dewey and Louie decide that they have been pretty bad all year and need to work hard in the last days before Christmas to earn the possibility of presents. Unfortunately, most of their genuinely good deeds and favors for Donald end up having disastrous results for their poor uncle. But more often than not, it is Donald's attempts to teach the boys a lesson that end up backfiring, resulting in Donald himself getting into trouble.
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