Post by abracax on Jul 25, 2023 14:32:54 GMT
Very interesting. Not meant for new readers, yet the most recommended one and highly regarded comics. Don't misconstrue that. I'm not being facetious, I genuinely find that interesting.
Are you saying read Barks' work beforehand? It's fairly extensive. How many and which volumes would you recommend before tackling The Life and Times of...? In order to get the references and have a good understanding of the character.
This is gonna be easier for you once Inducks is back up, which will happen soon. Then you can look at, say, the top 100 rated comics stories, and start with the Barks and Gottfredson stories on that list. For each story you can go to the page for that story, which will list virtually all of the publications of that story around the world, and you can then see what’s easiest for you to get.
Here are some long Barks adventure stories that usually get cited among his best:
Only a Poor Old Man
Back to the Klondike
The Old Castle’s Secret
(Those three lay lots of groundwork for the character of Scrooge.)
Lost in the Andes
The Golden Helmet
Tralla La
Other frequent favorites:
Land beneath the Ground
The Twenty-Four Carat Moon
The Unsafe Safe is a fun one with Magica De Spell.
You like dogs? North of the Yukon
Penguins? A Cold Bargain
Shorter stories by Barks widely considered classics include:
Omelet
The Master Rainmaker
The Screaming Cowboy
Flipism
Ten-Star Generals
You might want to check out which ten-pagers are being covered on Mark Severino’s fun podcast, Barks Remarks. He’s covering all the long adventure stories chronologically, but he’s only covering selected ten-pagers.
Some Rosa stories, like His Majesty, McDuck,
A Matter of Some Gravity or The Dutchman’s Secret, can be read with complete enjoyment without any prior knowledge of Barks. But the Life & Times, while arguably Rosa’s crowning achievement, is much more fun when you’re familiar with the Barks Duckworld. And some of Rosa’s best stories are actually sequels to Barks adventures, and you should definitely read the Barks story first. Lost in the Andes, then Return to Plain Awful. One of my favorite Rosa stories is Guardians of the Lost Library, but that gets much of its charm from how it deals with what the reader already knows about the Junior Woodchucks. So yes, I’d say in general, read a bunch of the Barks classics before you get too far into Rosa.
I'm guessing Don Rosa was a huge fan of Carl Barks, if he included numerous references to Bark's stories. Maybe he read all of his works. Perhaps you won't catch every reference unless you do the same.