Don Rosa’s Life and Times has a great deal of prestige as a graphic novel. Among serious graphic novel readers, this is considered a masterpiece that is required reading. From that it’s easy to shift into Barks or Rosa’s other works.
For myself, The Ducktales cartoon series of the 80’s is a touchstone for me because it was manifestly the best cartoon of its time, far better than anything else going. Nostalgia for this cartoon made me interested in the comics that formed a basis for this. I hope that the recent reboot of Ducktales helped to create new fans, though I’m certain that this cartoon was made more for geezers like me than for kids.
Finally, Fantagraphics has made a huge quantity of comics available in attractive but affordable volumes. They are pleasant to read for their own sake, as masterpieces of bookbinding and design quite apart from their actual content. So, the content is not actually scarce or unavailable at the moment. All of it is in English, by the way.
I'm old enough (60's) to have read new comics in my childhood with Barks stories in them. Plus my older siblings had collected a stash of issues of Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck with even better Barks stories, and occasionally something good and memorable by someone else! In adulthood I subscribed to Gladstone I and the Disney Interregnum (Disney Co. comics coming out between Gladstone I and Gladstone II!) and Gladstone II and Gemstone and IDW Ducks. Post-Gemstone, I have ordered many Duck comic back issues from Europe: French (easiest for me to read), German (also easy to order via eBay), Dutch (easier to read than German, but the Dutch don't sell their old comics on eBay.nl, they sell them on a Dutch online marketplace I can't order directly from), occasionally Italian. None of this would have been possible without INDUCKS, which is how I identify the stories I want to read and the issues they're in.
My dad started buying me the Gladstone I titles when I was about four; he read them to me initially, and by five I had started reading them myself (the comics more or less spurred me into learning to read early). The second installment of the three-part Gladstone reprint of "Race for Riches" is the first Disney comic I actually remember seeing as a kid; my first Duck comic was the Gladstone reprint of "So Far and No Safari." I was already firmly a fan by the time I became aware of Ducktales, but that helped to further my fascination with the Ducks' world. In terms of what I read nowadays, I have a pretty big library of back issues and hardcover collections (both the Another Rainbow set and the more recent ones from Fantagraphics), and I still seek out American back issues that I think I may be interested in.
My start was with the old animated shorts, which still hold a very special place in my heart. Moose Hunters and Mickey's Parrot are some of the first that I think I saw at a very, very young age, probably still under the age of three. As I got older, these shorts continued to just draw me in with their captivating visuals and charming characters. I started watching more Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy cartoons. These were always special to me, but I was totally unaware that were these awesome comics about the same characters! It wasn't until I really started using the Internet that I read online about the existence of "Carl Barks" and "Don Rosa." Intrigued, I searched the names in the database of my local library and found a hardcover copy of The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck available. I don't remember with certainty, but that is probably the first Duck comic that I ever read. I loved it! To this day, I still love Don Rosa's work, even as I have discovered other artists and writers whose work I enjoy. It started with Rosa and pretty quickly led to Barks. I went several years without really exploring outside of that. It was actually discovering this forum around the time that DuckTales 2017 came out that inspired me to read more stories, more artists, and more frequently. That's when I began expanding my horizons, and I'm still in that "expanding" phase today.
Actually, though I neglected to mention it, DuckTales was also probably pretty foundational to my enjoyment of Duck comics. Speaking of the original DuckTales, not the reboot. Mickey's Christmas Carol and Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas were probably my first exposures to Scrooge McDuck, but DuckTales was my first exposure to Uncle Scrooge as an adventurer, something that he is not in either of the aforementioned Christmas specials. DuckTales was probably a factor behind my interest in reading Life and Times, and the rest is history. I guess my story's somewhat complicated, but I guess the gist is that I started with animation as a child, learned about the comics through the Internet when I was a little bit older, and started reading them thanks to my local library. I didn't learn a lot of what I now know about the comics until discovering the Feathery Society about six years ago, though. Thank you, Feathery Society, for increasing my interest in something that really connects me to my childhood and brings me so much happiness!
No matter what I say or do, know that Jesus loves you.
How did you get into Duck comics, and what language do you read them in given English content is very scarce?
I grew up in an extended-family compound, with several older first cousins, who had lots of comic books all types, including Disney, and the other funny animal cartoon studio-based comics (WB, MGM, Lantz, Animal Comics(Pogo, Uncle Wiggly), as well as Westerns, Detective, Romance, and Superhero comics, which were US-produced, with Canadian ads, except for during 1940-45, when US imports were banned, and we had only the locally produced "Canadian Whites" (black & white). My grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles read especially the Barks Disney comics to me (which were favourites of my older cousins), starting then I was 2 years old. At 3 I knew many of them "by heart", and already started recognising that the individual letters matched the sounds, and was reciting the dialogues pointing to the word balloons and pointing to the action in the panels. By four, I was reading the stories to my "reader" (with a little help from them on the difficult words). I didn't care much about the Superhero comics and semi-realistic Westerns, when I was a few years older, browsing through my cousins' stacks of comics. They weren't really dedicated collectors like I was. When their comics were a few years old, they let me add them to my collection. So, I had most of the Disney Comics from 1940, 1946-49 on, almost from age two, plus, I added most of the 1940-45 Disneys from cousins who lived in Chicago. My Grandfather used to walk us kids to a nearby "five and dime" store, which also had several shelves with used comics, which we bought for 5 cents. So, by about 1954, I had almost all the Disney Canadian/US Comics that had been printed up to that time (other than the rare giveaway issues, and a few War year issues), which I bought in used book stores, along with the remaining WWII issues I'd still not gotten before, at age 17, after moving to Los Angeles to attend university. I started buying my own new comic books, as they came out, in 1954. Near the beginning of the 1960s, we moved to Chicago. So, I was buying Disney Comics as they came out. When buying the remaining US giveaway comics and others I hadn't had, in Hollywood, at Malcolm Willits' Collectors' Book Store, in 1966, I showed my self-photocopied, and professionally-bound "Works of Carl Barks", which was black and white photocopies, that I was hand-colouring. He thought Carl would be interested in meeting such an avid fan and collector. So, he introduced us, and I visited Carl and Gare 3 times, and corresponded by letter and telephone for a few years, especially after I had started writing stories and drawing storyboards and cover sketches for Dutch Disney Comics(Oberon) in 1984, and also for Danish(Egmont) in 1989. I had started working for Oberon because I drew some missing unpublished pages and unpublished stories as best I could, in Carl Barks' style, based on his description to me of what was on those pages (as best he could remember). Malcolm Willits was auctioning off the original finished inked pages of Carl Barks' unpublished stories and cut-out pages, and he allowed me to have them photocopied. So, I interspersed them into my volumes of my self-made Barks Library. And I also sold Oberon a few Donald and Scrooge stories of my own I had been working on while on R&R leave in Den Haag, between overseas assignments. They also published the shelved 1958 Barks Donald "Milkman Story" in 1974, after having seen my photocopies of its original art.
From the beginning of the 1950s through the 1960s, several of my family members and I spent much of each summer visiting other family members back in The Netherlands. I "inherited" several Disney Comics from some of my older Dutch cousins. And went with the older ones to used book stories, which sold used DD Weeklies and other comics there for 5 cents (1/20 of a Guilder). So, I built up a large collection of Dutch comics I kept with my cousins' stash, until I moved, full-time to Den Haag in 1983, and retrieved them into my flat. We had Belgian Dutch language Mickey Magazines from 1952 to about 1955, plus Donald Duck Weekblad from its start in 1952, and other, special Disney books. I had also had lived part-time in Den Haag during 1976-82, while on 3-4 month R&R breaks from consulting jobs on development planning projects in Africa and Asia for The UN, and World Bank, and accumulated additional used comics.
So, I read Disney Comics in both English and Dutch from my early youth. After starting work for Egmont in 1989, I also started collecting Danish Disney Comics, because there were lots of longer Donald and Scrooge stories drawn by Branca and Vicar, which (especially Branca's) were very Barkslike, and hadn't yet been printed in any Dutch comics. I started having subscriptions to both Danish Anders And Weekly, and Anders And Extra, and also bought older issues, and special issues of different series in used book stores. In 1989, when I started with Egmont, I had enough Disney work to quit my former career as environmental and economics consultant, and worked full time on Disney Comics. So, as I was Working on much of my work, together with Jan Gulbransson, I split each year among Munich, Germany to work with Jan, and Den Haag, to work with my Dutch editors, and in Denmark, to work with my Danish editor. I started learning Danish, and German. It is easy for a Dutch speaker to read Danish, even before starting to learn Danish. And also speaking English helps, too. German is much harder (but I always spent more time there, and had started working with Jan five years earlier, in 1984. And, of course, having the comic book drawings to help understand what is going on, helped to understand most of the sentences with a few words that I otherwise couldn't figure out.
So, I read Disney Comics in English and Dutch, and also in Danish, and German, and also in French, which I took for many years in school, and Spanish, which I learned from a couple years in college, plus living in Los Angeles for several whole years, and lots of years of staying there for a few months. With Spanish, and French experience, I can get the gist of what's going on in Portuguese, and Italian, with a dictionary handy. And I can read Swedish and Norwegian only with slightly less understanding than Danish. A Brazilian artist friend of mine (with whom I worked at Hanna-Barbara Feature, Turner Feature, and WB Feature Animation Studios, plus on some independent cartooning and comics projects) gave me a lot of Brazilian comic books from the 1950s, especially with Gottfredson stories before I got many of them in Gladstone or Gemstone albums, or Fantagraphics' Gottfredson Library. So, all those that hadn't been printed in The Netherlands or '40s Walt Disney's Comics & Stories, or other US Disney books, I read first in Portuguese.
I have all the US KK Publications (except most of "Mickey Mouse Magazine"), and bought all the Dell, Gold Key, Gladstone and Gemstone issues, and bought a selected small group of the Boom! and IDW issues. I stopped buying most of the Dutch issues after 2012. Now I just buy those with stories worked on by myself and my friends. Since my Danish Subscriptions lapsed, I only get copies of the issues containing my own stories, gags or covers. I also collect the Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, German, and French issues containing my stories. I also have quite a few issues with my stories from Italy and Indonesia. But, I don't need to read those in any language other than English, Dutch, or Danish, because those 3 publishers always cover any story I worked on, and I don't care about almost all the Italian-produced Disney stories that haven't been translated into English reprints or Dutch Stripgoed or pocket book issues (except a few long Scarpa Mickey Mouse stories, which I've struggled through in The Italian Scarpa Library, getting the gist of the stories, but, no doubt, missing several jokes, especially those containing idiomatic phrases I couldn't know). But, I'm sure those missing long Scarpa stories will eventually be published by Fantagraphics.
I'm old enough (60's) to have read new comics in my childhood with Barks stories in them. Plus my older siblings had collected a stash of issues of Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck with even better Barks stories, and occasionally something good and memorable by someone else!
Matilda, both of us read new Barks stories in the 1950s, and had the great advantage of reading previously published Barks stories in books from our older family members' stash. The same was true for Don Rosa, reading his older sister's comics. We were very lucky to have that advantage.
I'm old enough (60's) to have read new comics in my childhood with Barks stories in them. Plus my older siblings had collected a stash of issues of Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck with even better Barks stories, and occasionally something good and memorable by someone else!
Matilda, both of us read new Barks stories in the 1950s, and had the great advantage of reading previously published Barks stories in books from our older family members' stash. The same was true for Don Rosa, reading his older sister's comics. We were very lucky to have that advantage.
Well, in the 1960’s in my case! Yes, lucky to have the older siblings’ box of comics from the 50’s. And also like Don Rosa, the best non-Disney comics in the older siblings’ collection were Little Lulu comics. Of the comics stories I remember in detail from childhood, the great majority are by Barks (which of course I didn’t know at the time); perhaps half a dozen are Disney comics stories by others, and another half dozen are Little Lulu stories by John Stanley.