Thank you! I'm not that familiar with comics at all except Calvin and Hobbes, but I know those Disney comics characters from Duck Tales and thought I'd check them out. I also recently ordered some Pogo collections from the library I work at which seem very good and got me interested in more.
Also, is IDW the main publisher of current Disney comics? Thanks!
Depends on what you mean by "current Disney comics".
For regular comic books featuring the classic Disney characters, the answer is yes.
For archival book series, it's more divided between IDW and Fantagraphics. The latter is publishing (or has published) the Floyd Gottfredson, Carl Barks and Don Rosa libraries, as well as the recently-started Disney Masters series. Whereas IDW is publishing some book series of their own under their Library of American Comics label, including the Silly Symphonies Sunday pages, the Donald Duck Taliaferro strips and several other Disney newspaper strips.
Thank you! I'm not that familiar with comics at all except Calvin and Hobbes, but I know those Disney comics characters from Duck Tales and thought I'd check them out. I also recently ordered some Pogo collections from the library I work at which seem very good and got me interested in more.
Also, is IDW the main publisher of current Disney comics? Thanks!
When I'll be gone many bad things will be said about me, but not that I would not help out someone who loves Calvin and Hobbes. Also, you are looking for old good Pogo, which tells us that for the few you know you are interested in real quality when it comes to comics. You seem to have a serious plan of reading going on there. So I feel the need to warn you about Disney comics, which in the last ninety years have provided the world with some of the highest examples of comic literature ever, but with a lot of trash too.
So, if I were you, as a first move I would try to get an idea of the top of the history of Disney comics. Those comics that really transcend the bounds of the Disney universe and are considered absolute milestones in the history of the language. Until a few years ago this was not easy to do in the Anglo-Saxon world, especially in the US, where Disney comics are a niche genre. But nowadays the three main American masters are receiving - in one case decades after his death - a well deserved attention thanks to the publisher Fantagraphics. I would buy, or steal, or rent at least two of the following four advised books, each costing around 25-30 dollars.
A volume of Fantagraphics Library of Carl Barks covering his Donald Duck stories from the late 40's, by preference this one.
A volume of Fantagraphics Library of Carl Barks covering his Uncle Scrooge stories from the middle 50's, definitely by preference this one.
A volume of Fantagraphics Library of Floyd Gottfredson covering his Mickey Mouse newspaper strips from the second half of the 30's, I suggest this one.
A volume of Fantagraphics Library of Don Rosa; do not know which one, his level was always pretty high. Or you can check directly the series where he invented the past life of Uncle Scrooge, which can be read as a graphic novel.
You may not like some of this stuff of course. Let me give you some inputs. Barks has a graphic style which is extremely elegant and effective for his narrative purposes, but may look very dated to someone not too familiar, especially young readers. His long adventures reads as classics today. They often mix human comedy and funny quests for the exotic. They feel simple and somehow sophisticated at the same time. They may also feel dated or too cliché to a modern reader, but remember that if that kind of adventures has become so popular in mainstream culture - especially movies - is because a few influential storytellers have opened the way, and Barks is definitely one of them. Rosa is a fan of Barks who tried to create a continuity out of the vastly incoherent body of work of the latter. But his style is different from Barks's in many ways. You may even dislike Barks and find Rosa your favourite comics creator ever, or vice versa. In any case Rosa is a genius of comic humor, and deserves a try even if you don't give a dime about Donald Duck. Gottfredson was a hyper talented strip artists who turned Mickey, the iconic black and white cartoon character, into some kind of comedic hero, able to go on all kind of adventures, from sci-fi to detective stories, from exotic explorations to war-like scenarios. His stories are collages of strips, most of which have a self-contained joke, forming long compelling adventures.
These are the real must's. Then there is a whole world of other Disney comics, but these must be handled more carefully. Here is a brief overview, but for the moment I would suggest to avoid this stuff. Italian comic creators have developed their own take on Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck stories since the late 40's, producing four or five new stories every week for decades now. They are the main producers of Disney comics. They have been going on for so much time that they have branched into different and sometimes incoherent sub-schools and approaches. There are many good things in the vast Italian production, next to many bad ones, in the middle of a sea of average stuff. The narrative style is extremely different from the one of the American masters I suggested above. It feels like a different genre today. Well, the Italian tradition is actually rooted in Barks's and Gottfredson's pioneering work, but it has developed independently since then. The immense amount of Italian Disney stories has been mostly overlooked by the American comics market. In the last years IDW has tried to fill a bit the gap publishing some old stories and many more recent ones. Dutch creators have developed their own style on Donald Duck stories since the middle of the 70's. They are less open to experiments than the Italians, observing some kind of strict attachment to Barks's way of doing those stories, only with a clearly more childish and less inspired tone. They have been published in the US a lot in the 80's and 90's, but must be handled even more carefully. Denmark produces a lot of stories too since the 70's, using artists and writers from all over the world, mostly North Europe, North and South America. They are less religiously attached to the old Barks style than the Dutch, but open to similar criticisms. A selection of their stories also appear translated in the current IDW magazines.
But I honestly would go easy on IDW issues that you find in comic shops today. Chances are that you will spend more than 5 dollars to read a childish story. Because, except in some cases, most of the Italian, Dutch and Danish production is more childish than the authors I recommended above.
[Hope you will forgive typos and little syntactic mistakes here and there, I guess you notice that English is far from being my mothertongue...I keep updating this post to correct mistakes since 20 minutes now ]
Thank you! This is a lot of great information, and I really appreciate it. I will look into ordering some of these for starters. Ya, Calvin and Hobbes are the best. My father owned all the book collections and I loved them growing up. Maybe I never got into any other comics because everything else in the newspaper paled compared to the brilliance of the C&H books. But I've recently started discovering Pogo and Bloom County, and those are great too. Looking forward to checking out some of these Disney character comics. If the animated adaptations are anything to go by, they will be fun
You would be in the minority there. (As concerns the supposedly-monthly books, anyway. Maybe she's better on the literary parodies. I dunno. I haven't purchased those, since I already own those stories in French.)
You would be in the minority there. (As concerns the supposedly-monthly books, anyway. Maybe she's better on the literary parodies. I dunno. I haven't purchased those, since I already own those stories in French.)
I had a brief look in the Mickey Mouse Treasure Island adaptation as published by Dark Horse, and I didn't see anything in the translation that made me think it was anything other than Brady's usual style.
The colouring in the Fantagraphics Barks books is really kind of weird. Why did they choose the original colours instead of modern higher-quality colourings like that one used in the Carl Barks Library?
The colouring in the Fantagraphics Barks books is really kind of weird. Why did they choose the original colours instead of modern higher-quality colourings like that one used in the Carl Barks Library?
Possibly they went for "authenticity"? Not that Barks particularly intended for those to be the colors of his stories, to be fair, but there's an argument that recoloring to fit the now-established color schemes is not particularly better than the bowdlerizing of Voodoo Hoodoo or other such changes made to Barks stories in reprints to make them better fit modern sensibilities. As a collector's edition, they'll reprint the stories as they first came to the world, warts and all.
Same reason, if you will, that some people prefer to watch the original versions of the Star Wars films rather than Lucas's later, improved "Special Editions", even though some of the changes are objectively for the better.
The colouring in the Fantagraphics Barks books is really kind of weird. Why did they choose the original colours instead of modern higher-quality colourings like that one used in the Carl Barks Library?
Possibly they went for "authenticity"? Not that Barks particularly intended for those to be the colors of his stories, to be fair, but there's an argument that recoloring to fit the now-established color schemes is not particularly better than the bowdlerizing of Voodoo Hoodoo or other such changes made to Barks stories in reprints to make them better fit modern sensibilities. As a collector's edition, they'll reprint the stories as they first came to the world, warts and all.
Yeah, they went for "authenticity" to Western Publishing's original colors, which were a cheap, rushed hackjob and which Barks himself is on record as hating. It's a bizarre choice in pretty much every regard. Historically interesting? Yes. But on the level of what a definitive and properly respectful Barks library should be? No.
The truly ridiculous part is that there are even interviews with Fantagrahics' colorist Rich Tommaso where he implies that Barks sent in color guides which were then used by Western (thereby obviously defending Fantagraphics' choice to recreate Western's coloring):
Brigid: Why did Fantagraphics think it was necessary to re-color the Carl Barks comics?
Rich: In the recent past, publishers who've licensed this particular property have done a bad job at recoloring it—using too many modern coloring effects like gradients, highlights, lens flares and inappropriate color schemes to boot. Fanta's aim is to create a new Barks library that maintains a consistency with the old comics from the 40's-60's color schemes.
Brigid: Did Barks do his own coloring, or was there a separate colorist on these?
Rich: He provided colorists with hand-colored mock-ups to follow, I believe.
Stuff like this is what really makes it offending. The truth is, Barks NEVER had any say in how his work was colored, and disliked virtually all of Western's efforts. The few times he tried to send in color suggestions were right at the start of his career, and he quickly came to realize that Western ignored everything he suggested. But hey, why care what Barks might think when you can rather have fun changing the color of Uncle Scrooge's coat in every story he's in?
The colors, of course, are just one part of the problem with Fantagraphics' Barks series. Another is that the special features are quite lackluster compared with the Gottfredson and Rosa libraries. The "story notes" are of wildly varying quality (regarding both facts and analysis) depending on who wrote them. The point of these notes is obviously to say something of substance about each story; but there are writers (at least in the few books I own) who instead just do a synopsis of a story, without saying anything about the story's background, meaning etc. Joseph Cowles is a name that comes to mind here; he did this consistently through all his notes in the "Trick or Treat" volume. It's like Gary Groth or whoever gave him the assignment didn't explain properly what he was to do, and after he sent in his notes, there was no time to get them changed before the book went to press.
These are the kind of issues that make me feel Fantagraphics' Barks library is done more on autopilot than their series with Gottfredson and Rosa. Indirectly, it feels like Fantagraphics is saying to the readers that these two other creators are more important than Barks. I don't think that's their intention, but the truth is that Gottfredson and Rosa have been treated much better than Barks in their Fantagraphics libraries. In essence, it feels like the Barks series is simply lacking a leading editor who is as intimately knowledgeable about Barks as David Gerstein is about Gottfredson.