The Unavailable Barks

"The Unavailable Carl Barks" is the title of a newly released book collecting stories that has been out of print for a long, long time in the US.
A "must have" for the Barks fan.
Here's what the cover looks like:

And here's what the publisher, Kim Weston, has to say about it. (More images after the text.)

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As you may be aware, in addition to his Disney work, Carl Barks wrote and/or drew 36 non-Disney comic book stories. Unlike the Disney comics, these have not been widely reprinted. In 2011, Craig Yoe and IDW published The Carl Barks Big Book of Barney Bear, with those 26 stories, in the USA. But that book did not include Barks' other 10 non-Disney stories. The Unavailable Carl Barks (in color) DOES include those other 10 stories. And unlike The Carl Barks Big Book of Barney Bear, which is reproduced from faded, yellowed, 70 year old comic books, 7 of the 10 "unavailable stories" in my book are reproduced from copies of original black line proofs. The other 3, for which there are no known proofs, are, of necessity, reproduced from comic books, 600 dpi scans of the original comic books. In addition to the other 10 stories, I have also reprinted 2 of the Barney Bear and Benny Burro stories that are in Yoe's Carl Barks Big Book of Barney Bear. Why? 4 of Barks' stories, including the 2 Barney & Benny stories I reprint, were never published in the form in which Barks submitted them to the publisher. Since I had access to copies of black line proofs of the 2 Barney & Benny stories as well, I have restored them as closely as possible to the way Barks drew them. So the 2 Barney & Benny stories look significantly different--and better--than they do in Yoe's book. In all, 4 of the stories are restored in this way in the book.

There have been 2 other reprint collections of most of Barks non-Disney work. About 1979, the bootleg Barks Bear Book was published, apparently in Sweden, but in English, from black and white photocopies of the comic books. It was missing 3 stories, but it was better than nothing. In 2010, Egmont published Carl Barks: Bruno björn och vänner (Carl Barks: Barney Bear and Friends) in Sweden. It is a very nice book but difficult to read unless you read Swedish. Most of the stories are from black line proofs, but the Porky Pig is not. The color was dropped out of scanned comics to make a black line master and then the story was recolored. It looks passable, but does not compare well to the stories printed from original proofs. The book includes 35 of Barks' 36 non-Disney stories, omitting only his Andy Panda story.

My book includes Andy Panda and the other 9 non-Disney Barks stories not included in the Yoe book so between my book and Yoe's book, all of Barks' non-Disney work is currently in print. Like the Egmont book, my Porky Pig story is also printed from scans of the original comic book and it looks a lot like the original comic book but with some improved detail due to the larger printing size. However, because it is printed directly from color scans without dropping out the color, it does a much better job of preserving Barks' essential line quality than the Egmont book, even though its color, as in the original comic, is sloppy and out of register.

In addition to 125 pages of color comics, there is a 10 page index of all of Barks' non-Disney comic books keyed not only to the original comic books but also my book and Craig Yoe's book plus about 30 pages of introductory, historical, and background articles.

The book is available on Amazon.com in the USA, and the UK and German Amazon sites say it is available there. The book is 34.95 USD, 32 Euros, and 26.95 GBP.
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Here are a few snapshots, just to show you what the book looks like.

If you are just even slightly interested I'd say: buy now to avoid eBay prices later. Who knows how long this will stay in print.

Barks?

What? No one guessed Carl Barks?
Well, neither did I when I first saw this image as a low resolution page intended for The Carl Barks Collection. (CBC is the European version of Carl Barks Library. In color with loads of extra material not seen in te US version.) The copy below the image said it came from Barks scrap piles and might be a sheet for testing new nibs or something like that.
Since the image I saw was in such low resolution I coluldn't be 100% sure.
When the page finally appeared in print I checked it out to see what it looked like in nice sharp quality. And it confirmed what I had thought in the first place: this was not by Barks.

Now, why do I say that it's not by Barks when it's included in CBC?
Follow me and I'll give you my theory:
The image of Gladstone Gander and the pig are traced from WDC 131 and WDC 136. That would date it to ca 1951 or later.The inking on these lacks any trace of Barks elegant inking. He was at his peak in the early 50's and these are clearly inked by some one not used to ink in this style. You can see how the inker hesitates and the lines becomes unsure.
The sketch of a man between the Beagle Boy reminds me of Barks designs from ca 1945. The Donald in the upper right corner looks like a copied Taliaferro drawing. Then there are three Donald heads that looks like they are copied from various stories. The Scrooge and the man next to him and the Donald in the upper left corner are drawings done by someone not familar with Barks designs and construction of characters at all. (The shape of Scrooges hat is all wrong.)
Conclusion: This was made by someone else than Barks.

So, if Barks didn't do it, why did it survive in his scap pile?
One guess is that this is a try-out. Maybe someone asked Barks if he needed an assistant in the early 50's. These might even be done at Barks house with him "looking over the shoulder". However, Barks didn't have use of an assistant at that time. Maybe he saved the sheet of drawings all these years. Like a memory of that first meeting. Who knows. I don't and the answer is probably impossible to find with both of the Barkses gone.

/Joakim.

The Collectors Editions that never was

Just got this interesting piece on Barks fandom/Western Publishing history from Dana Gabbard.
Take it away, Dana!
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This post shares scans of a heretofore nearly forgotten corner of Barksdom -- a Western Publishing Barks deluxe reprint project that advanced as far as producing a prospectus shared with Carl Barks fans in the early 1980s. The origins of this project lay with John Nichols, who was both a dealer specializing in Barks and the publisher of the leading Barks fanzine, The Barks Collector. At that time (the late 1970s) certain classic Barks stories in English were only available in the U.S. via the pricey original editions. Nichols found an affordable alternative to offer his clients by importing Australian reprints of stories such as "Adventure Down Under" that were otherwise too expensive for most fans to afford in the original printing. Nichold did a brisk business in the Barks reprints and evidently wished that a new series of deluxe Barks reprints a la The Best of Walt Disney Comics series issued in 1974 was published by Western Publishing and which he could then market to his burgeoning customer base eager to have access to classic Barks at an affordable cost.

Then by chance at one of the two Barks Cons Nichols held in New York in the early 1980s (one was also held in the same period in Oakland California) among the attendees was the comics editor for Western's New York office, Wally Green. Green evidently was impressed with the gathering of fans he witnessed and Nichols' pitch that unlike the previous attempt Western had made to enter the collectors market (which the company must have seen as a failure since a second set of volumes in the Best of Walt Disney comics series had gotten as far as advance publicity aimed at the then nascent comic book fandom with mockups of the cover much like the Green memo before the project was without explanation cancelled) there was now an established distribution network serving comic book shops nationwide that featured non-returnable wholesaling. That must have been music to Green's ears as Western was in a downward spiral at that time as to sales of its newstand comics. This memo outlines the new deluxe Barks reprint series Western was contemplating. 

It was distributed by Nichols to the mailing list of Barks fans he had built up as a dealer and publisher soliciting their expression of interest in such a series. And that was the last anyone heard of the proposal. Why it didn't happen is a mystery but not soon after Western got out of the comic book business and shortly after that Gladstone stepped into the breach and began what is now seen as a Disney comics renissance featuring both classic and new material that garnered wide acclaim from fans.

It is thanks to Brent Swanson (who held onto the memo all these years and supplied a scan of it after my faint memories of it prompted him to retrieve it from storage) that this memo is now recovered from being hidden in the dark corners of history.

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Thanks for sharing the info Dana!

And as an extra Barks-bonus to this post:
here's a watercolor by the duck man.
Looks like a 1940's piece and judging by the hair style it might be his daughter Peggy. 

Barks?

I browsed the Heritage auctions website the other day.
And one of the lots that was sold last year caught my eye:

The description for lot 44042 read:
" Carl Barks - Uncle Scrooge #19 Cover Recreation Original Art (Another Rainbow, 1989). Uncle Scrooge animates a stack of coins with his golden musical touch, in this original illustration. Carl Barks recreated his original image to be used as a cover for a volume of Another Rainbow's slipcased Uncle Scrooge hardcover reprint editions. The image area measures 11" x 14". Matted and framed and in Very Good condition. From the Estate of Bruce Hamilton"

Well, I couldn't recall Barks doing any recreation of this cover for the CBL sets. And the art didn't look like Barks at all to me. So I searched Inducks, the internet database that indexes all the Disney comics in the world.
And, ta-da! This is what I found.

What was sold at Heritage wasn't a Barks drawing, but only a redrawn version (Not by Barks!) that was used as a poster in Walt Disney's Comics and stories #357. How much it went for? Some sucker paid $2629 for it!!!
Well, what can we learn from this? Don't get into colleccting original Barks art unless you can tell the difference between a real Barks and some other Disney artist.
But if you have spent all that money on it and can't tell the difference anyway... you might deserve it...

To finish this post here's Barks original cover for Uncle Scrooge #19.
(Courtesy of Inducks database.) Quite a difference between the two.

(The Unpublished) Barks Treasury pt. I

Back in 1996-97 Carl Barks did a large amount of drawings in colored pencils. Forty of them were released in 1997 in the book Barks Treasury by Applewood Books.

Drawing from Barks Treasury. Image taken from outducks.

Now, what about the other drawings? They were sold to private collectors and I bet some of them will never be seen by other Barks fans again.
Barks himself seems to have kept a binder with copies of the drawings and last year some of these copies were sold. Fortunately I was able to get low res snapshots of a few. (Better to have some images in low resolution than none at all ...)
So without much further ado here's part one of what I call "(The Unpublished) Barks Treasury". 
Enjoy!

Barks made 26 drawings labeled "Misc."
Four of them, 23-26, will appear here on the blog.

Misc. 23 – "Last call for the clan McDuck"

The Golden Turkeys

The following text about "The Golden Apples" is a rough translation of the last part of a longer text, about Carl Barks re-written Duck stories from the 50's and 60's. Published in Swedish Donaldist fan magazine "NAFS(k)uriren" this year.

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When you read the stories Barks made new versions of in the late 50's and early 60's there's one that stands out and differs from the others. The Terrible Tourist WDC 248 (1961) was in fact a new version of a story that was intended to be published in WDC 64 (1945), but that was rejected by Western Publishing. It was shelved and was first published more than thirty years later. For readers in the 60's, this was not a re-make of an old story but a brand new one.
But what about the other stories that Barks saw disappear into the archives during the 50's? Why didn't he re-write any of them when he was looking for stories to re-work? Well ... Maybe that's just what he did.

In 1952 Barks drew a story that later became known as The Golden Apples. It was shelved and, unfortunately, it has been missing since then. The only thing we know about it are the bits and pieces of information Barks shared over the years.

The Golden Apples story took place during the Duckburg apple festival. There was a a contest where the men in Duckburg would gather golden apples in the woods. Apples that were placed there by the festival queen, inspired by the Greek myth of Atalanta. Donald becomes fond of the festival queen. Something that makes Daisy thoroughly jealous. One of the reasons why the story was never published is said to be that Daisy behaved too "unfeminine" in this story.

When one reads Turkey Trouble in WDC 243 (1960), it is easy to draw parallels between the two stories. Instead of an apple festival, it is a thanksgiving day feast and all men play at being pioneers who captures game and gather fruit in the forest. The main course to be served at the feast is turkey. Whoever captures the most wild turkeys in the woods gets to dine with the queen of the festival.

The basic idea is the same as for the 1952 story! Gladstone Gander appears in the 1960 story, but he was probably not in the golden apples story. Barks often changed the cast of his rewritten stories, and since he never mentioned that Gladstone would have been in the older one, we can probably rule out his involvement.

However, I can imagine that even in the story about the golden apples some crooked cheating took place in the woods. Where Donald is tricked to buy chickens disguised as turkeys, he might have been cheated to buy normal apples painted with gold paint in the old version.

Daisy's temperament that the publisher didn't like has understandably disappeared.
As with most other new versions Barks wrote these years, he retained the storys structure but clothed it in a new suit.
Of course, I'm just speculating. But it's fun to play with the idea that one of the lost Barks stories in a way, still remains. Although the golden apples turned into turkeys.

WDC 405

Recently this piece turned up:

Looks like an alternate version of the cover to WDC 405. But is it by Barks?

Here's  a screenshot of the original listing:

Some people said it was a trace and a fake.
Take a close look. What do you think?

Now, let's see what the *evidence* says.

1. The paper.
See the stamped image in the top left corner? Schoeller Durex was the paper used by Western publishing. The back has preprinted borders. (See image.) So this is done on a genuine Western Publishing board.

2. The stamp
It's stamped with the proper early (1970s) "WALT DISNEY PRODUCTIONS" stamp, lacking the (c) in the stamp. (Notice it's not stamped with the later stamp that says "(C) THE WALT DISNEY COMPANY")

On to what can be seen and judged:

3. The no-match
The drawing doesn't match the published cover or the painting. Stuff has been drawn differently. (If it had been a forgery/a trace why not try to make it as close as possible?) It's actually closer to the printed cover. I'd say this pre-dates the painting, but this version was used as a basis for the later cover.

See here how the drawing doesn't match the painting. So it's not a tracing. 

4. The handwriting.
The "To Denver Carl Barks" is written by Carl. No doubt about it. (If not this is the best Barks handwriting forgery I've ever seen.)

5. The nephews
Compare the nephews to the printed cover. You can tell that they have been cleaned up by someone else on the cover. (Possibly Larry Mayer.) What we see here is the real deal. You can't forge stuff like this. Barks quick sketches are extremely hard to fake. It's like handwriting.

Now, the tricky thing with this piece is the inking and the double signatures. Why sign a piece twice?

After having looked at this piece I'd say it's by Barks. At least the pencils. It might have been inked by Carl by the request of the fan. Remember that this was done in the mid 70s or later. Barks had not been inking regularely with a nib for many years. And he was in his mid 70s or older. Look at this inked piece from 1977.  Not exactly up to par with what he did in the late 60's.

Carl Barks 1977

Or... the inking and the extra signature might have been added at a later date by someone else to "enhance" the piece. I have to see the piece in person to judge that.

My conclusion:
The paper, the first signature, the stamp and the pencils is the real deal.
The inking I have to examine in person to judge it. To be really, really sure I'd probably have to see a photo with Barks holding the inked piece.


/Joakim.

Bonus:
Here's the printed cover and the original art to WDC 405. (Courtesy of Inducks and Heritage Comics.)

F is for Fake

Time for some Barks forgeries again.
This time they turned up in the Barks cataloge produced by Karl Heinz Richard.
(He's the guy that makes Barks oils rare...)
Click HERE to see the online version of the cataloge.

First we have this piece that was sold by Profiles in History July 29, 2012

So obviously not by Barks I'm amazed that it can fool anyone. But... obviously it can, so I thought I'd better post the image here, to make people aware of this piece. This one should be destroyed by the police to avoid it entering the market again. Two close ups for those of you still in doubt.

The second one is what appears to be a study for the cover of Donald Duck 77. To me it looks like a rather crude tracing. Not by Barks. 

The third piece from the Barks cataloge is not a forgery.
But it's not by Barks... Sorry.
(The cover art is from Uncle Scrooge 189, 1981.)

To end this post on a happy note the catalog contained one piece that was new to me!
A pencil "rough" for the money salad cover! Enjoy!

New Barks, Lustig and Jippes story this week!

A brand new Uncle Scrooge story by Carl Barks, John Lustig and Daan Jippes will be published this week!
It's an unfinshed script by Barks, probably from the 60's, that John Lustig now has finished and Daan Jippes has provided the artwork to.
Here are a few samples to wet your appetite.
And for those of you who lives outside scandinavia: you can always bug your editors to pick up "The duck who came for dinner" for publication. The code number is "D 2010-073".  :)
Enjoy!

The original script was sold a few years ago as a part of the Barks Estate auctions on eBay.
This is what it looks like.

Besides the unfinshed script to the Happi Happi story I own and a few one pagers there are at least one more unpublished/unfinished plot out there, that is more than just a story description or an idea. (A plot broken down into pages and panels.) It's labeled as "Gyro's manager plot":

And while I'm at it...
I just wanted to mention this one, dealing with Magica DeSpell.
It seems to be written in the 90's, judging by the handwriting. (There are pages below the top one that looks like they are from a Junior Woodcucks story but the handwriting looks like Barks in his 70's.) Might be a scrapped idea that was written before "Horsing Around with History" or another plot began afterwards. Probably one of his last ones and it would sure be interesting to read it in full.

(If you own unpublished plots like the above samples, please get in touch with me. I'm always interested in trading or buying.)

PS. Here's a screencap from Wikipedia.
I changed it back to just "Carl Barks" since someone obviously pulled a leg here. Pretty funny though, but it shows how unreliable some sources can be...
Thanks to "Sim" on the Disney Comics Forum for observing this!

Was the Simpsons character named after Barks? Hmm...

WDC 132 revisited

A recent post over at Michael Sporn's "Splog" featured the cover to WDC 132 by Carl Barks.
(Thanks to Bill Peckmann for sharing the cover scan!)

Notice how off balance this cover is. There are two big chunks of empty space to the right of Donalds foot and above the nephews. Not well composed at all. And why is there a sign saying "Do not pick flowers"? It has nothing to do with the gag of HDL fooling Donald with a fake flower at all. In fact it distracts from it.

Now, I've seen this cover hundreds of times, but I've never taken a closer look. Could it be that this cover was altered and not what Barks drew?
Take a look at this:

Notice the small gaps between the sign and the inked lines surrounding it. It's been pasted on afterwards. I guess by someone who didn't think the original gag was strong enough.
But by adding the sign the gag became ... strange. Why wouldn't the nephews want Donald to pick the flowers when they are about to fool him?
Working at a comic book company I can attest that editorial desicions aren't always logical...

So what would Barks original version have looked like? I took a quick stab at it using photoshop. Maybe like this:

/Joakim.

PS. While on the subject of Barks covers:
Over the years I've seen people write that the nephews on the cover of FC 353 are drawn by someone else than Barks, because the eyes doesn't have the piecut.
Well ... the nephews are drawn by Barks. Why he chose to draw their eyes different (or why someone else changed them afterwards) I don't know. But the composition, drawing and inking is by Barks. :)

Image taken from GCDB.