Carl Barks: The Fantagraphics Studio Edition

Fantagraphics produces an original art edition of the work of famed Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck cartoonist Carl Barks.

Carl Barks: The Fantagraphics Studio Edition collects Barks’ preliminary pencil pages —or storyboards—of comics he wrote after he retired from penciling and inking, serving as a perfectly legible graphic storytelling map the finishing artist could follow. These are fully written and designed stories —which include Barks’ hand lettering— and can be read as easily as the rendered final versions. The advantage to these original art renditions is that the reader can not only appreciate but positively savor Barks’ gorgeous, nuanced penciling. These pages display the architecture beneath Barks’ final inked pages, revealing how fluid, vital, and effortless his finished panel-to-panel storytelling was, and how the subtlety of his character’s facial expressions were baked into the pencil work. Writing the story and breaking down the page graphically is the cartoonist’s first step to creating a comic, and here is an opportunity to see one of the 20th century’s greatest cartoonists thinking as drawing.

This book includes “King Scrooge the First,” the last Uncle Scrooge story Barks wrote and one of his best, as well as “Pawns of the Loup Garou” and many others. The pages are reproduced from high resolution color scans and printed at the actual size they were drawn.

The fidelity to the original art is so uncannily realized that a page framed under glass would be indistinguishable from the original. Every page convincingly conveys the quality and expressivity of Barks’ pencil linework.

Also included are several cover sketches and finished pencil drawings that were never published, and covers that were bought, finished, and submitted but never published. An introduction by Barks expert and editor Kim Weston provides background information and aesthetic commentary on the stories.