The Carl Barks Library of Burros, Hounds, Bears, Pigs, and Bunnies: The Art of Carl Barks, The Complete MGM Masters (and other non-Disney stories)

This book reprints, for the first time in one compact volume, all 36 of the non-Disney stories written and/or drawn by Carl Barks for Western Publishing and published under the Dell Comics label. Every story that Carl Barks wrote or drew featuring Disney characters during his career as a comic book creator has been reprinted, often many times, in comic books and albums, and books. The Disney work is the most important of Barks’ work, but he also wrote and/or drew these 36 other comic book stories featuring non-Disney characters between 1943 and 1953. These have been less-well served in reprinting and are much less well-known. They are generally comparable in quality to the average of the Donald Duck work he was doing at the same time. A few of them are quite creative and delightful, and stand well with the best short story work he was doing at the time. 31 of these stories were published in the MGM Our Gang Comics between 1943 and 1947. All were drawn by Barks and all but five were written by Barks. The other five were scripted by another writer near the end of this period, but Barks heavily edited them and made them more like his own writing. Original proofs of the artwork for all of these stories exists and has been used for their reproduction in this book, in pristine black and white just like the original artwork, yielding a unique opportunity to see the beauty of Barks’ pen and brush work, especially as printed here, larger than in the original comic books and with much better reproduction. During this same time period Barks drew two other stories from other writers’ scripts, one for the Walter Lantz character, Andy Panda, and the other for Warner Brothers’ Porky Pig. Original masters for these two stories no longer exist, but I have recently done color restorations of these stories in another book, Restoring Carl Barks, and have used the newly created black line plates (augmented by some grayscale in the Andy Panda story) for their black and white reproduction in this book. Finally, in 1952-1953, Barks wrote three more Droopy stories, in addition to the two early stories published in Our Gang Comics; these three stories were drawn by Harvey Eisenberg. Original proofs were used for reproducing two of the stories. No proofs are known to exist for the other, and the newly created black plates used in Restoring Carl Barks have been used instead. The three non-proof originated stories look significantly better in color and some readers may want to supplement this book with one of my color books, Restoring Carl Barks or The Unavailable Carl Barks (in color). Or you may wish to buy the SPECIAL EDITION of this book, which costs $20 more, because it includes the color versions of the three non-proof originated stories. The SPECIAL EDITION is printed using much more expensive color printing. Although the 33 proof originated stories are still black and white, the color printing process gives the black lines a little greater density and intensity making them look even blacker. For some readers this deeper blackness may justify the added expense. The SPECIAL EDITION is also now available on Amazon.