The Carl Barks Library of Burros, Hounds, Bears, Pigs, and Bunnies SPECIAL EDITION: 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. This SPECIAL EDITION version is different from the regular edition in that it is printed with a color printing process which yields darker, more intense black lines, even though 302 of 344 pages have no color, just black ink on white paper. In addition, the 3 stories for which no original masters are known to exist are also printed in color versions which look better than the black and white version in the regular edition, and are more reflective of Barks intentions. Because of the extra cost of color printing, this edition is $20 more expensive. * * * * 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 in late 1946, 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 new color restorations of these stories in another book, Restoring Carl Barks, including newly created black line plates. Those color restorations are also used in this SPECIAL EDITION, rather than the black and white versions used in the less expensive regular edition. * * * * * 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 are used for reproducing two of the stories. No proofs are known to exist for the other, and the newly created color restorations used in the book, Restoring Carl Barks, have been used instead. The three non-proof originated stories look significantly better in color, but the color printing also yields richer, deeper blacks in the 33 black and white stories that are reproduced from proofs.