Out Nov. 10, 2013
Scrooge McDuck is now such a fixture in the Disney universe that few
remember Carl Barks had been writing and drawing Donald Duck stories for
half a decade before he cooked up the miserly multiplujillionaire — for
what he thought would be a one-time Christmas yarn involving Donald,
the nephews, Scrooge in a bearskin, and (inevitably) a couple of real
bears. “Christmas on Bear Mountain” is one of Barks’s funniest holiday
stories and a true landmark in comics history, and offers a fascinating
look at a rough-edged, genuinely nasty character whom Barks would soon
soften... Scrooge aside, there’s plenty of fun to be had in this volume.
In “Volcano Valley” Donald and the Nephews end up stuck in Volcania, a
south-of-the-border country inhabited by sombrero-wearing,
siesta-addicted Volcanians. Other long-form adventures include the
self-explanatory “Adventure Down Under,” as well as one of Barks’s most
atmospheric thrillers, the West Indies-based “Ghost of the Grotto,”
which includes a lovely night-time sequence drawn in Barks’s trademark
silhouettes and a giantoctopus- vs.-hot-chili-peppers throwdown that
climaxes in an explosive splash panel. The book is rounded off with
seven of Barks’s hilarious 10-pagers, and as with the previous volumes, Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: Christmas on Bear Mountain
has been scanned from crisp vintage art and meticulously colored to
match the original printing’s warm, simple hues, and features abundant
critical and historical notes penned by some of duckdom’s finest
experts. Full color.
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