DCML digest #876

Don Rosa donrosa at iglou.com
Thu Mar 28 14:41:06 CET 2002


> From: Kriton Kyrimis <kyrimis at cti.gr>
> Hmmm... There's a B&W picture of Donald at the top left of the back cover,
> and no UPC symbol anywhere. I guess this makes my suddenly become rare
> issue even rarer--I'm rich!!! ;-)

That's a new one on me. I have *never* seen a direct-sales copy with brown
canes.
But to give you an idea of how rare and far-flung issues of U$ #219 with
brown canes are, one of the first ones I saw was when I was signing comics
at a book fair in Stockholm and a fan had such a copy... I asked him where
he bought it, assuming he was gonna say there in Sweden, and he said Africa!
(Unless there's a suburb of Stockholm that, to my American ears, sounds like
"Africa".)

> From: "Anders Christian Sivebaek" <acsive at mail.mira.dk>
> I just received the new issue of a great danish comic-fanzine
> The author of the little article has read in The Little rascals (a
> series from the OG-comic), a book by Leonard Martin and Richard W. Bann
> a claiming that Barks is supposed to have made a comic version of this
> short film series. -
> Then he asks if someone can confirm or deconfirm this information? I'm
> forwarding it now to this list, where I believe some of you readers
> have a big american collection where this could maybe be checked.

Yup, I have all the OUR GANGs, but I don't need to travel to the vault.
Those authors are mistaking Walt Kelly's detailed style for Barks art. Kelly
did the "Our Gang" stories. Barks did the Barney Bear, Benny Burro and Happy
Hound stories, like we all know.

> would be
> at all possible to recognize Barks' style when drawing humans in the
> 40'es?

You can see Barks drawing full-blown (?) humans in the Andy Panda story
(along with Pabian) in NEW FUNNIES #76 and in many early DONALD - FOUR
COLORs. But especially that NEW FUNNIES Panda story, as it is *not* about
funny-animal-story humans... that oddball story takes place in the "real
world" where an animal is discovered to be able to *talk* (yow!) and is put
into a circus! (But Andy Panda soon became a normal "funny animal" in a
"funny animal" world after that.)

But for those folks who want to have a full set of (American) comics
containing Carl Barks art... I bet they think they can stop with OUR GANG
#36. But to be reeeaaally nitpicky, you'd need to have the OUR GANG comics
all the way through when the title was changed to TOM AND JERRY, all the way
up to issue #82 in 1951. On each issue up until then, over in the
featured-character roster along the left side of the cover, were Barks
portraits of Barney and Benny.





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