Walt Disney's Donald Duck: A Christmas for Shacktown

This is the third published volume of Fantagraphics' Complete Barks series. It will be the 11th volume of the completed (30 volume) series. Here's my (possibly slightly rambling) assessment of the goods:If there were any weak spots in the magnificent first published volume in this series ( Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes (The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library) ), then it was surely the two included Christmas-stories, which were somewhat below the high water mark set by Barks in his 'golden' period. However, Barks DID produce a fair amount of memorable Christmas-stories - it possibly helped that Barks view of Christmas was a actually little bit cynical - Barks' seasonal stories tended to be well-balanced and not too saccharine.In this volume we get the title story "A Christmas for Shacktown" which may very well be the best Christmas story Barks ever made. It's just wonderful, from his use of Dickensian kids in Duckburg's poor quarter, to the haunting big black hole in the ground that swallows all Scrooge's money.... This story is a real seasonal classic!This volume features the stories published immediately prior to the stories in  Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge: Only A Poor Old Man (Complete Carl Barks Disney Library) . If you're mainly in it for the Scrooge-character, then you still need this book - even though it mainly focuses on Donald and the Nephews, it still features some all time classic Scrooge moments, including the first appearance of his famous Money Bin.The later long Uncle Scrooge adventure stories are famous, and I can understand why. Back in the 1950s and 1960s the globetrotting adventures of Scrooge must have been truly mindblowing for kids who hadn't yet access to Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies on DVD. However, the truth of it is that Barks did start to burn out on those stories pretty quickly - they forced him into types of too-similar storylines that were in danger of becoming somewhat stale. Some of Barks' very best adventure stories were actually done prior to Uncle Scrooge becoming a lead character.In this volume we get the mighty "The Golden Helmet" (featuring Donald and the nephews), which is simply a perfect adventure tale. I live in Denmark, where Barks' stories have been read (and loved) by kids for generations, unlike in the US, where Marvel's and DC's superheroes kind of pushed them out on the sideline in the 70s and 80s. "The Golden Helmet" has been highly honored in Denmark in a slightly bizarre way. A few years ago the (somewhat right-wing) Minister of Culture decided to strengthen Danish Culture against 'globalization' by assembling a 'canon' of the greatest works of art that had been produced in Denmark. To do this, he assembled a panel of leading artists and intellectuals. To cut a long story short: The final list featured a 'children's culture'-section with one somewhat controversial inclusion: "The Golden Helmet" by Carl Barks. This was the only work by a foreign artist featured on the entire list. The expert panel had apparently felt that this masterpiece had been a part of Danish culture for several generations to such a degree that it almost FELT like it was a Danish work of art.... or something. It all possibly simply goes to show that even leading intellectuals can sometimes be guilty of fuzzy thinking - or maybe they were simply rebelling a little bit against the minister's idea of a National Canon of Art. But they sure seemed to like the works of Carl Barks!The book also features the first appearances of inventor Gyro Gearloose. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Gyro would get his own magazine, and Barks would draw short Gyro solo-stories that were sometimes scripted by other writers. The two stories in this volume featuring Gyro Gearloose are among the darkest Barks ten-page stories. One of them, "The Terrible Secret" is about grown-ups having dark shameful secrets from the past. It ends with a hilarious punchline, but the story nevertheless did manage to unsettle me a bit when I was a kid. At this point in his career Barks wasn't doing watered down kids entertainment, he was doing stuff that was as edgy as any later Simpsons episode from the best seasons of that show.(Simpsons creator Matt Groening is known to be a big Barks nut, and arguable many aspects of the Simpsons show is a direct continuation of the storytelling in Barks' ten-page stories, with Springfield replacing Duckburg and Mr. Burns as a darker version of Uncle Scrooge, and Homer's relationship with his Christian neighbor Flanders sometimes mimicking the Donald/Gladstone rivalry.)(re: "Watered down kids entertainment". Barks would always retain SOME of his edge, but he WAS forced to skip some of the darker stuff in later years, after the comic book scare in the mid-50s, when the "Comic Book Code" was introduced and the industry was forced into self-censorship.)(and I'm not saying that this book isn't suitable for kids - it's GREAT for kids! I'm just saying that some stories MIGHT possibly haunt them a little bit the way good art is MEANT to haunt you....think Disney's "Bambi", or most Pixar-movies, or other kids' entertainments with somewhat dark undercurrents)Anyway, enough (happy) rambling from me. This is as good as comics gets! Buy this book! :-) Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes (The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library)Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge: Only A Poor Old Man (Complete Carl Barks Disney Library)

Its nostalgia time, thanks Carl Barks for those wonderful memoriesI recommend especially to folks that grew up reading and traveling in our imagination and living those adventures but also to the young’s to see how supreme they are.

I read these as a child, and I really enjoyed reading them again. Carl Barks and Hergé shared the ability to describe the world, whitout even travelling themselves. Both stand the test of time.

The stories are obviously fantastic, the quality of the paper however is not, very close to newspaper quality, not white and if you hold the book in one hand closed, you can see the paper waves ( not straight). But I probably end up buying them anyway, all of them.

Great!!