Donald Duck is an interesting character, because he’s a good guy. Only his inflated ego drives him to do bad things. He can be competent, until he’s challenged, and he must become the best, so he messes up. Most of his stories involve him carrying out some task for some reason, often ridiculous, and then being utterly incompetent to follow through. But he’s not mean. He’s sometimes vengeful, and almost always selfish. But he’s not mean, and that’s what makes him a successful character despite all the stupid, prideful things he does.
Buy Donald Duck: The 90th Anniversary CollectionIn this new Fantagraphics release, Donald Duck: The 90th Anniversary Collection, we get to follow Donald through the years in a series of comic adventures. It showcases the various aspects of his constantly irascible personality. Disney comics have an interesting history. They are often written by Americans and Canadians but were far more popular in Europe than in the States. And the comics usually had much more complicated and intricate stories than the Disney cartoons they’re derived from. This collection is an overview of the entire oeuvre of Donald Duck comics, from early newspaper stories to later full comic-book editions.
For American writers, the classic “good duck writer” was Carl Barks, who was a story writer for the cartoons before he began drawing comics. The latter-day genius, Don Rosa, was the writer who took all the threads of Barks’ great Scrooge stories and weaved them into a coherent narrative. That became The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck.
Both of them are represented in this collection by the stories, “Lost in the Andes” and its 40 years later sequel “Return to Plain Awful.” The tale is about a hidden valley with square eggs and square chickens. They might be a positive financial boon if anybody could get the locals to care about money. These stories are central in the duck comic mythos. They’re plainly ridiculous, but are also about arrogance (Donald), ambition (Scrooge), resourcefulness (the nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie) and the way these intersect with culture. Also, they have plenty of adventure and travel, which is common in the longer duck stories. With good writers like Barks and Rosa, some pretty heady topics are weaved into funny animal comics.
But that’s only two of the stories here. There are several other writers from different nationalities and times that contribute. A majority of the non-American stories are from Italian writers, including my favorite new discovery in the book, “The Life and Times of Donald Duck.” It serves as a biography of Donald told through a newscaster who has apparently read all the comics and knows that Donald Duck (and his nephews) are the most interesting characters in Duckburg. It’s funny, and poignant, with Uncle Scrooge discovering Donald as a lost egg on the road and generously (though, as ever, gruffly) taking him into his family. It’s funny how many dimensions these comics can have, the ridiculous to the sublime.
Even for the serious Duck comic collector, the amount of material out there is daunting. It’s interesting to have a collection like this with so many previously foreign-only releases available in English. It’s an anthology, so the quality can vary. For my personal preference, I loved the delicate linework of many of the European comics, but I could not stand the ultra-modern looking, final full-length story, “A Love Lost to Oblivion”. The story, about Donald as the super-hero Duck Avenger, was okay. The art, however, had so much exaggerated off-model posing that I could barely look at it. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I much prefer… essentially every comic before that one.
And I feel a little churlish for complaining about that. This is 367 pages of quality Donald Duck comic work. I think it’s a fun introduction to the rich world of Disney Duck comics, and a collection of often funny, often poignant comic book stories.
The Donald Duck 90th Anniversary Collection has been released by Fantagraphics.
