Number 1236: Inspiration for Carl Barks...?

One of my favorite Donald Duck stories (which I still own in the form of my original 1957 subscription copy of Walt Disney Comics and Stories #204) is the untitled story the Grand Comics Database lists as “Losing Face.”*

Donald, Daisy and the kids are taking a ride near Mt. Mushmore, and Daisy wants to swing by and see the giant carved head of Senator Snoggin.

Donald is nervous. Daisy asks him what's wrong, and he tells her a story of he and the boys getting a job the past spring cleaning up the park grounds for the tourist season, including a clean-up of Senator Snoggin's head.

While cleaning, Donald has trouble with an eagle. After being kicked out it comes back at Donald with a vengeance.

Donald spills a weed killer, which turns Senator Snoggin's nose bright red. In order to get rid of the stain, which won't wash off, Donald uses a jackhammer, which breaks off the senator's nose.

Donald and the boys build a new temporary nose with plaster, with disastrous results.

Donald whittles the nose down to its original shape, but needs to use the jackhammer to set pegs to hold the nose on.

 

The ultimate gag is after Donald tells Daisy the story the whole thing comes apart.

I've always thought this was one of Barks' masterpieces of gag building, pacing and drawing; one of his best.

Imagine my surprise to be flipping through issues of Pep Comics from 1943-44, and find a three-part story, “Catfish Joe,” which has some of the same elements as the later Barks story.  Check it out. From Pep Comics numbers 43, 44 and 45:

Okay, so what do you think happened? Here's a thought, what if Carl Barks, in the early part of his comic book career, was going through comic books to see what others were doing. He saw this story and it had some gag elements he liked. Years later he recalled some of those elements and put them into this classic Donald Duck story. As you can see, “Catfish Joe” is no Donald Duck and Larry Harris** is no Carl Barks.

The Donald Duck story by Barks is funnier, better written and better drawn than “Catfish Joe,” but it gives one pause about the creative process and where those ideas come from. I could say that Barks remembered the story consciously and used it as a springboard for his own, or I could let Barks off the hook and say that he had cryptomnesia, which is thinking a memory is an original creation. Memory is a tricky thing.

The two stories make for an interesting comparison.

*I'm sorry that I can only show panels from the Barks story and not the whole thing. I have heard that Disney lawyers troll the internet looking for copyright infringements.

**Harris isn't a bad artist, but uneven from panel to panel. His art reminds me of a cross between Roy Crane and Al Capp. I've never heard of Harris before. It's possible that the Larry Harris of “Catfish Joe” is this Larry Harris, gag cartoonist of the fifties and sixties.

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The Other Showcase

Back when I was a young teen collecting comics, I remember picking up this issue at a garage sale and boggling:



Under "Still 10 cents" it says "No. 1115". I was flabbergasted. I knew that Ricky Nelson had starred with the rest of his family in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet for a very long time (in fact, that show is still the second longest-running sitcom in US history, behind only the Simpsons), and that he'd had some success as a rock star, but the idea that his comic had over five times as many issues as Superman (back then) was simply impossible to conceive.



And, of course, it wasn't true.



DC did not originate the concept of a tryout magazine, where new features could be tested to see if they sold. They borrowed the idea from Dell Comics, which had a series simply entitled Four Color Comics. Dell published approximately 1350 issues under that name, which I believe is still the all-time record for a single series in the United States, even though the last Four Color issue was published in 1962. Since the first issue appeared in 1942, it is obvious that they put out about 60 comics a year under this line, or five per month. And four of those issues, not 1100+, featured young Mr Nelson.



The Four Color line included the debuts of many long-running series for Dell and its later successors, including Donald Duck, (#9), Felix the Cat (#15), Roy Rogers (#38), Little Lulu (#74), Pogo (#105), Woody Woodpecker (#169). Of course those features had appeared elsewhere, but these were the tryouts that got them their own comic titles. Four Color also featured the first appearance anywhere of Uncle Scrooge (#178).



The Four Color series did create one problem which caused endless anxiety for collectors in the days before the Overstreet Guide. Dell would run, say, four tryout issues for Spin and Marty (a serial about two boys on a dude ranch that ran on TV in the Mickey Mouse Club), spaced out over a number of months, and if the sales justified it, they would start issuing the feature in its own magazine, starting with #5. Which meant that collectors might search forever for the elusive #s 1-4, not realizing that they bore issue #s 714, 767, 808 and 826 on the covers.



As if that wasn't complicated enough, Four Color was actually two series; there were 25 issues in Volume One, and 1300+ in V2. To add to the confusion, while the last issue of V2 was #1354, there were numerous missing issues in the last 100 or so; for example, there is no #1351, #1352 or #1353.



The most valuable issues in the Four Color line are generally the early Donald Duck appearances by Carl Barks, but there are plenty of cheap issues from the 1940s-1960s offering fine quality entertainment.

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Donald Duck and Friends #359

Donald Duck and Friends #359
Oct 2010 | 25 pages | CBZ | 22.1 MB
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Donald Duck #359

Donald Duck #359
Oct 2010 | 29 pages | CBR | 23.2 MB
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Donald Duck and Friends #355

Donald Duck and Friends #355
25 pages | June 2010 | CBZ | 19.2 MB
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Single Issue Review: Walt Disney's Comics & Stories #210

I have not talked much about the funny animal comics thus far on the blog, so today I'd like to take a look at one of the longest-running and best comics featuring funny animals, Walt Disney's Comics & Stories. Disney, then as now, was a huge brand name for kids, signifying high quality and generally wholesome fare. The comics were marketed by Dell, which is still a major magazine publisher, although they got out of the comics business a long time ago.

The WDC&S issues came out monthly and featured a mostly unvarying lineup: A new Donald Duck story leading off the mag, some filler gag strips from the 1930s, a couple of backup features and a Mickie Mouse serial adventure.

The inside front cover has a reprinted gag from a Sunday Donald Duck story. Donald encounters a weeping child who is apparently lost. Donald escorts him around the block, past an ice cream parlor (where the kid gets a cone), a popcorn vendor (where the kid gets a box), and a candy story (where the kid gets a lollipop). And in the end, the kid tells Donald that his home is right there, where they started.

This is pretty typical of the Donald Duck shorts, where Donald almost always ends up getting fleeced by somebody.

The main story is a Carl Barks' DD adventure. Barks is one of the acknowledged geniuses of comics, a gifted writer and cartoonist who made Donald and his Uncle Scrooge into classics. In this story, Donald's young nephews are commenting on the success of all their friend's fathers, as compared to their lowly uncle:



Heheh. But it turns out that he's already lost that job, and has started as a baker. Here he's got a real chance to last for a week, as the owner is out of town for that long. So the boys--errr, ducklings decide to help him out, which proves difficult. At first, Donald scrimps on ingredients, and his biscuits turn out like hockey pucks. Then he overdoes the ingredients and the results are nearly as disastrous:



In the finale, Donald cooks a pie for some performers to burst out of and sing a song. Unfortunately, he uses melted cheese instead of shortening, and the singers end up stuck in the pie crust, and so the end of the story has him and his nephews running for their lives from an angry mob.

The second story features Scamp. Scamp was a minor character in the Lady and the Tramp, a Walt Disney cartoon first released in 1955. He was the one of the Lady's puppies who took after his dad, the Tramp, as something of a mischievous dog. For whatever reason the concept took off and led to a daily comic strip and a Dell Comic of his own, in addition to this backup feature in WDC&S.

In the story in this issue, Scamp does not appreciate his master, and decides to search for adventure on his own. Of course, he discovers that life in the wild is not as romantic as it might sound and finds a new appreciation for the life of a pet.

The next story is Chip N Dale. The two chipmunks try to help a mother skunk, whose daughters have run off to see the world. Of course, young skunks discover that life in the wild is not as romantic as it might sound... wait a minute, isn't that the same lesson Scamp learned?

The text story concerns Uncle Scrooge and Huey, Dewey & Louie. The boys scheme to get Uncle Scrooge to buy their handmade valentines, but he refuses because nobody ever sends him one. So they get Donald and Goofy and Daisy and a bunch of other people to send him a valentine. Uncle Scrooge hires the boys to respond in kind and tells them to help themselves to anything in his desk they need, so they stuff each valentine with $100 bill, much to Scrooge's dismay when he learns.

A couple shorts strips fill a page, and then we get to the Mickey Mouse serial. This is apparently the last of a three-part story, where Mickey and Goofy have encountered some bank robbers while investigating the strange things that have been happening to animals in Lonely Valley. The bank robbers have been causing the strange things to happen; their boss has invented an odd ray that gives him control over dumb animals.



The bank robberies are intended to pay for further experiments to perfect it to the point where it works on "people". Of course there were no actual humans in Mickey's world, but there were human-like animals and dumb animals, so I presume he means the former. Eventually Mickey and Goofy get away and the bank robbers are captured, so the only thing that will bother the local animals is Goofy's cowboy getup.

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