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Scrooge is the embodiment of home-grown pluck and made-in-U.S.A. materialism, but Barks' stories always come up with someone even greedier, or some force of history that the duck cannot best. In the end, Scrooge's enjoyment of wealth remains essentially benign, childish in its selfishness, but childlike in its spirit. Whether the old miser would acquire this volume is a moot point. It is pricey; on the other wing, it is an investment. An entire genre of clothbound comic strips from Little Nemo to Doonesbury has flourished in the post-Pop era, but seldom has such loving care been lavished on a volume of bygone entertainment. Collectors would have to pay close to $2,000 for the original comics containing these stories, and even in those, the panels would not be so brightly colored, the backgrounds so vivid. Hand-bound on luxurious stock, this volume has been produced with the care and cost usually reserved for reprints of Shakespeare folios.
"I thought everybody just read comic books once and threw them in the garbage can," Carl Barks remarks. "I never knew they'd amount to anything. If I did, I'd have kept a lot more of 'em." Barks, 81, was raised on a farm in Oregon, had a total of eight years of school and worked at every kind of job from mule skinning to lumberjacking. He was 26 and heating rivets on a construction gang when he mailed off some cartoons to "a little gutter magazine." The cartoons led to a series of magazine jobs that eventually landed him at the Disney Studios story department, which he quit ("I didn't feel free") after six years. "I was going to raise chickens in the San Jacinto Mountains," he recalls, but a comic-book publisher with rights to Disney characters asked him to work on some ducks.
With no royalties, no fringe benefits and no credit—not even a byline —Barks drew something like 500 duck sto ries. He modified Donald's splenetic film characterization and, in 1947, created Scrooge for a special Christmas issue. The old geezer proved so popular that he began to star in his own stories in 1952, each one billed "Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge." It was collectors who first discovered Barks himself. The artist's narrative skills would have made him a stand out, but the detail of his drawing was what elevated him to the status of pop father figure. All his early jobs gave him a Rube Goldbergian fascination with mechanical comedy; his plots were researched the way a schoolboy would do a term paper—by turning to the National Geographic and Scientific American. "If you're going to be in the Andes, it had to look like the Andes," he insists. "Some of those other artists put their characters in China, but they drew it as if it were Iowa."