The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library is a series of books published by Fantagraphics Books, collecting all of the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic book stories written and drawn by Carl Barks, originally published between late 1942 and Barks' retirement in June 1966. The series was launched in late 2011, and will comprise 6000 pages over roughly 30 240-page volumes when it is finished.
The rights to Barks' works were licensed from Disney by Gemstone Publishing from 2003 until the end of 2008, when they ceased publishing Disney titles. When he heard about it, Fantagraphics Books publisher Gary Groth got in contact with Disney, securing the rights to Floyd Gottfredson's work on the Mickey Mouse comic strip, which resulted in the Floyd Gottfredson Library series that started publication in mid-2011. Groth also tried to get the rights to Barks' duck stories. Disney at first announced they would publish the stories themselves, but eventually changed their minds and passed the work on to Fantagraphics.
Format[]
Barks' duck stories have been reprinted extensively, especially in Europe. Before Fantagraphics', there were two complete collections in English published by Another Rainbow Publishing. The first was the expensive, scholarly Carl Barks Library archive in 30 hardcover volumes, which was in black-and-white. This was followed up by The Carl Barks Library in Color in album form, with modern beautiful coloring.
Fantagraphics' 7.5" x 10.25" hardcover volumes are published in full color, as the stories originally were. When the series is complete, it will represent a chronological collection of Barks' stories. However, the volumes of the stories are being published out of order, starting with the volumes that the publishers believed would attract the most attention, beginning with Lost in the Andes, a volume containing stories from what is considered to be Barks' "peak" period (the late 1940s to the mid-1950s), including the story "Lost in the Andes", which many fans consider to be representative of Barks' best work, and was Barks' own favorite.
The design work was done by Fantagraphics' lead designer, Jacob Covey. The pages are recolored by Rich Tommaso, using the original comics as a coloring guide, unlike some of Fantagraphics' more scholarly reprints, as the books are aimed at a more general audience than many of Fantagraphics' other offerings, which are often aimed at the comics cognoscenti.
The books are about 240 pages each—about 200 pages of comics, with the remaining pages made up of supplementary material.
Restoration[]
The books are completely uncensored, including the racial caricatures that appeared in the originals that had been retouched in later reprintings. Some stories were printed from recently rediscovered original artwork, for the first time since their original printings.
Fantagraphics chose to have the artwork computer-recolored, using the original comics as color guides, rather than reprinting with the original off-register colors as they have in many of their other archival projects. Colorist Rich Tommaso has stuck closely to the original colors, although muting the originally garish ones somewhat in a concession to modern readers. Sometimes the colors were changed when it was known that Barks hadn't liked them, or when it was felt they could be corrected or improved.
