The Floyd Gottfredson Library volume 7 & 8

I like to get the box sets of the Floyd Gottfredson Library from Fantagraphics, and usually I get them in the mail right before Christmas. This year however I didn’t get them until after I got home from the holiday vacation, so I still haven’t found the time to read all of it. But from what I’ve read so far I have just one thing to say; you need to get these books now!
 
The 4th box set collects all the daily Mickey strips from May 1942 to July 1946, and as usual the books are packed with articles and bonus material.
 
The highlight from what I’ve read so far are the rare gag-a-day strips made for British newspapers. I had no idea they even existed! As the British newspapers ran the daily strips seven days a week instead of 6 days a week, 11 filler strips were made. They re-used art from previous adventure strips to make new gag stories, and it’s a lot of fun trying to compare the art.
 
Here is one example. The following two panels are from the British filler strip, published July 13, 1930.

 

The art is from 3 different panels in "Mickey Mouse In Death Valley” (found in Floyd Gottfredson library vol.1)

Among all the goodies in this box set is an "Appreciation by Casty" article.  The article is illustrated with two great covers made for the Norwegian "Mikke Mus & Langbein" ("Mickey Mouse & Goofy") Christmas comics.

 

But the cover for "The Black Crow Mystery" printed in the book is actually not the version used in Norway! As you can see on the picture of the two comics in question, in the published cover the crow holds a club, while in the illustration used in the book he has a bomb instead.

 

Norwegian Christmas comics with Casty covers

I might come back to this box set in a future blogpost. But I’ll end this one with a side note.

There’s also an "Appreciation by Cavazzano" article in volume 8, illustrated with a cover drawing from Topolino.

But did you know that this cover was almost used for an American comic too? The planned but canceled Walt Disney’s Comics #720 from Boom! was supposed to have the cover and the story "Topolino e il surreale viaggio nel destino" (featuring Walt Disney and Salvador Dali). According to the article the English title is "The Persistence of Mickey", but as far as I know no English translation has been published yet. If any archival editors (hint hint) read this, I hope we get to see it some day!

Planned but canceled issue of Walt Disney's Comics

"The Golden Helmet", paperback from Fantagraphics

"The Golden Helmet", book 3 in Fantagraphics' series with Carl Barks paperbacks

A new book in Fantagraphics’ series of Carl Barks paperbacks is about to be released. Amazon list the publish date to be October 3, 2015, but I already received my copy a few days ago. It’s the third book of this kind they have published. From before we have "Ghost of the Grotto" and "Sheriff of Bullet Valley", all under the Donald Duck logo.

All books published so far in this series

These half-sized paperbacks contain stories previously published in The Carl Barks Library by Fantagraphics. So if you are already collecting that series there is nothing new to be found here. Like the names of books in the Carl Barks Library, the paperbacks also have names taken from one of the stories inside. But it looks like they tried to not use the same names on any books in both of the two series. Probably wise to avoid confusion. According to Fantagraphics’ own web pages the paperback series is an "affordable, kid-friendly Disney Duck adventure series". So it sounds like they are more targeted at kids. But I can also see the paperbacks as an easy pickup if you need to kill some time at the airport or need some light reading for your travel.

The Carl Barks Library and the paperbacks have the same color restoration, where they are digitally colored to be as close to the colors in the original print as possible. The difference is that in the paperback each page is broken down in two, so there are two tiers per page while originally they were printed with four. But that can be done without having to remount or rearrange the panels, and there’s no editing done to the art. Actually, if you are so lucky to come across original art by Carl Barks, you’d probably see that one page of comics is drawn on two sheets of paper that are taped together. So most (if not all, I’m not sure) can easily be printed as two halves.

Inside The Carl Barks Library vol.11 ("A Christmas For Shacktown") and "The Golden Helmet" paperback.

The image above is a comparison of the hardcovers and the paperbacks. What I think is a bit strange is what page they started the story on in the paperback. If you go to a random page in the book, you’d see the bottom half of one original page on the left, and the top half of the next page on the right. I think it would be better to be able to see both parts of the original page at the same time. So the story should have started on an even numbered page and not on an odd numbered page. Carl Barks said in interviews that he tried to end every page with a punch line or something exciting to keep up the pace of the story.  But it’s not that big of a deal. I tried reading "The Golden Helmet" with this in the mind, and it’s still a great story!

The story "The Golden Helmet" takes up the majority of the book with the same name, but we get three of Barks’ 10-pagers (here 20 pages) at the end too.