Customer Reviews

Walt Disney's Donald Duck in Trick or Treat (Gladstone Comic Album Series No. 23)

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Gladstone did a lot of great stuff in the 80's and 90's when they had the rights to put out Disney comics. They were not only doing great new stories but also reprinting a lot of old, classic Disney material by thre great Carl Barks whose work on Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge is legendary. This Halloween story was always one of my favorites and was an adaption of a 1952 cartoon of the same name as the adaption and the cartoon open with a spooky, pan away view of a cemetery, high atop a hill over looking a sleepy town as Witch Hazel flies through the air on her broomstick. Huey, Dewey, and Louie are all trick or treating but Donald isn't making with the treats and instead is playing tricks on the boys including tossing firecrackers into their treat bags. Eventually Witch Hazel sees what's happening and teaches Donald a much needed lesson. A gorgeous adaption of the short cartoon! Barks was a master!

"Walt Disney's Donald Duck in Trick or Treat (Gladstone Comic Album Series No. 23)"
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This installment, volume 23 in the Gladstone Publishing company's fabulous Disney reprint series feature, is a seasonally-theme book, with several Carl Barks-illustrated Halloween stories from years gone by. The main story, "Trick Or Treat," is a very long adaptation of a Disney cartoon in which Donald Duck is being mean to his nephews and won't share any of his candy with Huey, Dewey and Louie. An ancient witch, awake for the night, decides to teach Donald a lesson about the proper Halloween spirit, and they battle all night long with her trying to trick or trap Donald into giving up his trove of sweets. This isn't one of my favorite Carl Barks comic strips -- he had a very different vision of Donald and the boys than the animators at the movie studio, and where they usually portrayed Donald as being hot-tempered and mean-spirited, Barks usually wrote stories where Donald, although flawed, was a much nicer person. I like his version of Donald much better, and I prefer reading the Barks comic strips to watching the animated cartoons. And sure enough, when Barks was called upon to adapt one of the cartoons onto paper, it's not always clear that his heart was really in it. The story is violent and repetitive (the witch keeps knocking on Donald's door and jinxing him in new ways, while he retaliates with ever greater force and spite...) and the artwork is a bit simpler and blockier than usual. I find the tone of the story jarring in comparison to Barks' own original stories, but it's still worth checking out. The other stories in here are closer to his vision, including a ten-pager with Gyro Gearloose and a one-page story with Donald and Daisy. They are:

"Trick Or Treat" (1952)
"Hobblin' Goblins" (1952)
and the one-page gag strip... all reprinted from "Donald Duck Comics" #26, which was apparently a Halloween special.

(Joe Sixpack, ReadThatAgain children's book reviews)