Customer Reviews

Donald Duck Family - The Daan Jippes Collection (Volume 1)

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Carl Barks' temporary return from retirement to script the newly launched "Huey, Dewey, and Louie Junior Woodchucks" series of the early '70s was seen as a mixed blessing. Barks provided the scripts and layouts, but left the finished art to others on Western Publishing's staff. Fans were okay with Tony Strobl's inking, but were less enthusiastic about the looser, "droopier" style of Kay Wright. Overall, the couple dozen new stories had more in common with the better slapstick farce stories Barks produced late in his career than with the best stories of his mature period of the late '40s and early '50s, when the Woodchucks had debuted.

The six stories in this album are among the better scripts and were redrawn by Dann Jippes in the early '90s. Jippes is capable of a very "tight" Barks imitation; his redrawn art for "Donald Duck's Atom Bomb" stood in, almost undetectable, for the Barks originals for many years. But Jippes has a "looser" version that recalls Barks without being completely tied to his style, and that is the hand he has applied to these scripts.

These stories are all enjoyable for what they are--light slapstick with inventive flourishes, particularly "Duckmade Disaster" and "Storm Chasers." Jippes even sneaks a Barks caricature into "Duckmade Disaster," possibly reflecting how the old "good artist" felt toward the end of this scripting stint. The first scripts were invigorated with a crankier Scrooge McDuck battling the eco-conscious Junior Woodchucks. By the end of his stint, Barks had clearly milked this conflict as far as his interest could go. But the earlier stories recapture some of the old fun. Jippes' art is a welcome enhancement, and we can hope this reprint will take these stories to a wider audience if not a new generation of readers.