Customer Reviews

Walt Disney's Donald Duck Adventures: Ancient Persia (Gladstone Comic Album Series No. 10)

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Carl Barks is to little known in the US; in my homecountry of Sweden he is a minor deity on the other hand. Whole generations of Swedes have grown up reading his fantastic tales about Donald Duck, his nephews, Gyro Gearlose, and Scrooge McDuck.
Barks himself never understodd his own greatness. He thought that he only wrote dime-a-dozen stories for kids. Yet, once you are hooked on Barks you read him also as an adult - the genius is so obvious.
On the surface this is a simple adventure tale with comic interludes, but lurking beneath is fear and madness. This is perhaps his darkest tale. Set in an ancient Persian royal tomb. The cramped corridor, where the darkness waits just outside the circle of the torches gives a claustrophobic feel, which follows us throughout the story.
One moment the professor appears rational and sane, then he is revealed to be an insane megalomaniac. While the antics of the resurrected royal family are funny, there, again, are traces of hysteria and mental unbalance.
In the end they are so disgusted by the modern ways that they voluntarily seek oblivion in death. Donald Duck survives only by dying and being resurrected several times.
The tale is funny, but it also gives the impression that the artist had far darker things in mind when he wrote it: this was the fifties, we were living in fear of the atom bomb, and what else the scientists were dreaming up in their laboratories. The tunnels and darkness are our feeling of insecurity in a world bordering on war, and our helplessness to prevent it.

I Suspect many people will buy this because they already know the artist, as well as the story. Over the years since this, and many other stories by Barks, have appeared, they have come in many formats, of which the best is the COLLECTED WORKS OF CARL BARKS, and now this series, including this title, comes in a nicely done cover, with Library quality paper. I have copies of this in a previous incarnation of the GLADSTONE prints, prior to the Publishers going bust. Thankfully, someone has realised that these titles are being bought by Adults who could not afford the collected works, but who wanted a title done in a collectable format that would last. Way too many versions of this title published since the late 50's and again in the 70s have been done on poor quality paper, and were priced accordingly.
This Ancient Persia title works well in this comic format, however, some of the titles occurred originally in a strip format, and suffer when transferred to the comic page format. However, I managed to get some of these titles in a "hard" cover binding that preserved the strip ratio, without resorting to the comic page ratio that was edited with apparently little thought ( these editions in original strip format came out about 1982-84, and as far as I am aware are not currently available anywhere... so I hope someone can examine some of the original formats, and see what best goes back to the strip format).

Enjoy ANCIENT PERSIA, if you read the original story years ago, this will echo beautifully in your mind in this lovely high quality paper print edition.

This is a graphic novel format comic album from Gladstone Comics, Donald Duck Adventures #10 of 1988. It features stories by Carl Barks, the famous artist who drew Donald and Uncle Scrooge for 25 years. Gladstone Comics reprinted many classic stories in comic, comic albums, and even comic digest in the late 1980 through 1990's. They put a lot of love in their books and it shows. High quality paper and inks, nice covers, taking the original black and white art and having brand new coloring done for each issue. Later Gladstone and their parent company Another Rainbow Publishing created a hard cover library of all of the black and white stories by Barks. After that their last big project was the Carl Barks Library in Color, reprinting in color all of Barks works in softcover books, in chronological order. As they finished that series, Disney stepped in and took away their license to print. I miss the heyday of the Gladstone books, they brought an excitement and quality to the reprints that no one has matched ever since. In this issue we have:

1) The cover is by Carl Barks, from the original comic of the cover story. It has been recolored for this issue.
2) "Ancient Persia" is a 24 page adventure, first printed in Dell Donald Duck One Shot #275 of May 1950. Art and script by Carl Barks. In this wild story Donald and the nephews are kidnapped by a mad scientist, and taken to Persia, where an ancient city is dug up and the royal court is brought back to life.
2) A half page Uncle Scrooge gag from Dell Comics #51 of January 1957. Art and script by Carl Barks. According to several sources, Barks had submitted a full page gag, and it was cut at the time by the editors for substance or to place an ad in the remaining space.
3) Next is a 1 page Donald gag, first printed in Dell Comics Donald Duck One Shot #263 of February 1950. Art is by Carl Barks, script is unknown.
4) "Super Snooper" is a 10 page story first printed in Dell Comics Walt Disney Comics & Stories #107 of August 1949. Donald is lecturing the kids about reading so many comics with super heroes, then accidentally drinks an experimental test sample that gives him super powers. Art and script by Carl Barks.
5) "Gyros Imagination Invention" is a 10 page story first printed in Dell Comics Walt Disney Comics & Stories #199 of April 1957. Art & script by Carl Barks. Gyro Gearloose invents a machine that allows someone to take a trip using their imagination.
All in all a big reprint book with tons of stories for Carl Barks fans.

By the way, every story in this book made its first appearance in a comic book, and the page layout had not changed for this reprint. I noted that one reviewer thought that this series of books reprint stories that first appeared in newspaper strips and the layout was changed, but only the Mickey Mouse albums from Gladstone are taken from strips, not the Duck stories. I am not trying to criticize that reviewer, but I have been collecting Barks all my life and have most of the original comics in addition to the books, plus all the reference books to rely on, just trying to be helpful.

I had gobble up all these stories as a child --in French, being French born and raised. It just occurred to me that I could read them in English as well now, while rediscovering them as they are currently being republished in France. And oh my! how good that feels! The savor of the old and the new all at once, the pleasures of childhood and adulthood packed in one.
(Want to brush up on your French? Do the reverse and read them in French. Come to think of it, you probably can improve any foreign language that way, just by reading these universally delightful stories both in original version and in whatever idiom you wish.)