General Duck comics thread

Looks like we could really use a Duck comics thread.

So to start off with the age old question: Barks or Rosa, who is the best?

Personal preference for Rosa's more complex stories, but, of course, I acknowledge that he nor the vast majority of Duck scribes would be anywhere without Barks.

Yeah, I love both creators, but I think I'd go with Rosa's art for sheer detail and atmosphere. Both tell great stories, too.

In terms of humor and I think just general writing style I probably prefer Rosa as well. Although I find Barks’s art style a bit more appealing.

Yes, Barks has a very appealing art style as well, very clean and expressive. That seems to be what most artists go for as well, though not always to as great a success.

Random question - is the Mighty Ducks cartoon, the one where the hockey players are LITERALLY ducks, a “Duckverse-adjacent” work, or no?

Interesting question. According to the work page, they are not part of the Disney Duck canon, but they sure look like they could be. They have a very similar art style.

Edited by Redmess on Apr 8th 2021 at 1:04:48 PM

Rosa was a hard sell to a lot of the Ducks' European fans, who thought his work looked too "underground." He won them over eventually, though.

Rosa is also a big Silver-Age Superman fan, and he wrote an episode of Talespin ("It Came From Beneath the Sea Duck").

Looked too “underground?” How so exactly? I mean the characters still looked recognizably themselves, just a bit rougher looking perhaps. I’m not to familiar with the underground scene.

It might have been the detail that did it. Super lined art was kind of a trend at the time and continued to be, iirc, and I could imagine why it might make foreign markets think of graffiti or political art or something.

Underground, really? Well, I'm glad people warmed up to him.

Comparing it to Fritz the cat I can kind of see it.

I remember seeing Paperinik when I was in Italy in 2016, but this superhero Donald seems like one that's interesting to me... used to be a fan of Duck Tales and other Donald Duck media as a kid, not all of them though! (Well... I still got the Duck Tales reboot to catch up on).

I imagine it was that Barks's inking style allowed for more soft contours, while Rosa's is more hard-edged, and makes use of more intricate (some might say fussy) linework; I expect how each artist did or didn't use dense blacks probably contributed as well.

I think the differences are fairly minor, really. I mean, you wouldn't confuse a Rosa Scrooge with a Barks Scrooge, but they aren't that far apart. I expect it was just passionate fans being resistant to something noticeably different. Fortunately, they did come around eventually.

Edited by Robbery on Apr 12th 2021 at 8:55:29 AM

So, which show do y'all think did a better job adapting comics and was more true to them: Duck Tales 1987 or Duck Tales 2017?

Legend of the Three Caballeros was the best adaptation of the comics in recent years, I think.

So would y'all also consider Sport Goofy special to be the truest and most faithful to the original comics out of all the animated adaptations of them?

Goofy isn’t a really big player in the Duck comics. Maybe in the Mickey Mouse comics.

Talking about in terms of the portrayal of characters like the nephews, Scrooge, and Beagle Boys, and feel, not necessarily Goofy's involvement.

The '87 Ducktales was by and large more faithful to Barks's work. Whatever your opinion on Huey, Dewey, and Louie's looking distinct from each other and having distinct personalities, you have to admit that such was not the case in Barks's work. Other than that, while the tone is generally Lighterand Softer, '87's Ducktales is still recognizably Barks (Barks himself liked some of the '87 show's innovations, like making Scrooge's personal emblem a dollar sign, and giving the Beagle Boys distinct-but-based-on-a-theme personalities, but he started to get more critical of it the further removed it got from his own work). You can sum it up by saying that '87's Ducktales is based on the work of Carl Barks, while 2017's Ducktales is based on '87's Ducktales.

I still think it would have been funny for 2017's Ducktales to do an episode with Barks, the "fourth nephew." For those that don't know, Carl Barks would occasionally accidentally (or possibly on purpose, but it's generally considered to be accidental) draw a fourth nephew in some panels. Fans dubbed this figure "Barks."

Edited by Robbery on Apr 21st 2021 at 2:00:38 AM

To be honest, it never really bothered me that the triplets were actually identical. And for all their being very like each other, both Barks and Rosa managed to give each nephew a bit of his own personality nonetheless. One nephew (usually the red one) tended to be the leader, and another was often a bit of a reluctant coward.

So in the epic of Gilgamesh, in tablet nine there is mention of the Garden of the Gods, which is a paradise of jewel laden trees.

Has this ever appeared in a Scrooge story? Because this sounds like a Scrooge story waiting to happen.

Is it the same fourth nephew that fans sometimes call "Phooey"? Because that character did appear in DuckTales (2017), in the episode "Nightmare on Killmotor Hill", though only as a figment of the triplets' imagination.

Yes, it's the same one.

It's not just accidental fourth nephews, but also the occasional miscolouring.

Edited by Redmess on May 31st 2021 at 9:12:27 PM

I imagine so, but I never heard him called that. "Phooey" does fit the naming convention better.

Edited by Robbery on May 31st 2021 at 2:04:05 AM