Reviews

Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes by R. Fiore, Rich Kreiner, Gary Groth, Carl Barks, Alberto Beccatini, Donald Ault, Francesco Stajeno, Craig Fischer, Stefano Priarone, Jared Gardner, Leonardo Gori

samantha_voss's review

adventurous funny lighthearted fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

nickpalmieri's review

So these are about as good as everyone says. Who knew?

As far as "timeless classics" go, these are right up there with the Looney Tunes cartoons of the same era.

glyptodonsneeze's review

5.0

Fantagraphics is publishing classic Disney comics and this is early Donald Duck when Scrooge McDuck was a twinkle of a plot device in Barks' eye. The titular Lost in the Andes is the original story of Donald and the kids' adventure to Plain Awful! I always thought Professor Rhutt Betlah was lost in the mists of time and the high Andes, but this is the thing! It's early Barks yet, but Ducks eat square eggs and are imprisoned for round objects, as in future Plain Awful. Good stuff. All comics are reflected on in essays by important Barks scholars. And we have the fourth and fifth appearances of Uncle Scrooge! In Rosa's The Life and Times of Uncle Scrooge, he discusses at length the contradictions between later canon Uncle Scrooge, who made his fortune by being "tougher than the toughies and smarter than the smarties, and he made it all square," and this early Scrooge, in Voodoo Hoodoo: A zombie appears in Duckburg, and the academic explains, for those of us who weren't aware, that zombies are a traditionally African bogeyman whose associations with the African diaspora would have been obvious to comics readers in the '40s. The zombie is after Uncle Scrooge, and the boys visit him at his to mansion to find out why. Uncle Scrooge, good old Unca Scrooge, explains, "My eye fell on some wonderful land that I wanted for a rubber plantation! The owners were a tribe of ferocious savages that believed their voodoo gods prized the ground! They wouldn't sell, so I hired a mob of thugs and chased them into the jungle! I got the land, but boy, those savages were mad!" Rosa resolved this appalling piece of Scrooge's early history by invoking Bombie the zombie to haunt Scrooge through his post-Klondike adventures, although here the zombie hasn't seen Scrooge for seventy years and is after a young Scrooge, i.e. Donald. Barks present the voodoo practitioners sympathetically, just like he gives agency to the Awfultonians and twists our assumptions of the native islanders in Race to the South Seas!, but different times and all that. Or, holy shit, that's racist. Lost in the Andes is arranged with epic adventures first, then ten page gags, one page gags, and commentary, which is a queer descent but there are some greats, especially among the ten-pagers like Donald's nightmares and Santa's workshop, and some that are strictly of their time, like the truant officer and the quiz show.

Read this book: Barks fans, obviously. And everybody. Everybody should read Carl Barks. (Everybody might also read How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comics by Dorfman and Mattelart.)

http://surfeitofbooks.blogspot.com/2015/06/racism-with-bonus-incest.html

jamiely's review

4.0

The comics were light, entertaining, and clever with little gems for adult readers. There are things we would question today as being offensive, but I think you need to appreciate them as the product of their times.

richard's review

The Carl Barks Donald Duck stories are so much fun. Just great cartooning in all aspects. I really hope my kid gets into these when he's older so we can read them together.