The Carl Barks Collection

The recent appearance on Amazon of The Carl Barks Collection, a multi-volume series comprised of slipcased sets of books reprinting Carl Barks‘s complete Donald Duck comics in chronological order, has inspired anticipation, questions, and commentary in various quarters.

The series, due to be published by Gemstone (current American license holders for Disney-related comics material) is planned to be an American edition of a series initiated by Egmont and already published in various European countries. Barks’s complete comics had previously been published in the United States by Another Rainbow in a now-out-of-print series of black and white hardcover books. This collection would not only bring Barks’s work back into print in a complete edition, but would be the first such offering in full color.
On the Metabunker website, Matthias Wivel notes that Egmont has undertaken a digital re-coloring of the stories rather than an archival reproduction of the work as originally published. The collection, he opines, is “thoroughly undermined by the colouring of the strips,” which he calls “fundamentally misconceived.”

Posting to the Disney Comics Forum, Gemstone’s David Gerstein notes that publication dates for the proposed American edition remain tentative, and that “our publishing schedule, and the use of Egmont’s material, color, etc., all decisions are still up in the air.”