Christmas on Bear Mountain

Scrooge McDuck is now such a fixture in the Disney universe that few remember Carl Barks had been writing and drawing Donald Duck stories for half a decade before he cooked up the miserly multiplujillionaire — for what he thought would be a one-time Christmas yarn involving Donald, the nephews, Scrooge in a bearskin, and (inevitably) a couple of real bears. “Christmas on Bear Mountain” is one of Barks’s funniest holiday stories and a true landmark in comics history, and offers a fascinating look at a rough-edged, genuinely nasty character whom Barks would soon soften… Scrooge aside, there’s plenty of fun to be had in this volume. In “Volcano Valley” Donald and the Nephews end up stuck in Volcania, a south-of-the-border country inhabited by sombrero-wearing, siesta-addicted Volcanians. Other long-form adventures include the self-explanatory “Adventure Down Under,” as well as one of Barks’s most atmospheric thrillers, the West Indies-based “Ghost of the Grotto,” which includes a lovely night-time sequence drawn in Barks’s trademark silhouettes and a giantoctopus- vs.-hot-chili-peppers throwdown that climaxes in an explosive splash panel. The book is rounded off with seven of Barks’s hilarious 10-pagers, and as with the previous volumes, Walt Disney’s Donald Duck: Christmas on Bear Mountain has been scanned from crisp vintage art and meticulously colored to match the original printing’s warm, simple hues, and features abundant critical and historical notes penned by some of duckdom’s finest experts.

Author Biography

Carl Barks (1901-2000, b. Merrill, Oregon; d. Grants Pass, Oregon), one of the most brilliant cartoonists of the 20th century, entertained millions around the world with his timeless tales of Donald Duck and Barks’s most famous character creation, Uncle Scrooge. Over the course of his career, he wrote and drew more than 500 comics stories totaling more than 6,000 pages, most anonymously. He achieved international acclaim only after he semi-retired in 1968. Among many other honors, Barks was one of the three initial inductees into the Will Eisner Comic Awards Hall of Fame in 1987. (The other two were Jack Kirby and Will Eisner.) In 1991, Barks became the first Disney comic book artist to be recognized as a “Disney Legend,” a special award created by Disney “to acknowledge and honor the many individuals whose imagination, talents, and dreams have created the Disney magic.” He has been similarly honored in many other countries around the world. Gary Groth is the co-founder of The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books. He lives in Seattle.