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Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge "Micro-Ducks From Outer Space"
Carl Barks is usually called "The Duck Artist" for good reason. Besides the artwork, Barks' produced adventurous tales than spanned continents and involved a sense of drama unusually well-articulated for a children's comic book.
The printing here is especially atrocious. This is from the 1976 reprint of what was originally produced in 1966. I suspect the 1966 print job was better. I can almost imagine a 1966 printer standing at the gravure press looking at what was pouring off the cylinders and sadly shaking his head. Maybe they were smiling up in the offices, calculating what the profits are from using such terrible paper, but printing itself is an admirable craft and a person with even an ounce of pride in ones skills accumulated from years of concentration could only cringe at this mess. I could be wrong, maybe Western Publishing had trained monkeys throwing levers and punching buttons as the press churned out a quarter million copies (or more) of Uncle Scrooge, but I doubt it. Colors are mostly in register (but take a look at the sloppy cutting job around the ladder in the first panel. Were they moving too fast or unable to hold a x-acto knife?). The horrendous bleed through from the opposite side of the sheet, plus the dirty ink spotting all over the front of the sheet leads me to believe the paper is the main problem, with additional inattention from pre-press.
When I bought this in 1976, I didn't notice such details. I was just happy to get another good Barks tale to read (I didn't know it was Barks then, but I would have noted it if the Disney books didn't market in creator anonymity. Herge, Neal Adams, Jim Aparo were already burned into my 12 year old brain.)
Scrooge has a busted window (how did it get broken? hmmmm...) and needs to get it closed off before moths eat up his money (currency does have a high cotton count in the paper, right?)
Huey, Duey or Louie: "Seems to us a new pane of glass would cost about a dollar, and would seal the hole more sensibly!
Scrooge: "It'd seal the hole all right, lads, but then I'd be a dollar poorer!"
I recently bought some glass panes for a cracked window. I purchased extrapieces so there'd be no need to go back to the glass cutter another time too soon: 8 panes cost $89.00 USD. Uncle Scrooge, you had a bargain in 1966 and you blew it!
See another page from Carl Barks "Micro-Ducks from Outer Space" here.
