The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

I started young. When I was knee-high to a leprechaun – maybe four years old? Maybe five? – my grandmother took me to a market. It was a bright, sunny Saturday morning, somewhere in South County Dublin; I don’t remember whether we were in Blackrock or Dun Laoghaire, but I do remember that somebody was selling toffee apples, and most of the stalls were piled high with stuff that didn’t interest me in the slightest.

And then there was the book stall, with its Donald Duck comics.

I say “comics”; there was only one, really, thick and impressive and bound in soft covers like a real book. I’d never seen a comic put together like that before. “Comics”, to me, meant thin floppy magazines printed on newsprint, or maybe thick hardbound annuals, or the small glossy “picture libraries”. They were something you read, but they weren’t books. They certainly weren’t piled up in stacks on bookstalls next to other books, proper books, with more words than pictures.

(an example of Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge artwork, borrowed from his Lambiek entry)

I was four years old (maybe five), and I devoured the Beano every week; of course I picked the Donald Duck comic up. And when I started to read it, I realised something amazing: it was all one story! It wasn’t a collection of one-page or three-page strips, each independent of all the others: it was a continuing story about Donald and Scrooge McDuck and Huey, Dewey and Louie and Superduck and a band of thieves and… a lot of stuff I don’t remember. I asked the stallholders the price; I don’t remember what it was, but it was more than I could afford, and my face fell. They immediately offered a discount, and I walked away happy, with the book in my hands.

That was my first graphic novel. I don’t remember what it was called or who created it (I don’t think I cared about that kind of thing when I was four), but I remember reading it when I got back to my grandmother’s house, spellbound, unable to put it down. It was so cheaply bound that the pages started to slip out even as I was reading it for the first time, but I didn’t let that stop me. (Though I knew, even as the book fell to pieces in my hands, that I’d regret it later, when I wanted to read it again. I knew I would want to read it again, probably many times.)

I lost the book shortly afterwards. I never went back to that market. But I never forgot that Donald Duck comic. It was funny and exciting and wonderful to look at, but more than that: it was deep in a way that none of the comics I’d ever read before even tried to be. The characters were all anthropomorphic ducks, but they were people – not just punchlines or collections of stereotypical traits. The story was long and involved and it needed you to pay attention, but it wasn’t hard to read at all – it was a thrilling ride from start to finish.

If I knew what it was called or who created it? That comic would be in my top 5 Best Comics I’ve Ever Read.

That’s why my heart did a jig when I heard about Gemstone’s plan to bring out the complete Carl Barks Donald Duck comics. I have reservations – for one thing, a single-volume omnibus priced at $150 isn’t very kid-friendly; for another, Mathias Wivel of the Metabunker has expressed reservations about the colouring of this new edition. I’m not even sure that the comic I read was a Carl Barks comic; Carl Barks wasn’t the only person to draw Donald Duck comics, after all.

All caveats aside, after twenty-five years, I’m overjoyed to get the chance to recapture that revelatory experience I had when I was four. After all, you never forget your first.

Katherine Farmar writes regularly on comics and culture, you can read more on her comics blog Whereof One Can Speak.