The Don Rosa Library

I started reading comics in 1989, as an offshoot of my interest in animation. While I started with “The Amazing Spider-Man” #318, I can also remember one of the early comics I bought was an issue of “DuckTales” that featured a William Van Horn story, “Windfall on Mt. G’zoontight.”

I don’t know which Don Rosa story I read first, but like so many readers of that era I quickly became enamored of the Duck work of the triumvirate of Carl Barks, Van Horn, and Rosa. I ate up those comics for the next 15 years and had quite a few letters published along the way to prove it.

In recent years, Fantagraphics published a ten volume set of beautiful hardcover books called “The Don Rosa Library.” It collects all of Rosa’s Duck works. Every short story, cover, gag story, and adventure story is reprinted in those books in chronological order, complete with commentary from Rosa and (perhaps slightly controversially) some coloring changes.

His “DuckTales Magazine” story is even in there (I still have that magazine in my collection), as are a couple of scripts from stories that never got made.

It’s a collector’s dream edition of the works, equal or larger in page size to the albums that Gladstone produced in the 1990s. (I own a couple boxes’ worth of those, too…)

For five Christmases, I received that year’s pair of DRL hardcovers in the slipcase edition, plus the two volume set that reprinted all of the “Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck” stories. Those stories are already in the DRL books, but it’s such a popular series that they did a two book set with only those tales. (And, really, I needed yet another copy of that series. My fandom required it!)

There was only one hiccup across all of those Christmases: One set either went out of print early on or got delayed and didn’t publish until after Christmas. I feared for awhile that I would have to buy the two books separately and go without the slipcase. It’s a classic collector’s conundrum: It’s the same books either way, but we all want the collection to match perfectly. We don’t want 8 of the 10 books to match and the other two sitting out there like sore thumbs.

Those two books in the slipcase showed up on Amazon in time for Christmas last year at cover price, and I immediately made sure that Santa knew my Christmas happiness rested on one gift.

Santa was kind to me. Bullet dodged!

Recently, I started to open the books up at random and pick out stories to read, mostly the shorter stories. Most of them I didn’t remember very well. I haven’t been reading the Duck comics regularly in more than a decade now. It feels like I’m discovering these stories for the first time again. I’m rediscovering the charm, the comedy, and the creative inventiveness of Rosa’s storytelling. It’s a lot of fun.

Most of this work was done for European publishers. Technically, that makes these comics European comics and on-topic for this website.

Today I start my review of the Don Rosa Library. I’m not going to review every story in every book. I’m not going in any order. I’m reading the stories in isolation. I’m writing reviews for the stories I have anything to say about. I’ll stop when I run out of things to say. This is not an attempt to review everything. I’m not even going to give it its own subsite here, like I did with The McSpidey Chronicles or Smurfs TV.

Don’t expect a scholarly review of the stories or me pointing out every hidden reference. Rosa has done a pretty good job of connecting all of the dots in his stories to Carl Barks’ works or his own. I’d just be redundant if I attempted that. This is a fan of the works taking a look back on them and explaining what’s to like (and occasionally what’s not to like) and how Rosa tells his stories in ways that have entertained us for the last 30 years.

Please join me as I relive and enjoy some of the finest Duck stories from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. This ought to be fun!

We begin with 1990’s “The Master Landscapist“.