Restoring Carl Barks Volume 2

By Kim Weston

This book takes one story by Carl Barks that was radically altered before publication and attempts to restore it to something close to Barks' original intentions. The story is Our Gang Comics #18's story in which Barney serenades a señorita. Carl Barks wrote and drew this story as an 8 page Barney Bear and Benny Burro story, but the page count for that issue of the comic book was cut from 48 pages to 32 pages due to wartime paper restrictions. The art for the story was shrunken, cut up, pasted up into 6 pages mostly containing 10 or 11 panels per page instead of 8, and re-lettered by somebody else, very obviously not Barks. This is only Carl Barks story published that was not lettered by Carl Barks or, beginning in 1953, lettered by his wife, Garé, who lettered following Carl's penciled lettering guides. In 2016 I published a version of the story restored to 8 pages, after I had done restorations of 4 other stories, all included in the book, The Unavailable Carl Barks (in color) and later in The Carl Barks Library of Burros, Hounds Bears, Pigs and Bunnies. . I would say the other restored stories are 95 to 99% true to Barks' original intentions, but this one story had much more butchery done to the art, much more cutting and discarding of art, and it was also re-lettered by someone other than Barks. The 2016 restored version looks and reads better than the 6 page version but much of the violence inflicted upon Barks' work I was not able to undo. It looks pretty good, but the other restored stories are VERY close to Barks' original conception, and this one was not so close. I have never been very happy with it, but I did put together a publishable version which gets one much closer to what Barks originally conceived. The first restoration in the book is a major updating of the original 2016 version, newly re-lettered in the Carl Barks Script font, and includes major alterations solving a continuity problem in the initial restoration, the solution to which became evident while I was working on the 2024 restoration. In the second restoration in this book, dating from 2024, you can get a pretty good idea how much is missing. This 2024 restoration was first published in the Carl Barks Original Art Edition MGM volume 2 , a very large and expensive limited edition art book reproducing Carl Barks' art at the size it was drawn. The version in Restoring Carl Barks Volume 2 is much smaller, much less expensive, and corrects a couple of minor lettering errors and makes that restoration available to a much wider audience. The 2024 color restoration in this book is the successor to the earlier 2016 restoration and now the preferred version. This book may be considered to be a supplement not only to the other books where the earlier version is published, but also to the big art book since the Black and White version restoration here corrects some minor problems with the first printing. The third version in this book reproduces the story formatted as it was originally published in the 1945 comic book, for comparison purposes. There is also commentary on the history of the story and the restoration process.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0DDZ5HVKT
• ISBN13: 9798329541571
• Release Date: August 2024
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 38 Pages
• Weight: 0.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 11.0" x 0.1" x 8.5"