Review- "Walt Disney's Donald Duck, Volume 10: Terror of the Beagle Boys", by Carl Barks

The year of 1951 appears to be a transitional period in the oeuvre of funny animals auteur Carl Barks; that is to say, between the years 1950 and 1952, both defined by their contributions of stone-cold classics to the comics pantheon ("Adventure Time", "Gladstone's Terrible Secret", "The Think Box", and "Only a Poor Man" being among my all-time favorites from those years), Barks spent twelve months experimenting with cartoon realism in his few long-form stories, and perfecting his established formulas in his ten-pagers. While not all of this is Barks at his A-game, these comics aren't solely of anthropological interest either; the Duck Man's prose is as blithely sarcastic and his lines as dazzlingly expressive as ever. It's just that both elements aren't used in service of Barks' best material.
The volume is named after "Terror of the Beagle Boys", a ten-pager that features the first appearance, or should be said cameo, of the Beagle Boys, a consistent thorn in the side of everybody's favorite capitalist icon, Scrooge McDuck. It's a sterling example of how to wring terrific comedy out of chamber constraints, character interaction, and a looming threat- laughs are mined from Scrooge's payment of Donald to worry for him, Scrooge's insistence that gun powder from the Boer Wars is new, and Donald's hapless sleepiness throughout. The only real problem is that the climax lacks Barks' usual ingenuity, relying entirely on a moment of massive stupidity on Scrooge's part. Overall, however, it's one of the best efforts of the book. (B+)
Also of note in this volume is "Dangerous Disguise", one of two long stories in its pages that experiments with comic realism, in this case through an attempt to put Donald and his intrepid nephews in a pitch-black spy narrative. While "Disguise" was admittedly a favorite of mine when I was younger, I say "attempt" because, while Barks had demonstrated in the past an ability to effectively merge humor and drama, he doesn't seem to be fully capable of straddling the line between innocent slapstick and dark satire. There's a lot of sterling pieces, like the recurrence of counter-counter-spies and Donald's fight with a bull, but the whole enterprise, while consistently fascinating, feels rather shaky and half-formed. (B-)

A curiously underrated long story is "No Such Varmint", which makes full use of Bark's tendencies toward verbal ingenuity and ironic structure. In it, the nephews, in a somewhat antagonististic role, attempt to enforce a dignified job like Sherlock Holmes-ing on Donald, who spends his days literally singing "the world owes me a living". Donald, meanwhile, wants to spend his days charming snakes, which gets him into some trouble when he charms a sea serpent. The story is one of Bark's most sublimely ridiculous, it actually has a pretty complex moral in its reflection that not everyone can or has to be great, and the introduction of the line "Quiet! I'm getting a great inspiration!" into the pop comic lexicon cements its status as a classic. (A)

                                        

Other strong ten-pagers among a rock-solid pack include "The Trouble with Dimes" and "Gladstone's Luck" (both A-), featuring Don's battles with Scrooge and his lucky cousin Gladstone, in rare coin-hawking and golfing, respectively. Also of merit is the third long-form story of the book, "Old California", which, while clearly a passion project of Barks, with its keen historical detail and gorgeous art, is confusingly relayed and just not that funny or interesting (C+). Curious but not necessarily good are Bark's weirdly didactic "Financial Fable" and a gorgeous art-only job on an insufferable "Grandma Duck" story (both C).
Outside of the stories, Fantagraphics does as good a job as ever with packaging everything in handsome manner, and restoring the comics in clean four-color style. In terms of the usually negligible "story notes" included in the back of the book, a few are actually pretty decent this time around- I'll shout-out to Bill Mason's sterling assessment of what works and what doesn't in "Dangerous Disguise", and to Craig Fischer's commentary on "The April Foolers", which makes a good case against the strangely shaped panels Barks employed in this period. An all-around solid book, really, even if it doesn't contain one of Bark's most inspired years.

Final Grade: B