In 1930 the first Walt Disney comic book series - The Mickey Mouse Magazine - was published, and since then many new series have been launched. One of the most remarkable was the FC Magazine which marked the start of Carl Barks' comic book career. It premiered in 1939 as the combined efforts of marketing manager Herman 'Kay' Kamen from the Walt Disney Corporation, and Western Publishing's editor Eleanor Packer. The series soon became so successful that the following year they started the longest running magazine of them all - Walt Disney's Comics and Stories (WDCS for short). Although many different publishing companies released WDCS comic books over the years (the most prominent names beside Western are Dell, Gold Key, and Whitman) the magazine is still alive and kicking today.
The magazine has always incorporated a broad variety of Disney characters as well as a great number of artists, many of which came from the Disney Animation Studios. This was also the case with Barks who joined Western in the FC Magazines in 1942. The following year he began to produce Donald Duck 10-pagers for the WDCS Magazine, a task he undertook for 24 extremely fruitful years.
In the first three years (i.e. before Barks started) the magazine was primarily filled with Mickey Mouse adventure stories and Donald Duck 1-pagers that originated from previously published newspaper strips. It is unknown who most of the artists are that drew the front covers. Western decided to run a Donald Duck 10-pager lead story in all issues starting with WDCS031. And a brand new one every time! As it happened, Barks was offered the task and he jumped at the golden opportunity. From the start he was still very much influenced by his time in the Disney Animation Studios and the first stories were filled with a lot of action and little dialogue. |
But soon Barks started to develop not only the known duck characters but also new primary characters that he invented for the duck universe. Except for 9 issues in 1950/1951 he faithfully - and this was unparalleled - produced the lead Donald Duck story in every issue until a few years before his retirement in 1966. Barks' energy seemed to have no limits; besides the impressive fact that he was contributing to other magazines he also began producing front covers for the WDCS. The first one appeared in WDCS095 and the majority of the magazine's front covers in the following years were by Barks. |
Most of Barks' front covers showed situations between Donald and his nephews. This was quite logical because these characters would make the best action gags, and that was exactly what the publisher asked for - a funny front cover that would attract the attention of the potential buyers. But sometimes Barks used some other characters in his front covers as well. This often resulted in more subtle and 'quiet' gags. He would occasionally use Daisy and Donald together in less action-like gags, but that was about it. Barks never used Gladstone, and he never used Scrooge - who appeared on the covers of his own magazine instead. |
From 1963 the publisher wanted to break away from the traditional type of funny animal covers and tried different approaches for the magazine's front covers. One novelty was that the cover would reflect the contents of the magazine by showing an 'appetizer' from one or more of the stories. Another novelty was that the different artists of the issue's individual stories would illustrate a situation to be presented on the cover. This way the cover was often divided into three sections. |
See a detailed listing of all Barks' duck stories in the WDCS magazine HERE.
See
a similar presentation of Western's other comic book series:
The FC magazine
The U$ magazine
The Various Magazines
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| http://www.cbarks.dk/THEWDCSMAGAZINE.htm | Date 2006-01-19 |
