In 1940 Barks worked on a Disney animated short that featured Donald Duck in the role of a truant officer. Luckily, many sketches have survived and you are presented to a few. Barks wrote and sketched most of the artwork with some help from colleague Jack Hannah, and the finished product, Truant Officer Donald, turned out to be one of the company's most successful cartoons (you can see it HERE).
Barks was a fountain of splendid gag ideas, but one nearly cost him the job. It was the sequence in which Donald finds three roasted chickens in the nephews' burning clubhouse causing him to think that he had killed them. But Barks insisted that the gag should be included - and the audience loved the scene!

Truant Officer Donald premiered in 1941 and it was nominated for the 1942 Academy Award (Oscar) in the category Best Short Subject, Cartoons, but lost to Disney's Lend a Paw.
The plotline is simple: In the summertime Donald tries various methods to force his nephews to go to school, but they repeatedly lure their uncle. At one point the nephews are trapped inside their burning clubhouse and one of them appeals:Think fast, men*! We're in a spot! They come up with the roasted duck incident.
* Interestingly, in all his later artwork Barks continued to let the nephews say Men instead of Brothers about themselves.

It would seem that Barks had a reverence for the American 'institution' of truant officers; at least, he made two front covers featuring the nephews as truants and Donald as the truant officer. Furthermore, in 1983 the earliest cover was reproduced with new colouring in the Carl Barks Library (CBL).

In WDCS100 'Truant Officer Donald' from 1949 Barks made a 10-pager featuring Donald in a job as an efficient truant officer against some incorrigible and shirking truants - his own nephews. The story contains several of the same locations as the cartoon (the clubhouse and the truck are examples), but in reality it is a new story in its own right.
Apart from the fact that the story now takes place during the winter, several scenes and gags are different. An example is the ending; instead of feeling utterly ridiculed that he has missed the school closing for the summer, Donald resolutely opens the school and forces the nephews to take a class under his supervision...

Barks made two very similar versions of the three truants and their officer based on the front cover from WDCS104. They were both purchased by private collectors who wanted this specific motif. As usual, Barks did not ponder too long about titling the artworks.

From August 1996 to March 1997 Barks produced 80 pastel drawings of his beloved ducks. He divided them into 9 main categories and supplied them with titles as well as simple, ascending numbers.
The truant officer motif came as #8 of 26 in the last category called Miscellaneous Subjects. It was published in the lavish book Carl Barks Treasury under the slightly different titling The Most Efficient Truant Officer.