Shelf Scan 2024: Taschen’s Ultimate Duck
Kicking off this year’s roundup reviews of notable books for comics history buffs, let’s start with the annual Taschen doorstop.
Walt Disney’s Donald Duck. The Ultimate History, David Gerstein, J.B. Kaufman and David Kothenschulte, ed. (Taschen, $200)
Taschen’s patronage of the comic arts continues with its annual XXL sized holiday behemoth, essentially a biography of Donald Duck. Starting as a bit player in Silly Symphonies, the hot-tempered, vocally challenged, sailor-suited duck became an unexpected hit among Depression-era audiences that seemed to identify with an aggrieved personality. Donald came at the right time for Disney too. As their star Mickey Mouse was becoming an ever-blander corporate logo, Disney animators recognized in the irascible duck a wider dramatic range with which to create. Donald Duck became the annoyed American everyman. He was placed into every imaginable profession, eventually propagandized WWII (i.e. “In Der Fuhrer’s Face”) and finally settled into Carl Barks post-war suburban Duckburg.
This book does most stages of that evolution justice. I would quibble with the short shrift given Al Taliaferro’s gag comic strip. But the film shorts and major Barks adventures get comprehensive summaries and anecdotes. Completists will appreciate the chapters illustrating all that weird merch (Donald Duck canned grapefruit juice?). Especially valuable are the outlines and storyboards for for unproduced shorts.
Taschen likes to put the ultimate in “The Ultimate History.” More than 300 perfectly reproduced images fill these pages. The comic book pages in particular recall the experience of poring through dot-filled Dell comics printing. Disney experts Gerstein and Kaufman provide insightful takes on the duck’s journey and the people who made him. Barks gets the deepest, most sensitive treatment. We glimpse how his fantasies of travel and own domestic disappointments drove his imagination.
The Taschen XXL books are indeed unwieldy, but the publisher uses that massive scale for immersive, voluminous illustration as well as dense captioning that often is more valuable than the chapter prose. We would love to see this publisher apply their stunning skills at design and scale at an even more ambitious project – like a comprehensive new anthology of the American comic strip.
We also can’t recommend highly enough this book’s predecessors on McCay’s Little Nemo, Herriman’s Sunday Color Krazy Kats, History of EC Comics, and The Fantastic Worlds of Frank Frazetta.