Carl Barks’ Barney Bear finally reprinted

I’m very excited to see IDW Publishing in the US is (finally!) reprinting the Barney Bear comics by Carl Barks. The hardcover book will be on sale in June 2011 from Amazon.com.

Carl Barks (1901-2000), most familiar for creating the best Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck-comics during the 40′s, 50′s and 60′s, also produced many stories for a comic called ‘Our Gang Comics’ (1942-1949), published by Dell Comics, starting with issue #11 to #36. Gil Turner was one of the artists taking over after Barks left the series and produced some nice stories as well.

The stories are hard to find. I enjoyed  some sort of a bootleg book by Editions Enfin published in 1979 with some pretty bad black and white reprints. Some good color versions have been published in the 90′s in Europe (Scandinavia and the Netherlands in ‘Tom & Jerry’ magazine). Last year publisher Egmont in Sweden published ‘Carl Barks Bruno björn och vänner’, unfortunately in a Swedish translation, but with excellent reproduction of the artwork. According to comic artist  Joakim Gunnarsson the material used in the Swedish edition was from a former editor, Ulf Granberg, who ordered it at Western Publishing and kept it on archive ever since.

I’m curious how the reprinted US-edition will look. It can’t get much worse than all the versions that are available on the net (from scans of the original comics from the 40′s) and the bootlegged books.

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Barney Bear by artist Gil Turner stepping in the graphic footsteps of Carl Barks.