IDW PUBLISHING – @IDWPublishing
[This review was originally posted on Patreon.]
STORY: Joe Caramagna
ART: Luca Usai; Gianfranco Florio
COLOR: Giuseppe Fontana; Giuseppe Fontana and Dario Calabria
LETTERS: Tom B. Long
COVER: Marco Ghiglione
VARIANT COVER ARTISTS: Marco Ghiglione; Jeff Smith
28pp, Color, $3.99 U.S. (September 2017)
“DuckTales” was an animated television series that ran from 1987 to 1990. Produced by Walt Disney Television Animation and Tokyo Movie Shinsha, DuckTales was syndicated to American local television stations and ran for 100 episodes. The series also yielded a theatrical spin-off movie, DuckTales The Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp.
DuckTales was inspired by and based upon the Uncle Scrooge comics book and other comic books set in the world of Donald Duck that Carl Barks, legendary comic book writer-artist, created mainly from the early 1940s and into the 1960s. DuckTales proved to be a popular TV series, and within a year of its TV debut, comic books based on DuckTales began to appear.
From 1988 to 1991, there were two DuckTales comic books. There was a “DuckTales” children's magazine published by Disney, and it featured DuckTales comics. The digest-sized Disney magazine, Disney Adventures, that included DuckTales comics from 1990 to 1996. Cable network, Disney XD, revived “DuckTales” in 2017 in a slightly rebooted animated series. That means that DuckTales returns to comics in a new comic book series from IDW.
DuckTales #1 features two stories. In “The Chilling Secret of the Lighthouse,” Donald Duck takes a job as a lighthouse keeper, but the lighthouse is in a small desert town. Now, Donald's three nephews: Huey, Dewey, and Louie have found out that the legend about a lost underground river may be true. In “The Great Experiment of the Washing Machine,” the nephews find misadventure in a den of absent-minded professor-inventor-scientist types.
Artist Luca Usai and Gianfranco Florio turn out some nice quirky, modern comic book cartoon art for DuckTales. Their lite version of the post-new wave, alt-comics graphics is spry and energetic. The colors by Giuseppe Fontana and Dario Calabria are sharp and keep the art from looking like typical Disney-style comics art.
As for the stories, Joe Caramagna writes both of them. Both are good ideas, but don't work as 11 and 12-page stories. Caramagna understands the spirit of Carl Barks and of DuckTales, but is unable to execute the stories as tales of adventure, mystery, and imagination. They are just not long enough, and are therefore, underdeveloped. I see DuckTales #1 as a primer for what I hope is to come – 20+ pages stories that recall the Uncle Scrooge comics of Carl Barks.
6.5 out of 10
Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"
The text is copyright © 2017 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog for reprint and syndication rights and fees.
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