Who's Out There?

« I read some of my stories recently and thought, ‘How in the hell did I get away with that?’ I had some really raw cynicism in some of them… » – Carl Barks

Like so many kids, I owe a lot of my interest in comics to Carl Barks, even though at the time I had no idea who he was – embarrassingly, up until today I’m not great at spotting his art. So much depends on what is available when one is growing up – and I used to enthusiastically dig through discarded piles of books at garage sales and whatnot, in quest for (among other things) for issues of Super Picsou Géant. Picsou is Uncle Scrooge’s French name, meaning something like “penny pincher”. These (true to their name) giant anthologies, just like pocket-book sized Archie compendiums, offered their readers pêle-mêle reprints of comic book stories both relatively new and also quite old, mixing prime Barks material with shitty European knock-offs with offerings by decent Barks disciples (see co-admin RG’s take on the latter).

Just like a Picsou Géant, this post has a few Barks covers and stories, and a few submissions by other folk… all viewed through my usual tentacle-specific lens. Dive in!

Somewhat off topic, but I was quite amused by the ending of this story. Is this was Barks meant when he talked about raw cynicism? 😉

No Tentacle Tuesday post would be complete without mechanical tentacles:

For this post, I wanted to concentrate on Gold Key publications, but at a later date there will be a follow-up post covering some other material.

~ ds