Some changes were done as an effort to correct changes made before the first
publication of a story »in Trick or Treat«
for example), other changes don't omit / change the art itself (as is
the case with »and The Golden River«.
Not all stories in "The Carl Barks Library" are reprinted without changes,
and unfortunately the books don't indicate what changes there are. Reasons
for such changes apparently were missing photostats or equivalent substitutes
to supply the line-art reproduction that The Carl Barks Library uses. Only in
one case a reproduction of an original comic was used, the Uncle Scrooge
blinders gag which was printed in Australia but not in the USA. To provide
the line-art reproduction, retouching was done. Faded (or almost faded) lines
in the art were filled in by the editors. In general, this is done with thick
lines and / or a lack of a 'Barksian' feel.
Some changes were done as an effort to correct changes made before the first
publication of a story »in Trick or Treat«
for example), other changes don't omit / change the art itself (as is
the case with »and The Golden River«.
On this site, changes in individual stories are listed under the entries of those particular stories. In a future update, these stories will be listed in an overview, for easy reference.
Remaining changes are listed below.
Questions: Do you know changes which have not been discovered so far?
Also, some promotional texts (written by Barks?) were removed from the covers.
In the Geoffrey Blum article "The Covers Story" (page 5B-285), hand lettered logo's seem to have been entirely removed from (at least) some of the cover sketches.
No argument that these were screwed up. This set had to be punched out before our CBL license expired. (Disney, in the process of taking over the comics license, was not in the mood to extend any other license we had at the time.) By the time we got the proofs on the photography of the covers, it was too late to redo anything, so it was print what we had or leave those covers unrepresented. We chose the former, for the sake of completing the job, and accept all brickbats for the lapse in quality.
DISCLAIMER: The following is not an attack on anyone -- it's just my opinion, and I certainly won't think anyone who disagrees with me is a lousy excuse for a human being. I'll think you're wrong, but what the heck -- it's a well-known fact that I'm always right (in my own twisted mind, anyway).I was closely involved in putting together the original CBL (my name's in the books, anyway, with a whole bunch of changing job titles), but I certainly don't remember the percentage of "original" to "redrawn" art.
What I do remember is that we used original proofs whenever we could get them, and that was almost all of the time. The exceptions were some of the banned stories like "Darkest Africa" (where Disney had ordered all the proofs destroyed years earlier), or a story like the ten-pager from WDC&S 70 (the Smugsnorkle Squatty story). In the latter case, Western Publishing had thrown away a half-page of artwork when the story was reprinted in
WDC&S 305, so we were forced to shoot from the original comic (filtering out the color), and retouch what was left -- in essence, "redrawing" it the same way Jippes "redrew" "Darkest Africa." (And by the way, did anyone notice that "new" half-page?)Other "non-original" pages in the CBL were censored pages we restored to stories (like "Back to the Klondike") -- the idea was to present the stories as Barks had intended. That's why some unpublished Barks pages were not put back into stories (the "ray-that-turns-living-things-into-stone" story from
US 8, for example) -- Barks himself had removed them so their inclusion would have been contrary to his intent.But you know what? If you want to get anal about it, EVERY SINGLE PAGE OF BARKS ART IN THE CBL WAS RETOUCHED. In fact, my first job at Another Rainbow involved using a brush and a bottle of white-out to remove flaws on the proofs. And a lot of times, we had to touch up (redraw) the lines to keep them from disappearing in printing. But so what?
I'm very proud that I was part of putting together the CBL; proud because we went to a lot of trouble to preserve Barks' life's work as faithfully as possible. Naturally, it could not be an exact duplication of exactly what Barks drew, given Disney censorship ("Donald Duck's Atom Bomb", for example) and lousy or missing proofs in some cases.
I can certainly understand people being disappointed at not getting a banned story in it's original form. But I have a hard time understanding complaints about "redrawn" art. When everything important (like the story, the layout, the position of the character, the facial expressions, etc. etc.) is original, and the only change is the exact thickness of a line a fraction of a millimeter long, what's the problem?
But for those of you who think it is a problem, all I can say is that you really should step back and look at the forest. It's a much more pleasant view than that knothole on the the third tree to the left that you've got your nose buried in.
-- Byron "I just like to read a good comic book story" Erickson
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