"The Golden Nugget Boat"

So having written about Gladstone, let's look at how Scrooge is portrayed in 1961, when Barks is feeling old and cynical about his flagship character.

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Favorite Duck Comics

By request, some always-subject-to-change lists from which I may well have left some vitally important stories. Lists in approximately descending order. Only five Donald adventures because there are so many fewer than there are Scrooge adventures. I really ought to also make a list of Barks ten-pagers, as well as one of Gyro stories, but the problem is, there are a hell of a lot of those that I haven't yet read.
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Gladstone Gander

Sometimes I realize I should provide small bits of context on the off-chance that there are people reading this who aren't big duck fans already. I honestly don't know whether that last sentence was meant to be sarcastic or not. But so: Gladstone Gander, of course, is Donald's disgustingly lucky cousin (genealogy: Donald's father Quackmore is Gladstone's mother Daphne's brother). In his first few appearances, Gladstone was just a kind of generic braggart meant to be a foil and mirror image for Donald.
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"Interplanetary Postman"

So about this alleged dip in quality that Barks' work suffered in the early sixties: I dunno. There's probably some truth there. Magica de Spell DOES feel very Cousin Oliver-ish, and there are several stories from this period--"Mythtic Mystery" and "That's no Fable" come readily to mind--that, we are sadly forced to admit, flat-out suck.
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