"The Many Arms of Death, Part 1: Sinnerman" #1

Dell Four Color #9- October 1942 - 68 pages Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold! Bearing a map found in Donald's seaside restaurant, Donald Duck and his nephews, and a parrot named Old Yellow Beak set sail for an island where the pirate Henry Morgan's treasure is buried. Unknown to them, the crew of the ship is made up of Black Pete, disguised as an old woman, and two of his rat-faced henchmen. Pete takes over the ship, but the ducks and the parrot reach the treasure island on a raft. There they dig up the treasure while Pete lies in wait. This was the first Donald Duck story originally produced for an American comic book and also the first involving Donald and his nephews in a treasure hunting expedition, in this case for the treasure of Henry Morgan. The work in this story drawn by Carl Barks was done prior to his departure from the Disney Studio, before he began work as a full-time comic artist. The book was released in the Dell Four Color series . It was Four Color No. 9 and officially titled Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold (October 1942). It was so popular that it began a series of original comic book stories featuring Donald Duck stories, which after 25 separate one-shot stories, became a stand-alone title in 1952, as Dell's Walt Disney's Donald Duck. The story adaption was written by Bob Karp ,and was taken from storyboards written primarily by Homer Brightman for Morgan's Ghost, a Disney feature cartoon that was never produced. Disney historian Jim Korkis reports the notion of taking the unmade feature and adapting the storyline for publication as a comic book occurred when Dell Comics editor Oskar Lebeck "was given permission to look through the Disney files of cartoon ideas that were shelved. He found the over 800 numbered sketches for "Morgan's Ghost" and was instantly struck that most of the work had already been done in terms of visualizing the story. Lebeck felt it could easily be adapted into a Donald Duck comic book story." This was Carl Barks's first comic-book work. He illustrated thirty-two of the sixty-four pages. The pages are not numbered, but Barks illustrated these: 1, 2, 5, and 12 through 40. The remainder of pages were illustrated by Jack Hannah , at that time Barks's partner in the Duck unit of the story department at Disney Studios. In general, Barks drew the exterior scenes and Hannah the interior scenes. "We had a little talk together as to which pages we enjoyed or felt one of us could draw better than the other. We decided that I would take most of the outdoor scenes, the ones that showed the ship and its rigging ... Jack took the indoor scenes. He had a wide knowledge of perspective and liked to draw shadow effects and furniture-that is...He took the ones he liked, and I took the ones I liked," Barks recalled. Hannah continued: "We divided up the pages and worked on weekends and evenings. It was understood that the comic book work was not to be done on studio time. "At the time we were doing the comic book, neither Carl nor I had any idea that this was a proposal for a feature. It certainly seems strange that we never heard, because along with Jack King, we were directly responsible for all the Duck shorts coming out of the studio. Still, if it were being developed as a feature, somebody may have felt it wasn't any of our business because we were just doing the shorts and this was a feature so it would involve an entirely different group of people. They certainly never told us. We were just given a typewritten script to work from and that was it," Hannah remembered. Reprinted: US in The Carl Barks Library (Another Rainbow, 1983 series) #1 (July 1984) US in Donald Duck (Gladstone, 1986 series) #250 (February 1987) US in Gladstone Comic Album Special (Gladstone, 1989 series) #1 ([1989]) US in Carl Barks Library of Walt Disney's Donald Duck Adventures in Color (Gladstone, 1994 series) #1 (January 1994) US in Walt Disney's Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge - The Best and Firsts (Gladstone, 1996 series) (7 April 1996)
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