Artists of vision toiling within the gears of a vision-suppressing machine, Carl Barks and Floyd Gottfredson drew and wrote great swathes of the best popular art of the twentieth century, mostly in the least auspicious venues available: comic books and comic strips credited to Walt Disney.

There, the work did what popular art too often doesn't: It actually delighted the millions who read it, rather than merely distracted or killed time for 'em.

Fantagraphics is currently collecting the work of both artists: Barks's transcendent Donald and Scrooge McDuck comics, and Gottfredson's sprightly Mickey Mouse serials. To the publisher's credit, the books are gorgeous but designed for readability rather than display. This is great art you can guiltlessly peruse in the bathtub.

First, the ducks. The initial volume in the Barks series is available this month, and it's all pleasure, a treasury of deceptively simple gag and adventure stories that fashioned with wit, irony, and impeccable craftmanship. These mid-century tales star Donald and his nephews, with cameo appearances from Uncle Scrooge, a Barks creation seen here in his earlier, more miserly days.

The longer stories here -- "Lost in the Andes," "The Golden Christmas Tree" -- are suspenseful, surprising, funny, and fresh, even when many of their elements are familiar adventure-comic standbys. Here, Donald attempts to batter in the door of a witch up to no good. She responds with a conjuration as funny as anything in the best years of Mad or The Simpsons:

Funny as that is, these '50s stories are often adventures on a grand scale, and the stormy seas and jungle journeys are more thrilling than anything Hollywood (or Disney himself) was at the time imagineering.

These tales concern mysterious islands, lost civilizations, and -- perhaps inevitably -- man-eating natives, a fixture of cartooning in the first half of the last century. Barks worked this tradition later than most, and in these stories he acquits himself honorably: His natives are full-fledged individuals who only turn on the white folks (or, in this case, the ducks) after suffering at the hands of Uncle Scrooge's imperialistic capitalism.

Seriously, Uncle Scroooge's rubber business is painted as something like United Fruit, which prompts a native tribe to dispatch an old-school vodoun zombie to rub him out. Barks finds sympathy for the tribe and the zombie both -- as well as several spectacular gags.
The hangdog zombie is somehow totally Disney, and quietly moving, but also as absurd as a Don Martin oaf.

In addition to four full-length adventure stories, all smart and satiric and crafted by Barks at the top of his game, Fantagraphics has included nine amusing ten-page stories, in which Donald is less of a pluckish everyduck and more of a harried uncle, as well as a host of one-page gag strips and many pages of illuminating notes. These kids' comics are far from kids' stuff -- this is for everyone.

Next: Mickey Mouse and the Temple of Doom

In the introduction to the Barks book, Donald Ault leads with the famous story of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg basing the rolling-boulder sequence from Raiders of the Lost Ark on an Uncle Scrooge story. (That story is not reprinted in this volume, but a page of it turns up to illustrate the point.)

That scene, like Barks' duck adventures, is brilliantly crafted from ideas common to countless earlier stories but freshly distinguished with killer gags, peerless timing, and an atmosphere so fully realized that only the churlish wouldn't dream along with it.

Floyd Gottfredson's early Mickey Mouse comic strips are touched with genius, too -- but something more along the lines of Temple of Doom. I don't intend that as an insult. (Seriously, some day I'll get around to writing a passionate defense of that nastiest of movies.) Like the goofy, violent, darker-than-expected cliffhangers of the second Indiana Jones flick, Gottfredson's Mickey Mouse -- especially in its just-released second volume, covering 1932 and '33 -- is an exhausting achievement in can-you-top-this adventure storytelling.

Gottfredson's great gift, here, is for inventive momentum, the way Mickey goes from one problem to a worse problem to an impossible problem, and then, hey, all of a sudden he's piloting a shot-up biplane into a death blimp:

Mickey's badassery might not be the revelation that it was in the first volume, but in volume two the drawing is more consistent, the stories better shaped, and the adventure even grander. In the first volume -- unlike the Barks books, these are a chronological reprinting -- Gottfredson sometimes seemed to be writing two different strips, one the traditional funny talking-animal story, and the second a rip-roaring adventure.

Here, he fully integrates the comedy and the action elements. He hits a serious peak here, when -- in that can-you-top-this? fashion -- Mickey has been bound, gagged, shoved off a ship by mutineering pirates, only to land in a lifeboat occupied by a similarly bound gorilla:

The question isn't can you top this? It's "Could anybody, ever?"

Gottfredson relies on many of the adventure-story standbys that Barks does, but his cannibals, I'm sorry to say, are less dignified than even the ooga-booga caricatures of the Tarzan movies. These are huge-lipped tribesmen speaking dialogue right out of Uncle Remus. And earlier in the book, Mickey stages a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin in full-on blackface -- a powerful reminder of just how far away 1933 is from us today.

As disturbing as some of Gottfredson's strips are, Disney and Fantagraphics should be commended for hauling them from the vault. Neither the mouse nor the man fully transcended their age.

But, damn, both could pile on with the thrilling, impossible adventure. Here, just as his friend Horace Horsecollar is found guilty of a crime that he didn't commit and facing a bona fide lynching, Mickey leaps from an airplane with the real criminals in tow and literally parachutes into the courtroom -- clutching a money bag with a dollar sign on it!

This kids' stuff isn't for kids, either. But it's revealing and thrilling, both a guide to what's long been wrong with this country -- and what's great in its imagination.
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