Carl Barks’ Ducks Come to Fantagraphics

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It’s not even an entire workday into 2011, and we’ve already gotten an excellent piece of comics news: Fantagraphics has just announced that they’ll be publishing the complete comics of Carl Barks, in something around 30 hardcover volumes, over the next 15 years. (There’s an extensive interview about it with Fantagraphics publisher Gary Groth over at Robot 6.)

(More on TIME.com: Fantagraphics Announces “Mickey Mouse” Reprints)

“I was just a duck man – strictly a duck man,” Barks famously said. He wrote and drew thousands of pages of Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic books between 1942 and 1966, and he was one of the great American masters of adventure-comedy comics. His stories have been reprinted many, many times around the world, but there’s never been a comprehensive English-language color edition of his work before. (Blessedly, Groth notes that the Fantagraphics version will have flat colors based on the original coloring, rather than the garish “airbrush” effects of recent European editions of Barks.)

(More on TIME.com: Mickey Mouse’s Older Brother Gets the Spotlight in New Game Trailer)

Fantagraphics’ Barks series is scheduled to appear at the rate of two volumes a year, beginning this fall. Rather than starting at the beginning, chronologically, they’re starting with the prime-period stuff: the first volume will be Lost in the Andes, collecting work from around 1948.