Carl Barks' Duck

"Schilling cheerleads, gushes and obsesses, using smart, but not scholarly arguments to convince readers to share his duck love. Basically, he's a fan. Fortunately, he's an interesting fan, rejecting Barks' most popular works because he disdains Donald's zillionaire uncle Scrooge McDuck, partly because Scrooge's financial fixation limits him. Schilling loves Donald's flexibility: Everyone else is a slave to continuity, but Donald has new professions, hobbies and expertise in each story. To Schilling, that makes the duck more an actor than character, which corresponds to the essayist's idea that Barks' work is akin to early cinema comedies."--Jake Austen, Chicago Tribune "Schilling regards the stories, as he says in his introduction, as "paper movies." He approaches his subject with the same reverence, insight, and awareness that the late Roger Ebert brought to film. [...] In his essay about the classic Donald Duck story "The Magic Hourglass" he references Citizen Kane as well as Eric von Stroheim's silent epic Greed. [...] By using our shared familiarity with another medium, Schilling expertly expands our understanding of another."--New York Journal of Books