Since Fantagraphics first release in this series focused on Donald Duck, it is only right that the second focus on Carl Barks s other great protagonist, and his greatest creation: The miserly, excessively wealthy Scrooge McDuck, whose giant money bin, lucky dime, and constant wrangles with his nemeses the Beagle Boys are well-known to, and beloved by, young and old.

This volume starts off with Only a Poor Old Man, the defining Scrooge yarn (in fact his first big starring story) in which Scrooge s plan to hide his money in a lake goes terribly wrong. Two other long-form classics in...

The second volume of Fantagraphics reprinting of Carl Barks s classic Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge work, like last spring s Uncle Scrooge: Only a Poor Old Man, focuses on the early 1950s, universally considered one of Barks s very peak periods. Originally published in 1951, A Christmas for Shacktown is one of Barks s masterpieces: A rare 32-pager that stays within the confines of Duckburg, featuring a storyline in which the Duck family works hard to raise money to throw a Christmas party for the poor children of the city s slums (depicted by Barks with surprisingly Dickensian...