Carl Barks was perhaps the least-known best-loved cartoonist in the world. Hardly a household name, Barks for over two decades was the driving force behind Walt Disney's Donald Duck, as well as the creator, in 1947, of Scrooge McDuck. "This may come as a surprise," wrote Leonard Maltin in the Disney News, "but the most popular and widely read artist-writer in the world--by at least one educated estimate--is a man about whom most people have never heard." Disney's policy of keeping its artists anonymous saw to this strange obscurity, yet word began to circulate by the 1950s that Barks was the pen behind the quack. As a writer for Newsmakers commented, Barks "is credited with transforming the anthropomorphic duck into a feisty Everyman, and for creating 'Duckburg' town populated by several of his own characters." Maltin further noted that, though Barks was not well known at the time of...