How to Read Donald Duck
 Cover of the 1971 Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaiso first edition | |
| Author |
Ariel Dorfman Armand Mattelart |
|---|---|
| Original title | Para leer al Pato Donald |
| Translator | David Kunzle (English) |
| Country | Chile |
| Language | Spanish |
| Publisher | Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaiso |
Publication date | 1971 |
Published in English | 1975 |
| ISBN | 0884770370 |
How to Read Donald Duck (Para leer al Pato Donald in Spanish) is an early work critiquing popular cultural forms that has been labelled by some as communist propaganda[1][2] written by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart. It discusses the impact of comic books featuring the Walt Disney Duck cartoon characters (Donald Duck, Scrooge McDuck, etc.). The book was written and published in 1971 in Chile under socialist president Salvador Allende.
Dorfman and Mattelart argue that the Duck comics, particularly those featuring the ultra-rich Scrooge McDuck on international searches for treasure, take on an ideological cast that reflects and naturalises American corporate exploitation of Latin American countries. While Dorfman and Mattelart argue in the original text that this is corporate ideology of the Disney Corporation is made manifest in the comic books, David Kunzle's introduction to the 1991 English edition suggests that in the years since the book's initial publication, Dorfman had "taken a more generous view of the comics he excoriated, at least those by Carl Barks (main writer and artist of the Duck comics), whom he too recognizes as an unrivaled satirist.[3]"
Criticism
Thomas Andrae, a biographer of Carl Barks (the main writer of Donald Duck), criticized the claims of Dorfman and Mattelart that Disney controlled the work of every cartoonist, maintaining that cartoonists had almost completely free hands unlike those who worked in animation. He writes that Barks' cartoons include social criticism and even anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist references.[4]
References
- ↑ Kurtz, Stanley (2014-08-25). "How the College Board Politicized U.S. History". National Review. Retrieved 2014-08-30.
- ↑ Patanella, Dan (1997). "Goodbye, Carl Barks". Retrieved August 21, 2014.
- ↑ Kunzle, David. 'Introduction to the English Edition (1991).' How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, 4th Ed.. International General, 1991, p. 17.
- ↑ Andrae, Thomas (2006), Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity, Univ. Press of Mississippi, ISBN 1578068584
Further reading
- Robert Boyd. "Uncle $crooge, Imperialist" Comics Journal #138 (October 1990), pp. 52–55.
- Dana Gabbard and Geoffrey Blum. "The Color of Truth is Gray." Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge Adventures in Color #24 (1997), pp. 23–26. Critical analysis by two experts on Carl Barks.
- David Kunzle. "The Parts That Got Left Out of the Donald Duck Book, or, How Karl Marx Prevailed over Carl Barks." http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v6_2/kunzle/ Paper presented to the Marxism and Art History session of the College Art Association Meeting in Chicago, February 1976 (1977), pp. 15–22. Kunzle's experiences in doing the English-language translation.
- Tadeusz, Tietze. "Hard Racism and Soft Stalinism" Comics Journal #142 (June 1991), pp. 32–34.