Donald Duck, a cartoon character created by the Walt Disney Company, is today the star of dozens of comic-book and comic-strip stories published each month around the world.
In many European countries, Donald is considered the lead character in Disney comics, more important and beloved than Mickey Mouse.
In America, the Donald Duck comic strip debuted on February 7, 1938, following a 1936-1937 trial run in the Silly Symphony Sunday page.
The earliest print mention of a character called "Donald Duck" is in 1931 in the book The Adventures of Mickey Mouse, published by David McKay Company, Philadelphia.
On the first text page, none of which are numbered, the third paragraph begins, "Mickey has many friends in the old barn and the barnyard, besides Minnie Mouse.
[2] The Donald introduced in the short film The Wise Little Hen made his printed debut in the June 1934 issue of Good Housekeeping magazine: a single-page ad depicted six comic images of Donald as part of the monthly Silly Symphony section.
It was released between September 16 and December 16, 1934, in the Silly Symphony Sunday pages by Ted Osborne and Al Taliaferro.
Starting February 10, 1935, Donald appeared in the Mickey Mouse comic strip by Ted Osborne and Floyd Gottfredson, in the story "Editor-in-Grief."
They also introduced the first members of the Duck family: Donald's identical triplet nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, who debuted on October 17, 1937.
At this time, the first Donald Duck stories originally created for a comic book made their appearance.
In February 1940, Donald Duck made his first appearance as the main character on the cover of an American comic book in Dell Publishing's Four Color #4.
Donald's paternal grandmother, usually just called Grandma Duck, first appeared in a portrait on August 11, 1940, and in person on September 28, 1943.
The story was written by Bob Karp, who based it on the storyboard of the unproduced Mickey Mouse short Morgan's Ghost by Harry Reeves and Homer Brightman.
Barks largely did away with Donald's animated persona as a loafing, lazy hothead whose main quality is his hardly understandable quacking.
To make him suitable for a comic-book story, Barks redefined his personality and gave him articulated speech and shaded emotions.
To give Donald a world to live in, Barks developed the city of Duckburg in the American state of Calisota.
He was allowed to focus entirely on his own cast of Duckburg citizens, such as the richest duck in the world, Uncle Scrooge McDuck, lucky cousin Gladstone Gander, and peculiar inventor Gyro Gearloose.
Barks quit working at the Studio and found employment at Western Publishing with a starting pay of twelve dollars and fifty cents per page.
He created his first Donald Duck ten-pager, The Victory Garden, which first published in April 1943; the basic script came from the studio, but Barks was asked to rewrite it in addition to drawing it.
Or as Barks would say later: "He was sometimes a villain, and he was often a real good guy and at all times he was just a blundering person like the average human being."
But when they misinterpret a number of chance events to be covert attacks by their respective neighbor, they resume their fighting with renewed determination.
From 1947, Jones was also used by non-Barks comics writers; from the 1960s onward, he has frequently reappeared in stories by a great number of authors.
Donald's maternal uncle Scrooge McDuck made his first appearance in Christmas on Bear Mountain, first published in December 1947.
The first member of The Clan McDuck to appear, his name was based on Ebenezer Scrooge, a fictional character from Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.
Scrooge's first appearance was almost immediately followed by that of Donald's first cousin Gladstone Gander in Wintertime Wager, first published in January, 1948.
Scrooge was a bearded, bespectacled, reasonably wealthy old duck living in isolation in a huge mansion who is visibly leaning on his cane.
Hundreds of other authors have used the character — for example, the Disney Studio artists that made comics directly for the European market.
Two of these, Dick Kinney and Al Hubbard, created Donald's cousin Fethry Duck, an obsessive dreamer with a love of discovering new lifestyles and hobbies.
Romano Scarpa, an Italian Disney artist, created Brigitta MacBridge, a female Duck who is madly in love with Scrooge.
Donald originally created Paperinik as a dark avenger alter-identity to secretly seek revenge upon relatives such as Scrooge McDuck and Gladstone Gander, but he soon found himself fighting other menaces as a superhero.