Syd Shores (The Westerner Comics #37, June 1951):
Carl Barks had Uncle Scrooge McDuck and Donald Duck drew a whole-book adventure in "The Land of The Pygmy Indians" in late 1956. Although he located his hidden land in a remote, dense northern boreal forest, rather than in a hidden cave, I wonder if he got the germ of his idea from this 1951 "The Westerner" story of the same name. I know that Carl did go to his local drug store to look at its magazine stand to see what comic books were being sold, every few weeks, and also that he was a fan of "Western" stories. Of course, he never copied large elements of anyone else's stories. He only would get the germ of an idea that would trigger his imagination. But, this has triggered my own curiosity to read that story in "The Westerner" No. 37. Of course, the 12-page, "Westerner" story, by size limitations alone, is forced to be a completely different story in style and content, from that of Barks' 27-page epic Northlands adventure (which also had an environmentalist message-which is much more pertinent today than in its own time).
That page number restriction, caused by publishers, during the 1940s, wanting to have several different features by different authors in each monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly issue, caused stories that fit better into whole books, rather than restricted to from 8 to 16 pages per issue, and to often be serialised into several issues. I'm the type of reader who was very impatient to wait one or two months to read the continuation of a story. The cramped stories, that WEREN'T serialised, always felt choppy, and that they had a lot missing (not shown in narrative or illustrations) that had to be inferred by the experienced, clever reader. As a fan of visual art, I felt cheated, in missing all those potentially fantastic illustrations. I know the challenges of cramming enough story information into 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 and 12-page stores that would "breathe" better in 6, 8, 12, 16, 24, and 32 pages. It was an acquired skill, placing key strategic written and drawn information in as small an area as possible, leaving as much room as possible for additional information, and NEVER, NEVER telling something in print (narrative or dialogue), that could be discerned from the artwork.
Barks was such a master of that facility, that non of us mortals could draw and write 10-page stories that were as good as his. We needed, at the very least, 12 or 13 pages to create stories remotely as satisfying as his 10-pagers. That is the reason that Danish Disney Comics (producer for much of Europe, Africa and Asia, for many years allowed us 12 or 13 pages for the Donald Duck Weekly lead story, when it had been only 10 pages for Barks' time and several years after.
