The uses of cuteness: kitties, ducks, babies and a ninja. Reviewed by Douglas Wolk

Walt and Skeezix (Drawn & Quarterly, $29.95) reprints the daily strips from 1921 and 1922 in a gorgeous hardcover designed by "Gasoline Alley" buff Chris Ware and supplemented by a copiously illustrated essay about King and the real-life inspirations behind the strip.

Skeezix, as the baby is known, can't do much other than eat and cry at first, although he's talking and making some mischief by the end of the volume. (The strip's characters aged in real time -- they still do, actually, although King died in 1969.) Walt, on the other hand, has had his life turned upside-down; when his friends' wives demand their time, he still laughs it off with an "I know when I'm well off," but he also knows that being a devoted car enthusiast hasn't quite prepared him to be a father. When the community tries to set him up with a pretty young flapper near the end of the book, Walt is torn among his desire to put himself above his friends' machinations, his hormones and his longing to give the baby more of a family.

Walt and Skeezix doesn't include the Sunday strips in which King really got to show off his sense of design, but the dailies are visually splendid in their own right. He took obvious relish in drawing his characters, cars and settings, especially in a long sequence in which the cast takes a trip to Yellowstone Park. And as mild as King's wit usually is, he gets a lot of mileage out of the sense of desperation that any new parent feels in caring for something beautiful and helpless.

Strictly a D.U.C.K. Man

Cuteness keeps children interested in pretty much any kind of story. Carl Barks was the mastermind behind hundreds of Donald Duck and Uncle $crooge comics from the '40s to the '60s, and the antics of his adorable ducks, geese and dogs let him pull off some elaborately choreographed adventure stories. Don Rosa is a very different sort of cartoonist, but he's also fanatically devoted to Barks's work, and The Life and Times of $crooge McDuck (Gemstone Publishing, $16.99) is a delightful, if head-spinning, act of homage. The first panel of every Rosa story about the Disney ducks has the letters D.U.C.K. hidden in it somewhere -- the acronym stands for "Dedicated to Unca Carl from Keno," Rosa's real first name.

Barks's multizillionaire-skinflint Uncle Scrooge was forever dropping hints about his past: that he sold his ancestor "Seafoam" McDuck's heirloom gold teeth to buy a prospector's outfit, or that he "jounced to the African Rand in a bullock cart." For this mammoth story, Rosa has assembled all of those "Barksian facts" into a master narrative of the first 80 years of Scrooge's life. He's even worked out a family tree of all of Donald and Scrooge's kin. (Did you know that Donald's father Quackmore Duck had a sister named Daphne who married Goostave Gander? Now you do.) Amazingly enough, it all fits together into a witty, tightly plotted story about a plucky young duck starting from scratch and amassing a fortune while he loses his soul by degrees. We see Scrooge facing down Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, outrunning a flash flood in the Australian outback and finally hitting paydirt during the Klondike gold rush. Rosa crams every chapter of his serial with wordplay, historical nuggets, throwaway sight gags and references to his favorite old movies. (The final chapter begins with a delicious extended homage to "Citizen Kane.") And the Barksian idea he ultimately focuses on is a lovely one: that the reason Scrooge is so obsessed with not just wealth but money itself is that he's earned all of it through hard work, and each coin is a souvenir of an adventure from his extraordinary life. ·

Douglas Wolk writes about comic books for Publishers Weekly and the Believer. He is the author of "Live at the Apollo."