How to Read Donald Duck

Blurb

How to Read Donald Duck is an early work critiquing popular cultural forms that has been labelled by some as communist propaganda written by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart. It discusses the impact of comic books featuring the Walt Disney Duck cartoon characters. 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, whom he too recognizes as an unrivaled satirist."