If you’re not familiar with the comics of Uncle Scrooge, you’re missing out. The treasure hunts of the globe-trotting “richest duck in the world” draw inspiration from steam- and dieselpunk-era adventures and in turn inspired George Lucas in creating Indiana Jones!

Carl Barks, Scrooge’s creator and widely regarded as the best Duck artist of all time, never consciously established a biography for Scrooge, but he did reveal tidbits about the old miser’s younger years through dozens of stories.

In The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, Keno Ron Rosa masterfully weaves together every detail Barks revealed about Scrooge’s past with real-world history, from the heydays of the Mississippi riverboat to the Klondike Gold Rush. It’s that real-world history we’re going to explore. Hence the emphasis on the “times” of Scrooge McDuck.

The twelve chapters of The Life and Times are best read in order. They form a narrative whole, from Scrooge’s rise to his fall to his redemption. Eight additional “untold tales” (Don Rosa preferred the term “B chapters”) are mostly pure adventure stories and best read after. For our purposes, however, a chronological order makes sense.