Another Rainbow Publishing was created in 1981 by Bruce Hamilton and Russ Cochran to bring greater recognition (and revenue!) to the work "Carl Barks". Their first efforts went into establishing Another Rainbow Publishing, the banner under which they produced and issued the award-winning book The Fine Art of Walt Disney´s Donald Duck by Carl Barks, a comprehensive collection of the Disney duck paintings of this legendary artist and storyteller. Not long after, the company began producing fine art lithographs of many of these paintings, in strictly limited editions, all signed by Barks, who eventually produced many original works for the series.
In 1983 Another Rainbow published the entire Disney comic book works of Barks — over 500 stories in all — in the ten-set, thirty-volume Carl Barks Library. These oversized hardbound volumes reproduced Barks´ pages in pristine black and white line art, as close as possible to the way he´d originally drawn them, and included mountains of special features, articles, reminiscences, interviews, storyboards, critiques, and more than a few surprises. This monumental project was finally completed in mid-1990.
In 1985 a new division was founded, "Gladstone Publishing", which took up the then-dormant Disney comic book license. Gladstone introduced a whole new generation of Disney comic book readers to the wondrous storytelling of such luminaries as Barks, Paul Murry, and Floyd Gottfredson, as well as presenting the first works of modern Disney comics masters Don Rosa and William Van Horn. The company was based in Scottsdale, Arizona, until January of 1987, when the whole shootin´ match was packed and hauled up to the mile-high community of Prescott, the one-time territorial capitol of Arizona.