There’s no super organized answer to that, but (this will be long):
Basically, the Duck universe as we know it is the creation of Carl Barks, in the comics he wrote and illustrated over 20 years for three Dell Comics books:
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Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories,
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Donald Duck, and
- Uncle Scrooge.
The two major post-Barks Duck authors, Don Rosa and William Van Horn, came aboard in the late 1980s. Both of these guys built on and in many ways refined and codified Barks’ vision. We’ll get back to them in a minute.
Barks in turn built on a foundation provided by early comic strip writer/artist Al Taliaferro, who created or co-created Daisy, HD&L, and Grandma Duck. Barks was a frequent collaborator, and in the beginning more or less took the reins from Taliaferro.
Taliaferro mostly did short-form domestic comedy, and that became the bulk of Barks’ early work and, later, a continual balance with the more epic storytelling that soon developed in his Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics. It’s in the domestic comedies where Donald and the nephews’ book personalities were honed, and more personal foils like Gladstone Gander rose to prominence. This is where Duckburg came about, as a setting for family hijinks, and this is where the mythology starts.
With WDC&S and Duckburg as sort of the safe home base, Barks started to send Donald and the nephews off on long, world-spanning adventures. Each of these stories would need a whole, extra long comic, so that’s where Donald Duck comes about. These are the stories to which 2017 DT sort of metatextually refers a few times. It’s here, in stories like “The Old Castle’s Secret,” that characters like Scrooge and Gyro Gearloose, and that whole extended gang of villains and supporting characters emerged and coalesced into their now-recognizable forms.
Scrooge is the major breakout character, of course. Once he started to coalesce, he quickly took over Donald’s book. That clearly was unsustainable, so after a while Scrooge was funneled into his own book – which is why the characters and world of Uncle Scrooge comics are pretty fully-firmed from the first issue. This comic ran for something like 15 years before Barks retired. The publishers couldn’t carry on long after that, and we entered a long wilderness era.
Honestly if you start with Uncle Scrooge #1, featuring “Only a Poor Old Man”, that’s as good an intro as you’ll get. It’s kind of a statement of intent for the character and the book, and one of the most famous of all Disney comics.
The original DuckTales is largely based (with a few concessions) on the Uncle Scrooge range. Many episodes, especially early ones, are close adaptations of individual or composite Barks stories. “Only a Poor Old Man”, for example gets a close look-in with Fenton/Gizmoduck’s introduction in “Super DuckTales”.
Now. Here’s where discussion of the 2017 series gets interesting. Around the time that Disney was planning DuckTales, a small company called Gladstone began to reprint old Barks and Floyd Gottfredson (basically the Barks of Mickey Mouse; I’d love to see his stuff get a similar treatment to DuckTales) comics. They treated the stories with care, and with a certain academic rigor. For the first time ever (I think), the original writers and artists received credit. Each issue tended to have scholarly articles and essays about the comics. It was a real trip. Before long, the new range started to attract writers and artists that were as fond of Barks and Gottfredson as the editors clearly were. Of these, the two biggies are Rosa and Van Horn.
Van Horn is cool. He continued on with the domestic comedies and brought an even more whimsical and odd tone to proceedings. Though he follows Barks continuity, he kind of goes off into his own direction with it and eventually even incorporates some DuckTales characters (e.g., Launchpad), because why not. Eventually Barks wrote one last Donald Duck eventure before he died, which he chose Van Horn to illustrate for him.
Don Rosa is the serious and meticulous one, and the one that people tend to point to these days. He picked up the pieces and the standard of the Uncle Scrooge (and occasional Donald Duck) epics, and became basically Duck Man II. His first story, “The Son of the Sun”, is also a good starting place. It’s a fan tribute to Barks’ work, in the gestalt. I think it was written as the ultimate Barks story that never was. Although Rosa quickly developed his own style, this sets the tone for everything else he’d do.
His most defining work is The Life & Times of Scrooge McDuck, which… I mean. It’s something else. He combed through everything Barks had ever written, including unpublished scraps of paper that Barks jotted down for his own reference, for mentions of names and dates and events outside of the comics’ events themselves. Rosa made it all into a timeline, and – well, at first he set about trying to resolve every discrepancy, of which there are many. Then he decided to go for it, and told the entire timeline of Scrooge’s life – based on Barks’ own previously disorganized references – from a young boy to when we first met him in “A Christmas for Shacktown.” It’s an extraordinary work, and occasionally rather grim.
This thing has won award after award, and I often see it cited as basically the go-to culmination of Duck comics. Like their Dark Knight Returns or something. But like Miller’s book, it builds off of a certain expectation of familiarity in its audience. You can read the whole thing as a story, but it means a heck of a lot more if you’ve been through all of the random adventures and you understand what it’s trying to put into perspective.
So, none of this had yet happened when the original DuckTales was in production. All they had to go on was Carl Barks, and his internally very disorganized bibliography. So they picked and chose, and made up the rest.
While DuckTales introduced Barks’ characters to a mass audience for the first time, there was something going on not unlike the TMNT situation. You may recall how there was sort of an existential crisis in the late '80s, early '90s about the Turtles. The original Mirage books are dark and violent and serious, but the 1987 cartoon is so goofy. The Mirage books seemed to kinda react to the presence of the cartoon by going darker and more serious. By the time the cartoon ended, the comic was something else entirely – a discrepancy that later adaptations have gone nuts trying to square. (For my money the 2003 cartoon nails it best.)
Similarly, there was a certain snootiness toward DuckTales from the comics fandom. And lucky them, whereas Van Horn just did whatever amused him, Don Rosa took Barks super super seriously. He wanted to get it right, and nail down the Duck canon in a way it had never been done before. And by George, he put in some elbow grease. By the time DuckTales ended, its “deficiencies” compared to the source comics were laid bare and the Barks canon had been turned into a sort of a solid block of inarguable literature.
Fast forward 30 years, and we’ve got a generation raised on DuckTales who then set out to read the Barks/Rosa comics. And boy, does the 2017 series reflect the change in fandom. It’s kind of like the new Doctor Who in that sense as well. Yeah, it builds on the original – but it also builds in a wealth of supplementary and contextualizing material that didn’t exist when the original was on TV. All of the stuff about the nephews’ lineage? Would never have happened without Don Rosa. I mean, look at this shit:
Likewise, by adding Donald back into the mix where he belongs, the 2017 series brings in the other two arms of Barks material: the Donald Duck adventures (as alluded to) and the WDC&S domestic stuff that plays out continually, yet had no place in the 1987 series.
It’s just… so much good stuff, so well-handled, it makes me giddy.
ANYWAY. My suggestion:
But you could spend a lifetime on this stuff. I pretty much did. Get through all of that, and I can list off a dozen highlights.
P.S.: I hear that Goldie is a major character in this series!!!