Carl Barks

It’s not exactly a secret that I’m not the biggest fan of Donald Duck. That said, I am a fan of the cast of characters around him. While my personal favourite doesn’t always appear connected to him—you try being a fan of Dr. Ludwig Von Drake—the most noteworthy of the cast is almost certainly not even Daisy but instead Scrooge McDuck. He was one of the ones created by the great Carl Barks. In the days when the comics were uncredited by artist—there’s some things I like about Walt, but his persistent erasure of the people working for him was not one of them—he was known to fans as The Good Duck Artist.

Barks had the kind of childhood that would’ve broken Donald. When he was very young, his parents lived on a remote farm two miles from the nearest school, a one-room schoolhouse with a handful of students. When he was a little older, his father moved the family north to a more populated area, but Barks and his brother were still expected to work long hours. Then they moved to a farm near Santa Rosa, California, where financial pressures probably caused his father to have a breakdown. They moved back to the original area of Merrill, Oregon; the high school was too far away and Barks was already having hearing problems, so he dropped out of school. He was fifteen.

The Barks version of Donald Duck suffered through rough times. Unlike the cartoon version, for the most part, he was dealing with real problems that could spark a real response. Now, he still overreacted, because that’s what Donald does. And he doesn’t show the level of resilience that Barks did himself. Barks had many jobs but little success. However, he learned the importance of humour, and Uncle Scrooge’s stance that you have to be tougher than the toughies and smarter than the smarties was inspired by his own attitude.

Barks did spend some time working at the studio; his first story sale was for the bit in “Modern Inventions,” my favourite Donald Duck short, where the robot gives Donald’s butt a haircut. Unfortunately his second seems to have been the story for “Donald’s Ostrich,” which we covered yesterday and which I didn’t like. Still, he found the work frustrating during the war and apparently had sinus problems that were made worse by the studio’s air conditioning. Working on the comics went much better for him.

And my goodness did he influence pop culture. He doesn’t seem to have directly worked on Duck Tales, but there is no Duck Tales without Carl Barks. Both Spielberg and Lucas freely acknowledge his influence, and after all the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the Giant Rolling Ball Of Doom is lifted from “The Seven Cities of Cibola.” Danish Karl Krøyer denied that his invention that lifted sunken ships with inflatable polystyrene balls was stolen from Barks, but Barks did it first—with ping pong balls. Don Rosa only considers the Barks stories canon about the Duck family. For people who care about that sort of thing, there’s no one greater than Carl Barks.