Carl Barks and the Perversity of
Beasts, Machines, and Nature
by Garth Danielson
I have been a fan of Carl Barks for over 40 years. I was a fan even before I knew who he was. Back in the golden, olden days Disney comic artists weren’t allowed to sign their work. In 1942, when Carl Barks and Jack Hannah drew the first original Donald Duck comic book story for Dell Four Color 9, the readers just thought he was Walt Disney. If they were savvy they knew Walt didn’t draw everything, let alone anything.
I never thought about the artists who drew the comics I read as a kid. About the time I was getting to the end of my teens I became exposed to books about comics and their artists, and magazines like the Comic Reader or the Comics Buyers Guide, and whatever that weird Steranko comics tabloid was. That was when I came to find out that Carl Barks was the “Good Duck Artist.” That’s the comic fan shorthand nickname for “the guy who did all of those great Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories.”
Since everyone read Disney comics when I was a kid, in the late 50’s and early 60‘s, there were always a great pile of them around to read. I didn’t collect them so much as just have them. I wouldn’t get the collecting bug bad until after puberty. Is there some connection? I doubt it. Parents bought new ones for a dime and there was usually some bookstore that had them for half price or less. Disney’s were plentiful in those days, they were the largest selling comics anywhere, each month millions of copies poured into the country. And, remarkably, there are many still available. The Dell comics were printed on a better quality of paper and have survived fairly well. Good quality reading copies can be had for prices only a bit higher than the currently published versions. Yet very few people collect them. Like stamp collecting the collectors are older, and have been at it along time.
Several companies produced Disney Comics over the last 60 odd years. Western Publishing did the production, and they were distributed by Dell until 1962. After that Western published them under their own Goldkey, Golden and Whitman labels. There was a brief 2 year break before Gladstone, under Bruce Hamilton and Russ Cochran, took the reigns in 1986. They did great Disney comics until 1990, when Disney took over. Disney returned the comics to Bruce Hamilton. He struggled from 1993 to 1999, then it was over. Steve Geppi’s Gemstone Publishing restarted the line in 2003 and has been producing nice books ever since. Marvel figures in there somewhere, doing a bunch of Disney movie and TV comics, but the less said about that the better.
Still, I didn’t know who Carl Barks was, let alone his name, but I remembered the stories. And his stood out against the rest. Certain scenes stuck with me for years, flashing into my mind. Great art will do that, burn itself into your skull, and there is no doubt in my mind that Carl is a great artist and storyteller. That storytelling component is such a very important piece in the making of good comics, and combined with his wonderful line art, Barks stories are a joy to behold. The best cartoonists and illustrators will tell you over and over again, keep it simple. Too often comic artists clutter their pages with so much debris that you can no longer see the story. That’s a very hard game to win, and only skillful stylists can pull that off. Jack Kirby could do it, and he was one of the few good ones. Of course, I think Carl Barks is one of the great ones. He knew exactly what to keep out of his panels.
Carl was born March 27, 1901, near Merrill Oregon, a small town near the Oregon California border, to William and Arminta Barks. Carl was their second child, his older brother Clyde had been born the year before. The family farmed wheat on a section of land and lived there for several years. Carl started school in the rural school system, walking 2 miles each day each way, joining the 8 to 10 kids he remembers going to that one-room school. Rural life is often lonely and Carl was a shy kid, with a growing hearing problem. His parents were busy running the family farm and did not have much time to spend with their boys. Carl did not have much in common with his brother and there were very few other children to play with. He spent much of his spare time drawing, often copying from the newspaper cartoonists of the time.
“I first copied such stone-age comic artists as Winsor McCay and Opper. Always was inclined to invent my own comic faces, figures and scenes. What I copied from the cartoonists of my day was their technique of pen handling and shading,”
— Barks in a letter to a fan
In 1908, in order to better the family fortune, William Barks built a feedlot in the town of Midland in Oregon. There were railroad lines there, and the area had better prospects. The boys worked in the feedlot, feeding the cattle and “bedding down the cars.” “Bedding down the cars” entailed spreading hay 6 to 8 inches deep in the cattle cars, something for the cattle to lay on or eat. In 1911 the family moved to Santa Rosa California, renting out both the wheat farm and the feedlot. They farmed vegetables and bought a prune orchard, but the business did poorly and William had a nervous breakdown from the anxiety. He recovered and the Barks family moved, first back to the feedlot business in Midland, then back to the farm in Merrill in 1914.
Carl continued in his one room school, completing the 8th grade in 1916, the year his mother died. This same year Carl took a mail order correspondence program in cartooning from the Landon Schools. He only finished a few classes before giving it up for work. The war was on and there was money to be made in the hay fields, $5 a day. This was followed by a long series of short-time labor jobs. It was these early jobs that Barks would later draw from to vex Donald in so many of his wonderful stories.
In a letter to a fan Barks remarked, “On the physical plane, my experiences during my early years, when I worked as a farmer, logger, riveter, muleskinner, pseudo-cowboy, and printing press feeder., always terribly inefficiently, gave me practical knowledge for complicating many of Donald Duck’s problems. The perversity of beasts, machines, and nature I knew by heart.” As Barks drifted from job to job, either looking for something different or just loosing interest, so did Donald, just more so. If Barks screwed up, Donald did so on a larger scale.
1918 found Carl Barks in San Francisco working for a small publishing house, as an errand boy for 12 dollars a week. A rented room on an airshaft cost 2 bucks a week. He was also trying to sell his cartoons to newspapers and magazines, with little success. Barks married his first wife, Pearl Turner in 1921, they had two daughters. After a brief flirtation with farming back in Merrill, and a summer logging, Barks and his new wife found themselves in Coalinga California where Carl sought work in the coal fields. He didn’t like the look of the work, or the area, and they moved near Sacramento. Carl found work there repairing boxcars for the Pacific Fruit Express and stayed there until 1930.
A couple of years earlier Barks had started selling cartoons to the Calgary Eye-Opener and that started a long term relationship with the Minnesota based humor magazine. He occasionally sold cartoons to other magazines, like Judge and Whiz-Bang. When his marriage ended in 1931 Barks moved to Minneapolis where he joined the editorial staff of the Eye-Opener. For 90 bucks a month he drew about half the magazine, in addition to all his other duties. This lasted until 1935, conditions at the magazine were deteriorating and Carl was growing dissatisfied.
He heard that there were jobs at the Disney Studio. He applied and was accepted. New studio artists are schooled and tested for the first month, many are weeded out. Barks made the cut. He had to take a pay cut, getting $20 a week. Barks started as an in-betweener. He would draw the illustrations for the animated cells that go between what are called the “key cells”. It takes 24 pictures to make up a second of animation once filmed. Someone has to draw the 24 pictures for that second and low paying apprentices would fill in the cells between the key cells. Not a very creative job and one that Barks wanted to move out of. He started submitting gags to the story department. There was extra money to be made. He was awarded $50 for submitting the automatic barber chair sequence that tortures Donald in the cartoon Modern Inventions. This gag was also his ticket to the story department. He worked on cartoons like Donald’s Nephews, Donald’s Cousin Gus, The Vanishing Private, Timber and many more. He married again, in 1938, to Clara Balkan.
He worked at the studio with a few different partners, Harry Reeves was first, followed by Chuck Close and finally with Jack Hannah. In an interview with Jack Hannah by Jim Korkis, for the Carl Barks Library, Hannah says: “For ‘Truant Officer Donald,’ Carl came up with the idea of having Donald find three roast chickens with the nephews’ hats on and think he killed Huey, Dewey, and Louie. That idea sparked my idea of having one of the nephews come down on a rope dressed as an angel. Harry Reeves hated that sequence. He thought it was too gruesome, and Carl and I really had to fight for it. Later, when the cartoon was previewed, it got a big laugh, so we were proven right.”
While Carl’s sinuses were acting up from the new studio air conditioning he was growing dissatisfied in other ways. The studio was gearing up to produce more war related material that Barks was not interested in working on. Perhaps a little bored he had taken the opportunity to work on the Pirate’s Gold story which was based on an un-produced cartoon called Morgan‘s Ghost. Mickey, Donald and Goofy were to star. Barks and Jack Hannah worked off of a typewritten script based on the storyboards.
Bark quit Disney in November of 1942. He moved to the desert near San Jacinto to raise chickens, and more importantly, he let Western Publishing know he was available for work. The popularity of the Pirate Gold story led to the Donald Duck ten pagers in Walt Disney Comics and Stories. That led to many more Donald Duck stories and finally the chickens were given up for full time work on stories for the comics.
After doing several 10 pagers Barks second full-length story was Donald Duck and the Mummy’s Ring. In the story Donald and the boys are on the way to the museum to see the ancient mummy exhibit when they are accosted by a hobo. He gives Donald a ring and that starts the whole adventure. Huey disappears in the museum and Donald and the boys give chase. The chase leads them to Egypt and a near-live burial for Huey. He’s rescued and for returning the mummy’s ring back to it’s rightful place the Ducks are rewarded, although Huey has lost his hat. In depicting Egypt, since Barks wasn’t very much of a traveling man, he would use the National Geographic and the Encyclopedia Britannica.
“I used to rob from the Geographic. It was my best reference. I still have all those old issues; I’ve been carrying them with me for years and years, moving from one place to another. Over half of what’s in my stories is visual information, and I didn’t have something like the Geographic for establishing what things looked like in other places and times, I wouldn’t have any means of making things realistic.”
“I was writing escapist entertainment. The plots that so often featured the “far away and long ago,” as a Boston fan expressed it, were staged in those areas and times because they took the reader out of his present world. Archaeology is interesting to practically everybody, and I was striving to get the atmosphere of ancient cultures and places into my stories, also the old lost treasure gimmick that is forever popular with kids.”
In the same issue as the Mummy’s Ring there were two more Carl Barks stories. In the first story Donald buys a horse and enters it in a race. He tries to win by cheating and that leads to his arrest, a nice trip to court and some heavy fines, while the honest nephews, plodding along on their swayback horse, reign victorious. The third story, Too Many Pets, is a gag filled romp. The boys, with too many pets already, get a monkey. Donald and the monkey start off getting along, then things go sour. Toss a plan stealin’ spy into the story blender and you have a fun read. It’s these type of stories that made me come back again and again for over 40 years, that and the funny pictures.
Barks divorced Clara Balkan in 1951. The following year he met Margaret Wynnfred Williams and they were married in 1954. Margaret’s nickname was Gare and she also was an artist. She painted landscapes and helped Carl with lettering and the inking of his stories. Their marriage lasted until her death in 1993.
After Barks retired in 1966 he continued to write Junior Woodchuck stories for the next six years. After that he started painting. His paintings were highly sought after and the prices sky-rocketed. Many were reproduced as limited edition prints. By the time Carl had retired he had produced nearly 500 stories and over 6000 pages of art. All of those stories have been reprinted over and over again for the last 60 years, all over the world. Starting in 1983 and continuing over the next seven years Another Rainbow would publish the Carl Barks Library. It’s a massive project, 7300 pages, 30 books, 10 slipcases, only Disney. Many of the quotes reprinted here are from the Barks interviews and articles scattered through the 30 volumes.
Barks created few major characters of his own but they evolved into some of the most wonderful ever. My favorite comic book character Uncle Scrooge, the wealthiest duck in the world, was the first and certainly greatest. Scrooge was followed by the ever lucky Gladstone Gander, marvelous inventor Gyro Gearloose, the beautiful evil sorceress Magica DeSpell, the bumbling Beagle Boys and another favorite of mine, the Junior Woodchucks.
“These characters were created to fill specific needs in certain stories. I hardly expected ever to use them again, but their special type did become useful. Uncle Scrooge especially kept developing new offshoots of character like a tree growing and unfolding leaves of thousand-dollar bills.”
His stories range from simple one page gag stories to long elaborate adventure stories filled with action and great humor. He wrote and drew his stories with little editorial control, delivering the finished pages to the Western Publishing California offices. There were few changes and many of the stories have been restored in the current reprints. Upon inspection these cuts are mild by today’s standards. Carl’s stories have a good moral sense. They have a sense of fair play. They’re good for kids of all ages.
“My firm resolve in the Duck stories was to keep off the shopworn cops-and-robbers kick that depraves so much of TV and other mediums these days. As a result, my gimmicks have usually dealt with human frailties like greed, pride, and arrogance. A kid long ago told me that he liked the stories because he never knew when he picked up the magazine whether Donald was going to be a hero, a villain, a windbag, or a heel.”
In one of my favorite 10 pagers from Walt Disney Comics and Stories 146 depicts that multifaceted Donald. Donald, Daisy and the boys are riding in Donald's Car. I really like Donald's car. He is still driving it today, over 50 years later. Must be a good car. They pass a sign for the town of Omelet. Donald hands out disguises for him and the boys. Donald explains to Daisy that he and the boys are not welcome in the town, but they need to go that way to get where they are headed. Donald proceeds to tell the curious Daisy the story of his attempt to run a chicken farm. It was located on top of one of those rolling hills, overlooking the town, which was named Pleasant Valley in those days. Things were going along pretty good, Donald had 10,000 chickens. Thinking he would speed things up growth wise Donald whips up a mess of vitamins and feeds that to the chickens. The chickens respond by dropping all their feathers. Thinking the loose feathers can be sold Don and the boys rake them into piles on the hill above the town. The town thinks it's snow already and begin tarring their roofs for the winter. While that is going on a big wind blows the feathers off the hill into the town. Donald is not welcome there anymore but he keeps on struggling. The chickens aren't laying eggs. The boys suggest selling the chickens for eating. Donald drives the ten thousand chickens right into the town thinking he can just load them up like cattle at the rail yard. He gets sued. Now he's so broke he needs the price of eggs to jump 60 cents, to a buck a dozen, to break even. He starts stockpiling eggs. Soon there are a million eggs and their weight is too great for the flimsy stockade. It bursts. The eggs rush down the hill flooding the town to the roof tops. The people burn down the town to make it easier to remove the eggs. Donald quips on the way out "But you would think those soreheads could have spelled it 'Omelette' or something fancy. After all, those were mighty expensive eggs." The end, no lesson learned, back to the action next story. It's a funny story and the art makes it all the more special.
Several of the Donald Duck stories from the early Four Colors are special. Frozen Gold (FC62), Terror in the River (FC108), Ghost of the Grotto (FC159), Sheriff of Bullet Valley (FC199), Lost in the Andes (FC223), Luck of the North (FC256), A Christmas For Shack town (FC367), The Golden Helmet (FC408) to name a few. The series would continue under the Four Color banner until 1952 when Donald would get his first series number. Number 26 has a Barks story called Trick or Treat, based on a Donald Duck cartoon, and it would be the last story in a Donald Duck comic for 4 years. Barks would produce occasional covers for that series and only a few more stories.
In Frozen Gold Donald and the boys are tired of the cold and shoveling snow. They trade their house for a plane, hoping to fly away to warmer climes. The mayor seeing the plane, all decked out with skis, asks Donald to embark on a mission of mercy. Unfortunately the troubled people in need of the penicillin are the Eskimos in Point Marrow, Alaska. In the middle of the night, while the town sleeps, suspicious characters hide something in the plane. Next morning Don and the boys take off for Alaska. Somewhere in Canada the plane ices up and the crew jettison everything to lighten the load. The something hidden in the plane is discovered and it turns out to be a small metal box inscribed with the words; “property of Klondike Joe.” He’s the “queer old prospector who lives on our street,” says Donald. “People say he has a million in gold buried in Alaska.” They plan to return the box to him when they arrived back home.
Point Marrow is a snow bound town, the buildings hidden by deep, deep snow, just the smoking chimneys peeking out. Still, they have a hotel, and that’s where the newly arrived heroes are put up. The bad guys, not finding the box in the plane, break into Don’s room to search it. Donald wakes up and they take him too. Rather than do Donald in right there, our bad guys plan to leave him in the wilderness to perish. It’s a hard life for our Donald. The metal box belonging to Klondike Joe turns out to have a map inside, leading the bad guys to the hidden million in gold. Abandoned, Donald walks for a while, gets snow blind and has an encounter with a bear. He is rescued by the nephews, just in the nick of time. While trekking back to safety, our heroes are captured by the bad guys and locked in a cabin. While the bad guys are gloating over their stolen gold the ducks escape. The boys go for the plane while Donald raps the cabin in wire. The nephews return with the plane and they tow the cabin, bad guys and gold enclosed, to the police. Don and the boys return home to a heroes welcome, where they present Klondike Joe with a stack of gold. He in return buys more penicillin for the poor Eskimos and asks our ducks to fly it there. They faint.
In 1952 Uncle Scrooge was also given his own title. The first three issues ran under the Four Color series, often used to launch titles, and issue 4 started the numbering that continues today. “Only A Poor Old Man” defines Scrooge’s relationship with his money in a fun and humorous way. Scrooge tells Donald, “I dive around in it like a porpoise, and burrow through it like a gopher, and I toss it up and let it hit me on the head.” While he’s telling this to Donald he is really diving, burrowing and tossing money in the air to rain down on him. He likes the money as a physical thing not for the wealth of it. Since Scrooge is a finely tuned spendthrift, he has many of the coins and dollars he ever made, and he expends much effort keeping it safe. Scrooge explains to Donald’s nephews why he likes the money; “Well, all this money means something to me! Every coin in here has a story! I made it on the seas, and in the mines, and in the cattle wars of the old frontier! I made it by being tougher than the toughies, and smarter than the smarties! And I made it square! You’d love your money, too, boys, if you got it the way I did – by thinking a little harder than the other guy – by jumping a little quicker.”
Unfortunately there are others that aren’t into making it square. The Beagle Boys buy the plot of land next door to Scrooge’s money bin and start digging a huge cellar. Their goal is to erect a building and tap into the money bin and drain off what they can. Seeing this development Scrooge and Donald rig a trap door in the money bin and secretly dump money into the Beagle Boys trucks. The truck are taking their dirt and moolah mixture to the old reservoir on Cedar Creek. Scrooge secretly buys the land the reservoir is on and the money is safely deposited there, ironically by the Beagle Boys. The area is fenced off, the land mined and booby traps are set up to keep people away. Unfortunately Scrooge can’t swim in his money if it’s all in the bottom of the lake, so he dredges a huge pile for that purpose. He’s spotted by the Beagle Boys and a huge fight over the cash ensues.
The Beagles try a series of tactics to bust the dam holding back the cash filled lake. The money rich fluid would then drain into the Beagle Boy land below the dam. First they try a giant magnifying glass to burn the dam, but they are thwarted by Scrooge’s cannon which shatters the lens. After that setback the Beagles try bomb laden fish. Failure. The Beagles try coin stealin’ cormorants but Scrooge can talk Cormorant. He sends that first wave away, as he does the second wave. Napalm bomb carrying cormorants are sent back to bomb the Beagles camp. The Beagles 4th plan is to seed the clouds and make it rain. They hope the lightning will hit the metal laden water and burst the dam. Scrooge is prepared with a lightning rod and wire to divert the strikes back to the Beagles. A shocking failure.
The fifth plan, these guys are still very determined failures, is ingenious. The Beagles scare Scrooge into believing termites are a potential threat to his dam by planting a fake story in the local newspaper. Donald buys some super termite destroying beetles from a conveniently located roadside stand. Unfortunately it’s manned by disguised Beagle Boys. The super termites eat the dam and the money spills out onto the Beagle land. Defeated Scrooge congratulates the Beagles and asks a favor. Can he have one last swim. Suspicious, the Beagles let him take the plunge. Impressed, the Beagles try cash diving, only to smash headfirst into the pile of hard coins, turning their skulls to mush. With the Beagles out for months Scrooge recovers his money and takes a celebratory swim.
After getting paid off for their help, at the usual 30 cents an hour, Donald and the boys leave. Donald tells Scrooge; “You may not know it, Uncle Scrooge, but your billions are a pain in the neck! You’re only a poor old man! Good-bye!” Scrooge looks sad for a moment and responds, but only to himself, “Bah! Kid talk! No man is poor who can do what he likes to do once in a while! And I like to dive around in my money like a porpoise! And burrow through it like a gopher! And toss it up and let it hit me on the head!” He’s happy once again.
It was Scrooge and his money that would be the catalyst for many of the stories Barks did for the Uncle Scrooge series. Some of my favorites are Back to the Klondike (FC456), The Horseradish story (FC495), The Menehunes Mystery (4), The Atlantis story (5), Tralla La (6), The Seven Cities of Cibola (7), The Great Steamboat Race (11), The Golden Fleecing (12), A Cold Bargain (17), The Flying Dutchman (25) and there are so many others. Most are still readily available, many reprinted every 5 to 10 years. Only A Poor Old Man has been reprinted in the USA over 10 times and over 70 around the world.
There isn’t much currently available material on Carl Barks. There was a book by Michael Barrier called Carl Barks and the Art of the Comic Book. It came out in 1981 and can still be found. Barrier’s website mentions he may be coming out with a new edition. It was a valuable resource for this article. There is a book of interviews called Carl Barks Conversations by Don Ault that is a very interesting and revealing read. There are many Carl Barks related websites, a Google search reveals over half a million hits, and a few are of great value. But the best thing, start reading the stories he left behind.
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