Carl Barks
Carl Barks (March 27, 1901 – August 25, 2000) was an American cartoonist, author, and painter. He is best known for his work in Disney comic books, as the writer and artist of the first Donald Duck stories and as the creator of Scrooge McDuck. He worked anonymously until late in his career; fans dubbed him The Duck Man and The Good Duck Artist. In 1987, Barks was one of the three inaugural inductees of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.[2]
"Duck Man" redirects here. For the cartoon, see Duckman.Carl Barks
March 27, 1901[1]
Near Merrill, Oregon, U.S.
August 25, 2000 (aged 99)
Grants Pass, Oregon, U.S.
Scrooge McDuck, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, Daisy Duck, Gyro Gearloose, Gladstone Gander, The Junior Woodchucks, Beagle Boys, Flintheart Glomgold, Magica De Spell, Neighbor J. Jones, Glittering Goldie, Cornelius Coot, John D. Rockerduck
Oil paintings of his duck characters
2
Barks worked for the Disney Studio and Western Publishing where he created Duckburg and many of its inhabitants, such as Scrooge McDuck (1947), Gladstone Gander (1948), the Beagle Boys (1951), The Junior Woodchucks (1951), Gyro Gearloose (1952), Cornelius Coot (1952), Flintheart Glomgold (1956), John D. Rockerduck (1961) and Magica De Spell (1961).
He has been named by animation historian Leonard Maltin as "the most popular and widely read artist-writer in the world".[3] Will Eisner called him "the Hans Christian Andersen of comic books."[4] Beginning especially in the 1980s, Barks' artistic contributions would be a primary source for animated adaptations such as DuckTales and its 2017 remake.
Influence[edit]
"(A)n asteroid was named after the Duck Man in 1983 --- 2730 Barks, a carbonaceous C-type asteroid with a diameter of between 10 and 16 kilometers, an ordital period of six years and four months, and a rotation period of just over six hours."[17] In a 1983 interview, Barks says that "Island in the Sky," a story about the Ducks traveling to the asteroid belt to find a place Uncle Scrooge can store his money, was his favorite story.[18]
Barks' Donald Duck stories were rated #7 on The Comics Journal list of 100 top comics; his Uncle Scrooge stories were rated #20.
Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have acknowledged that the rolling-boulder booby trap in the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark was inspired by the 1954 Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge adventure "The Seven Cities of Cibola" (Uncle Scrooge #7). Lucas and Spielberg have also said that some of Barks' stories about space travel and the depiction of aliens had an influence on them.[19] Lucas wrote the foreword to the 1982 Uncle Scrooge McDuck: His Life and Times. In it he calls Barks' stories "cinematic" and "a priceless part of our literary heritage".
The Walt Disney Treasures DVD set Chronological Donald, Volume 2 includes a salute to Barks.
In Almere, Netherlands, a street was named after him: Carl Barksweg. The same neighborhood also includes a Donald Ducklaan and a Goofystraat.
Japanese animator and cartoonist Osamu Tezuka, who created manga such as Astro Boy and Black Jack, was a fan of Barks' work. New Treasure Island, one of Tezuka's first works, was partly influenced by "Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold".[20]
A 1949 Donald Duck ten-pager features Donald raising a yacht from the ocean floor by filling it with ping pong balls. In December 1965 Karl Krøyer, a Dane, lifted the sunken freight vessel Al Kuwait in the Kuwait Harbor by filling the hull with 27 million tiny inflatable balls of polystyrene.[21] Krøyer denies having been inspired by this Barks story. Some sources claim Krøyer was denied a Dutch patent registration (application number NL 6514306) for his invention on the grounds that the Barks story was a prior publication of the invention.[22][23] Krøyer later successfully raised another ship off Greenland using the same method, and several other sunken vessels worldwide have since been raised by modified versions of this concept. The television show MythBusters also tested this method and was able to raise a small boat.
Don Rosa, one of the most popular living Disney artists, and possibly the one who has been most keen on connecting the various stories into a coherent universe and chronology, considers (with few exceptions) all Barks' duck stories as canon, and all others as apocryphal. Rosa has said that a number of novelists and movie-makers cite Carl Barks as their 'major influence and inspiration'.[24]
When the news of Barks' passing was hardly covered by the press in America, "in Europe the sad news was flashed instantly across the airwaves and every newspaper — they realized the world had lost one of the most beloved, influential and well-known creators in international culture."[21]
In 2010 Oregon Cartoon Institute produced a video about the influence of Carl Barks and Basil Wolverton on Robert Crumb.[25]
The video game Donald Duck: Goin' Quackers is dedicated to the memory of Carl Barks.
Carl Barks drew an early Andy Panda comic book story published in New Funnies #76, 1943. It is one of his few stories to feature humans interacting with talking animal characters (another is Dangerous Disguise, Four Color #308, 1951[26]). See List of Fictional Pandas.
The life story of Carl Barks, largely drawing upon his relationship with Disney and the phonetic similarity of his name to Karl Marx, serves as a loose inspiration to one of the subplots in The Last Song of Manuel Sendero by Ariel Dorfman.
The first image ever to be displayed on an Apple Macintosh was a scan of Carl Barks' Scrooge McDuck.[27]
Films where Barks served as storyman or story director include:[28]
