A Biography of Carl Barks, the Duckman
Carl Barks, the creator of Scrooge McDuck, was born on March 27, 1901, on a grain ranch near Merrill, Oregon, a small town on the Oregon-California border, just south of Klamath Falls. The young Carl was a solitary youngster, partly due to the isolated location of his home and his partial deafness.
At an early age, Barks began drawing. During his childhood when he wasn't in school, worked on the grain ranch for his parents. Thankfully, for us, he wanted more in life. In December, 1918, Barks left home to try his luck elsewhere. He became a logger, railroad repairman and printer among other odd jobs. But his artistic career began to take off when he got a job as cartoonist for a magazine called Calgary Eye-Opener. This was a humor magazine where Barks honed his craft drawing gag panels and other humerous illustrations. He was the magazine's most productive contributor.
A few years later, in 1935, he applied for and began working at the Disney Studio In Burbank , California. Shortly after he was contracted, Barks submitted a gag about a mechanized barber chair for a Donald Duck cartoon called Modern Inventions. This gag lead to a promotion to the story department where Barks co-worked on famous cartoons like Donald's Nephews (1938), Donald's Cousin Gus (1939), Timber (1941), The Vanishing Private (1942) and The Plastics Inventor (1944).
By the early 1940s, Barks was tired of working in collaboration. With the Disney Studio being converted into a war plant that produced films for the military, and health problems aggravated by the air conditioning of the new plant, Barks left the Burbank studio for the dry air of the California desert. The animated cartoon world's lost soon became the comic book world's gain.
Getting back to his roots, Carl Barks established a chicken farm, but he still needed to make a living. Barks wrote to Western Publishing Company which published the Disney comic-books. Western hired him immediately to draw Donald Duck stories. And Barks did just that for the next 25 years - and even into his retirement. Although he hoped to develop his own set of characters to populate his own independent comic-strip, Donald and tghe world he created around the duck, never got the chance to do so.
In the Donald Duck cartoons that were shown on the movie screens, Donald was a loafing, lazy hothead whose funniest quality was his hardly understandable quacking. To make him suitable for a comic book story, Barks gave him a more complex personality, well articulated speech and shaded emotions.
To give Donald a world to live in, Barks developed the city Duckburg. The city's a citizens like the mega-rich Uncle Scrooge McDuck, lucky nephew, Gladstone Gander and the peculiar inventor, Gyro Gearloose. Barks would eventually send Donald and his nephews along with Uncle Scrooge would to travel the world finding lost civilizations and forgotten treasures. Barks created marvelous artwork featuring glittering gold coins and sparkling gems as well as beatiful backgrounds of jungles and strange buildings.
According to Barks, his stories didn't have any hidden meanings. But the stories do feature an inciteful vision of the daily pursuits of the human world.
To quote Barks, "I always felt myself to be an unlucky person like Donald, who is a victim of so many circumstances. But there isn't a person in the United States who couldn't identify with him. He is everything, he is everybody; he makes the same mistakes that we all make. He is sometimes a villain, and he is often a real good guy and at all times he is just a blundering person like the average human being, and I think that is one of the reasons people like the duck."
What made his comic books stories so wonderful was his ability to delight children With fantastic adventures while intriguing adults through sly humor and real human emotions. His duck and animal characters reflect who we are and who we want to be.
And he was consistent in producing delightful top-quality material. His plots, his art, his dialogues, all echo deeply in the hu-being heart and intellect. "I polished and polished the scripts and drawings, until I had done the best I could in the time available", says Barks. And the deep dedication to his art shows in the 10-page comedies as well as the longer adventure stories he produced between 1942 and 1966.
On June 30, 1966, Barks retired from drawing comic books, which included about 6,371 comics pages from some 450 comic books, and began his career as a painter. The world he created, Duckburg and Uncle Scrooge, etc. was picked up by new artists as is often the case with successful comic book characters. Still, this wasn't the end of his career.
From 1972 on, he made about 150 oil paintings which mostly featured his Disney Ducks in scenes from his comic book stories. In 1994, while on a tour through Europe and he co-worked on the comic book story: Horsing Around with History (1994) and then later, the story - Somewhere in Nowhere (1997). Always active, he drew 70 drawings as part of the celebration for his 96th birthday.
Carl Barks passed from the world at about 12:15 AM PDT on Friday, August 25, 2000. I imagine now he is someplace where people swim in a vast money bins... and laughter fills the air.
About the Author: Scott Harker is the publisher of several websites including: Sherlock Holmes Pastiches, Harvest The Sun | Renewable Energy, Jokes - The Subject is Funny, DreamTime Music Shop, and On The Hook | Fishing Supplies.
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