by Carl Barks
REVIEW BY KIM THOMPSON:
(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)
A Disney Studios writer and gag-man (he worked on a number of Donald Duck shorts from the mid-1930s on, as well as the feature file Bambi), Carl Barks was assigned his first comics story in 1942: a shelved Mickey Mouse animated feature. In collaboration with his studio mate Jack Hannah, he converted it into a 64-page Donald Duck comic, which Western Publishing released under its Dell Comics imprint (Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold, Four Color #9). Barks, who had worked as a gag cartoonist and illustrator before joining the studio, decided he found comic-book work more hospitable than the rigours of the increasingly regimented studio, quit his salaried job and approached Western about more comics work. He was subsequently anointed Western's Duck chronicler - both in the continuing Four Color "solo" series (longer, more adventure-oriented yarns that usually filled the issues) and in Walt Disney's Comics & Stories.
WDC&S provided Barks' most regular berth: Between 1943 and 1965 he drew and (usually, but not always) wrote over 250 ten pagers. These were originally designed as paper equivalents of the Donald Duck cinematic shorts: strings of slapstick gags in which Donald was portrayed as an ill-tempered, farcical loser battling either his nephews or other malign adversaries - people, animals, or objects. But as Barks gained confidence in his new medium, he began to work up more subtle, nuanced characterisations for his protagonists.
REVIEW BY ART SPIEGELMAN:
I loved Carl Barks' work since those days of long-lost innocence when I assumed the duck stories were all written and drawn by Walt Disney himself. As far as I was concerned, they were Walt's best work, done on lunch-breaks, when he wasn't making animated cartoons or hosting his weekly TV show. Before that I just believed the ducks were somehow real, and now, as an adult I've reverted to my first opinion: the ducks ARE real. Not the way they look, of course, but they're emotionally real, realer than most people I've met.
FURTHER READING:
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