Carl Barks
FameRank: 4

"Carl Barks" was an American cartoonist, author, and painter. He is best known for his comics about Donald Duck 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 List of Eisner Award winners#The Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame/Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.

Barks worked for the The Walt Disney Company/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), Duck family (Disney)#Cornelius Coot/Cornelius Coot (1952), Flintheart Glomgold (1956), John D. Rockerduck (1961) and Magica De Spell (1961). Cartoonist Will Eisner called him "the Hans Christian Andersen of comic books."

More Carl Barks on Wikipedia.

The thing that I consider most important about my work is this: I told it like it is. I told my readers that the bad guys have a little of good in them, and the good guys have a lot of bad in them, and that you can't depend on anything much; nothing is always going to turn out roses.

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I enjoyed doing the gag covers better than the story ones because they were usually simpler. A cover based on an incident in the plot took a great deal of staging to tell a little story that was still part of the book. And it had to make sense on its own.

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I've always looked upon the Ducks as caricature human beings. Perhaps I've been years writing in that middle world that J.R.R. Tolkien describes, and never knew it.

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I read some of my stories recently and thought, 'How in the hell did I get away with that?' I had some really raw cynicism in some of them.

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Before I started drawing a comic, I would read my script for it ten or twenty times.

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Ideas generally come in a very complicated form, and you've got to strip them down to make them usable. Boil a gag down to its simplest form, and it is readily discernible to anybody who sees it.

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There was no difference between my characters and the life my readers were going to have to face.

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I was never a Boy Scout, but oh, I wanted to be one when I was a kid about ten or eleven years old. But there wasn't anyplace where I could ever join the Boy Scouts.

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