THEROYALTIES

Royalties can be considered the financial fringe benefits an artist may obtain in the time after he has completed a certain artwork. Normally an artist sells his product once and for all, but in some cases there might be special conditions attached to the artwork. When Carl Barks made his Disney duck paintings he was able to negotiate certain royalties for some of them, primarily the ones he made for later lithograph and serigraph purposes. These paintings were more or less 'made to order' by businessmen who were willing to pay Barks for the unique opportunity of publishing his paintings for more people. The sub-pages will present you to a few examples of book and painting transactions chosen from Barks' private ledgers. They will allow you to see what he actually earned without 'lifting a finger', as it were, and it is interesting to discover that he in some cases earned more in royalties than he did from his original stories and paintings. Royalties can most often be considered a nice extra income with little effort...

NOTICE
It is important to understand the differences between salaries, fees, commissions, and royalties:

All of his comic book life Barks earned his salaries by delivering stories for The Walt Disney Company via his publisher Western, but when this was done he had no further involvement with - not to mention any claim to - the stories. He simply sold them and that was it.
This is also true for most of the many editions of books containing his stories (for which he received fees for consultation or forewords) or paintings as well as 'his' stories used in the television series Ducktales. And when Barks began to paint his hundreds of non-Disney paintings, the ones he sold were out of his financial life forever as soon as they were purchased. But he was paid steady and handsome signing fees in connection with the thousands of lithographs he signed.
In many cases Barks had his, especially, non-Disney paintings in commission at art galleries and private collectors, and when they were sold he received a cut, which had been negotiated in beforehand.

None of these financial options and transactions are part of this page.