THEMODELSTUDIES

All of his life Carl Barks had a secret dream of making a comic book series featuring real people in real environments. In 1975 he said: I like to draw humans! I like to draw faces and figures. I would have liked to have done that in the beginning. I would have loved to have worked on human characters. I could have drawn a thousand different faces. Had every expression related directly to what was being said. This page concentrates on Barks' renderings of human faces outside his duck universe.

Barks' wish never came through for various reasons. The most decisive one was undoubtedly that he had to earn a living, and experimenting with a series of his own would have jeopardized both his and his wives' lives, where he had a steady income from the Disney ducks. Also, when you browse the examples on this page you will probably notice a common characteristic; all the faces appear stiff and with little expression rendering them fairly lifeless to look at. Their looks are miles away from the explicit plasticity and expressive warmth that are found in the characters from his duck stories, and this is probably another contributing reason why he never really decided to change his artistic life so drastically. I might have been able to invent a set of characters, human characters, but I didn't have the time to work it out, and so I stayed in the old duck rut and look what happened!
Yes, look what happened! If Barks had abandoned his brilliant duck work, he would probably never have become a famous artist, and we would certainly not have been enriched the way we were...

From the late 1930s Barks dabbled with more or less concrete ideas of inventing his own series of human characters, and especially studies of faces found their way to his drawing paper. At the time he was an employee at the Disney Studios, and he began to draw countless faces when he was at work and in his spare time. The special sheet of paper - with punchmarks for use in the cartoon work - seen to the left bears witness to the fact that Barks occasionally 'moonlighted' in between his tasks at the studio, but most of his model studies were done at home.

Barks also made several attempts of drawing realistic people in real environments (a few can be seen HERE), but they lack expression and personality.