When he died, Carl Barks left behind a number of unfinished projects. These had accumulated over a long working life. Barks kept a whole cabinet of unused ideas and gags on file. These began in the late 1930s when he was employed at the Disney Studios, and continued during his active comic book period. He would, from time to time, look into these for ideas though he never actually used any. In the last part of his life, when Barks was an avid painter, he started a number of paintings which were never finished, usually because of lack of time.
Many of Barks' unfinished projects have since his death been stored in vaults at the Bank of America, but they are scheduled to be brought out in 2005, when they will be auctioned away.

THE CARTOONS
During his time at the Disney Studio Barks was involved in a number of animated shorts, some of which, where he was the story director, were released. However, about a dozen shorts - in which Barks was the driving force - never got through the planning stage. You can see a listing of them HERE. One of the projects was Northwest Mounted for which Barks singlehandedly made almost 400 storyboard sketches in 1936. The story, starring Mickey Mouse, is quite straightforward: Black Pete kidnaps Minnie in order to learn the whereabouts of her gold mine, and Mickey saves his girlfriend.
Minnie is threatened...	...Mickey comes to the rescue...
...Black Pete is captured...	...all ends well...

THE FRONT COVERS
Barks produced a colossal number of front cover sketches, many more than were actually published. Some he discarded himself and some were sent to the publisher who rejected them. In those days it was quite normal for Barks to post a handful of gag sketches to the publisher at a time, and then he would perhaps choose one or two for publication. The rest were scrapped! No telling how many perfectly good ideas and sketches went up in smoke in the publisher's incinerator. Here you are presented with four sketches that Barks never finished. Three of them were later inked by other artists and then published, but the 1965-sketch - which was one of several made for U$60 The Phantom of Notre Duck - was never published.
1960	1962
1965	197?

THE STORY

Barks started sketching this Gyro Gearloose 8-pager for publishing in 1959. But after three pages he abandoned the project because he suddenly realized that it would involve too much work. The reason being that the story - which was inspired by the well-known German fairy tale of the rat extinguisher from Hamelin - called for lots of rats in the panels. Barks later forgot the story, but in CBL6 from 1990 it was published anyway. It was finished by Keno Don Rosa who invented a suitable ending. In Barks' opening sequence, shown below, Rosa even spotted and corrected a slip by the master; Gyro would not call the old miser Uncle Scrooge. He would say Mr. McDuck! This was corrected in the published version.

The Pied Piper of Duckburg

THE PAINTING

As indicated in the introduction Barks left a number of unfinished paintings behind. One of them, #8-96 Queen of Sheba (showing the queen's famous visit to King Solomon of Jerusalem) was mistakenly published in the book Animal Quackers in 1996. Barks tried to delete the painting from the book but did not succeed. He did this because the painting was not finished. If you look closely you can see the following items that still need attention: the queen's headgear, the gemstones, and some of the servants.

#8-96 Queen of Sheba