THECHICKENSTORY

One of the most often globally published Carl Barks comic book stories is the one from WDCS146 'Omelet' (see more HERE). Not all that surprising as this particular story about the Duck family running a chicken farm to the ground has left readers all over the world with a lasting imprint due to its astonishing and compelling plotline. Barks himself was a fan of the story, and he frequently mentioned it as one of his favourites. A contributing reason was presumably that he, in the years before the story was published, had a firsthand background of the job managing a small scale chicken business from his home. So he had a certain insight in chicken farmer Donald's hardships. This is the story.

THE STORY

WDCS146 'Omelet' - 1952

Synopsis:
Donald and the nephews become chicken farmers on a hilltop but it is not that easy to earn a living - especially if one knows nothing about raising chicken...

Comments:
Barks saw this story as one of his funniest 10-pagers. It was the short story he recalled most frequently, in which Donald worked as a chicken farmer - as had Barks done some time before the story - and everything turned out wrong to such an extent that the unfortunate town, Pleasant Valley, in which the story takes place was renamed Omelet. Barks would shudder when remembering the huge number of eggs and chickens that had to be drawn, though.

THE REAL CHICKEN FARMER

From November 1942 Barks lived with his second wife Clara at an address on Ramona Drive in Hemet, San Jacinto Valley, California. It is a little known fact that he had actually bought the property a couple of years earlier. Here he started a new career as a chicken farmer, but it turned out to be of limited success.
The photos rendered above are the only ones in existence connected to the chicken business. In 1951, when Carl divorced Clara, he was so fed up with bad memories that he simply tore up all the photos taken at the place except for the ones above.
The first one, showing part of the chicken coops in 1943, comes from his personal files and has never been published before (apparently, Barks overlooked it at his 'destruction session'). The second photo is an 'official' press photo, in which the duckman - standing in front of his coops - was asked to hold an atypical bird in his hands...

COMMENTS

Here are a few comments from Barks taken from diverse sources:

In a 1942 letter Barks expressed the hope that 'my farm and chickens will support me while I build up an income from free-lancing cartooning'.

Excerpt from a 1972 interview: When I left the studio, I wanted to get out to a drier climate, because air conditioning was knocking the hell out of my sinuses. I was having hay fever and colds all the time. The only way I could think of to make a living was to have chickens or something around. You couldn't plant an orchard and expect it to make something right away, and I knew that chicken business should pay. During all those war years the country was going to need to have eggs. It seemed like a quick way of getting into something I could make a living in.
It didn't last very long, because I was doing so many comic books that I didn't have time to take care of the darn chickens. They made me a little profit before I phased them out, but I just found that I couldn't care of chickens and write and draw. Comics were the ones that paid me more money.

Excerpt from another 1972 interview: Choosing chickens was a matter of economics. I mean, I didn't care much for chicken farming. I wouldn't have gone into the dairy business, for instance, because that is really tying you down. You've got to milk cows at a certain hour of every day. With chickens you're pretty much tied down, too, but you needn't be there at a specific hour to get the eggs. You can leave them to lie there until the next day and gather them up. It doesn't cost very much to go into raising a few chickens, but going into any other type of farming is very expensive.

Excerpt from a 1993 interview: I left the Disney Studios in November 1942 because I was in poor health and had to leave. I had found that the hot sunshine of the desert areas east of Los Angeles cleared up my allergies. It was a reckless gamble to leave a 100 dollars a week for the fragile security of a chicken farm, but I hoped to get into comic book work on a freelance basis as a sideline occupation.

TITBITS

Fellow artist at Western Publishing Walt Kelly (see more HERE) made an in-joke reference to his colleague Carl Barks and his chicken farm in San Jacinto on the front cover for WDCS078 from 1947. The text on the side of the box reads BARK'S JIFFY CHICKEN DINNER.
Apart from the erroneous use of the apostrophe (Bark's instead of Barks') in the text, it is somewhat puzzling that Kelly should have made the in-joke years after Barks actually had abandoned his chicken farm, because at that time he had long abandoned the project. (It should be added, though, that a certain number of Kelly's covers were actually first published years after his resignation from Western Publishing in 1948 suggesting a fair amount of 'inertia').
But at the time Barks was a rising star who paid monthly visits to Western in order to personally deliver his stories (see more HERE), and it can be speculated that the art director, Carl von Buettner, simply decided to pay tribute to his star artist by 'digging' up an old cover from the discarded drawings archives. Only thing left to do was to alter the year stated on the radio sales sign...

Barks mistakenly gave two of the secondary characters 5 fingers on one of their hands instead of the usual 4 used in the funny animal universe.

D4813 Tomato Time

WDCS146 'Omelet'

D4813 Tomato Time from 1979 was made by the artist Victor Arriagada Rios (better known as Vicar), and follows the overall plot in Barks' story. Vicar changed his story so that tomatoes did the damage instead.

In several of his stories Barks would draw on his expertise from his early life (such as a lumberjack in WDCS267), but the job he held the longest was as a chicken farmer.

A certain portion of an egg is the eggshell, but in the story we are not presented to one single shell when all the eggs have cracked, although they should be floating on top of the gooey mass...

In this panel Barks forgot to add Donald's shadow, which is easily deduced from the convincing shadow from the small ladder right next to him. You can see more examples HERE.