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JOSEPH 'JOE' LITTLE (FC0238 Voodoo Hoodoo)
The two main triggers for Barks' story was the
Bela Lugosi film from 1932 called White Zombie and a thrilling 1942
painting by Little titled I
Met a Zombie! showing a
ferocious looking, human-like zombie with
torn clothes. Barks' version ended up being rather cuddly as he had no
intention of imitating the horrid monsters from the EC comics.
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HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (U$18 Land of the Pygmy Indians)
In the 1950s the public's attitude towards
preservation of the environment started to change. There was talk
about pollution of air and water. Barks had strong opinions about
the way people mistreated their surroundings and he longed for a
perfect world with clean air and clean water.
I came up with having the pygmies talk in the
language of Longfellow's Song
of Hiawatha.
About the 8th grade, I had to read and recite it in school. I
thought it was a very tiresome way of telling a story back then, but
the meter lends itself very well to the conversations of the pygmies
when they talk about what they're going to do. It gives the story a
special flavor. The dialogue took longer to write than normal - it
practically had to be timed with a metronome. I'd come up with the
gist of what they wanted to say, then try to figure out a way to
express it in Longfellow's meter.
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FREDERICK MARRYAT
(U$25 The Flying Dutchman)
Throughout time many authors have written about the so-called Flying
Dutchman, the ship that was cursed to sail the high seas forever because
its Dutch captain had made a blasphemous remark. One of the most
read was the British author and naval captain Marryat, who wrote The
Phantom Ship.
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WINSOR McCAY
(Little Nemo)
I most clearly remember Winsor McCay's
Little Nemo - wonderful drawings!
Winsor McCay was certainly one of the influences
in my life, because Little Nemo was one of the
first comic strips I can remember. It used to be
published in the San Francisco Examiner, which we
got on our farm. Those characters had a great
influence on me. I wasn't so much an admirer of
the drawings as I was of the story construction.
And my favorite of the characters was old Doctor
Pill, because he seemed to be a good guy. He was
protective, and trying to do the best he could,
while the clown-like guy with the cigar was just
fouling things up and making trouble and leading
the kids astray. |
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GEORGE McMANUS (Bringing
Up Father)
Barks read comics sporadically most of his life.
One that he kept coming back to was Bringing Up Father.
The newspaper comic strips I liked as a teenager were mostly
from the San Francisco papers.
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JOSEPH MOHR (FineArt1981
Silent Night)
The origin of the Christmas carol we know as
Silent Night was a poem named
Stille Nacht
written by the Austrian priest Joseph Mohr. He
originally intended the poem to be set to music for
guitar, but his friend, Franz Xavier Gruber, composed the
music for church organ instead. Silent Night has
since become the most famous Christmas carol of all time!
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FREDERICK
BURR OPPER (Happy Hooligan)
I never liked Happy Hooligan as a
character. I liked some of the characters that he
was in contact with much better. Happy Hooligan
seemed to me to be a person who didn't do
anything good in the world. He just blundered
around. Generally I would have had sympathy for
the straight guy, not for the supposed clown who
was the main character of the strip.
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ALEXANDER 'ALEX' GILLESPIE RAYMOND (Flash Gordon)
There was a man who could combine
craftsmanship with emotions and all the gimmicks
that went into a good adventure strip. He was a
master.
I could just sit there and look at the drawings
and be inspired. Of course, I couldn't use those
drawings very much in doing the duck stories
later on, except for the background or the
atmosphere of the places the ducks had to go.
That inspired me to do some nice drawings in
there, and it helped to put those duck stories
over and make them popular. Because they appeared
to go to real places. |
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JOHN RUSKIN (U$22 The Golden River)
The British philosopher and author John Ruskin
wrote The King of The Golden River, a fairy tale set in the land of
Stiria which tells of the good-hearted Gluck and his mean older
brothers, Schwartz and Hans, who seek gold and get their just
rewards! Barks liked the concept and transformed it to his duck
universe.
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ELZIE
CRISLER SEGAR
(Thimble Theater)
I loved the stories, but I didn't care
much for the drawings. The stories were very
funny. It was the simplicity of
it. He didn't have to put in a thousand lines to
show what his characters were doing; he just kept
them very simple and wide open so that you could
know what every character was doing and what he
was going to do. What I was getting out of Segar
was a method of putting into my stories the way
he put action and anticipation and all those
things into his stories. |
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ROBERT WILLIAM SERVICE (U$49 The Loony Lunar Gold Rush)
The great brawl scene was inspired by Service's poem The Shooting
of Dan McGrew. |
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SIDNEY SMITH (Old Doc Yak)
Old Doc Yak was a humourous newspaper strip that ran from 1911
to 1917, when Smith started his The Gumps strip that
Barks also enjoyed. He even modelled Uncle Scrooge partly after
Smith's character, Uncle Bim, in the Gumps.
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