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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.