This page is provided as a service to you if you have a question on Barks in particular or Disney in general. Send an email to cbarks@cbarks.dk and mark it The Letterbox. I will then do my best to give you a satisfactory answer. Please note that your question may be published on this page if your question has public interest. If you want to make a comment about the website, please use the Guestbook which has been setup for that purpose.

 

 

 

2008,
Feb.
19th		 I found the half-page “Huey, Dewey and Louie – The Rainbow’s End” and noticed a few things wrong in it:
1. Scrooge’s right hand seems not to be Barks' work.
2. Why the empty space above Scrooge?
3. Why are some of the coins falling?

I think the original hand was deleted and re-drawn, and Scrooge is doing and saying something.
I tried to reconstruct the possible original drawing. What do you think?


Carlo Gentina (Italy)

 I agree partially with you that something in this half-pager from DD71 seems to have been altered. Let me answer your points:
1. I do not agree entirely with you. To me, Scrooge's hand could have been drawn by Barks.
2. I do not see redundant space. On the contrary, I do not see that Scrooge has any reason to speak at all.
3. Now, this is a puzzler. Logically, one would expect something to cause the coins to fall and your graphic guess is a qualified and plausible one, although I doubt that Scrooge would by scouring the countryside with a shovel and a bucket...

So, all in all, there remains a possible mystery here. Can anyone spread a little light over it?

 

2008,
Jan.
17th		 I write to you about a very funny visual gag that is missing in all publications I know of except my old Chilean copy of "Back to long Ago!" (US16). Maybe it is known already but I don't know this. I'm sending you the scans and some text for you to help me find out if this is a true fact:

This brilliant visual gag (page 7, panel 6) where dotted lines show the suspicious looks between Scrooge and Donald does, surprisingly, not appear in the original publication nor in the Carl Barks Library. First I thought that the gag might have been created by the Chilean editor, but it makes no sense (they never did that sort of thing, they only made the balloons bigger from time to time for the translated dialogue).
Furthermore, if you look closely, the original US-issue shows some traces that the dotted lines were deleted for some reason, because parts of them are still there!
Now I believe that Carl Barks did in fact draw the dotted suspicion lines. Can you solve this puzzle?

Pedro Peirano (Chile)

 This is indeed a real puzzler! This is the first time I have ever seen this special panel with the two Ducks measuring each other suspiciously in this graphic way. There can be little doubt that this was done by Barks, because this is his type of gag and besides there are other panels in the story where dotted lines are fully visible.
As you correctly point out the 'original' US version has still several traces of deleted dotted lines (Barks fans: Grab your own copy and check!), and the deletion was certainly not done by Barks; why would he go back on a fine gag, and why would he not fill in the empty gap with background bricks, then?

I have been in contact with one of the world's finest experts of Barks' work, and he was as bewildered as I am. He would try to contact his network and hear if anybody would have an explanation, but he asked me not to set my hopes too high.

So, Barks fans, is there anyone among you who knows the story behind this highly mysterious panel???

 

2004,
Aug.
8th		 I read your site and have looked in quite a few places on the Internet, but I simply cannot come up with a definitive answer to my very simple question: What happened to Carl Barks' original comic pages?

On one site I read that after he sent them to the publisher, they made plates of them and then were thrown away. But I see pictures in the Carl Barks Library of Carl standing next to original pages of his comics sometime in the 1970s.
So what's the story with this? Do you have any idea?

Mike Matei (New Jersey, USA)

 The answer to your question is saddening to all Barks fans. In 1975 Carl Barks was asked the same question, and this is part of his response:
The original artwork was destroyed at the publishing house. They simply couldn't store all the drawings that came in for all their 15 or 20 comic books and none of the editors, none of the artists felt that the stuff was ever going to be worth anything anyway, so all these thousands of pages of drawings were taken out to the incinerator and burned.
I happen to have a few pages that I have been selling lately. They are very rare, I have been told, and I recently learned why. The publishing company usually burned all the art after they had made their engraving plates. A few pages got carried out by employees or somebody over the years...
...I got the original art from 5 Uncle Scrooge comics and a ten-page WDC Donald for a retirement present from the Western editor in 1966. He saved the pages from the burner because he thought I might like them for souvenirs.

So, the bulk of Barks' - as well as other artists - artwork was burned. But, luckily, a number of pages have survived. This website's editor has a complete listing of them all (single pages, stories, covers), and what happened to them. Some of the material can be found HERE.

The artwork from 1966 that Barks mentioned was given to him by Editor Craig Chase at Western Publishing. The stories are U$59-63 and WDCS308. Barks also received a few gag pages.

 

2003,
Dec.
7th		 Do you know if Carl Barks ever expressed in detail his opinions on the TV series Ducktales? He obviously wrote most of the ideas for that show. Did he get royalties? Did he ever visit the Disney animation studios while Ducktales was being produced? I am left to wonder what Barks thought of all the changed history that went on with Ducktales. I am also left thinking that he must have got really aggravated when the Disney writers chopped up his storys to fit a half hour kids show.

What was the deal with Huey, Dewey and Louie and the shirt colors? Take Dubious Doings at Dismal Downs and then compare it to Lavender and Old Lace for example. I always thought that the official colors for the lads were Red=Huey, Blue=Dewey, and Green=Louie. But apparently not. I guess Barks just put them in whatever color shirt he
saw fit at the time. Even more complicated is the fact that their shirts were all originally black in the comics.

Mike Matei (New Jersey, USA)

 First of all it is very important to bear in mind that none of the characters Barks drew - and invented - were owned by him. They all belong to Disney's. This also means that Barks did not receive any kind of royalty for Ducktales although some of the storylines come from 'his' comics.
Barks did once comment on Ducktales and as the polite man he was he just said that he liked them, but that they were cramming too many ideas into too short a timespan. No doubt that Barks did not like Ducktales very much which is also emphasized by the fact that he never owned a television set until he was well up in his seventies. He never got used to the staggering fast pace of the cartoons and the never-ending rapid cuts.
After his retirement in 1966, Barks went once or twice a year to Disney's just to have a look around, but he was not involved in any of the cartoons (for example Scrooge McDuck and Money from 1967). However, in 1955 he was approached by the animation studio to write a script for a Scrooge animated short. In reply, Barks wrote a full manuscript in just a few days. Upon receipt Disney's suddenly decided to shelve it. The official explanation was that they would rather concentrate on the new media - television - instead. Sadly, the script has since been lost although the synopsis still exists.

In the comics the nephews' shirts are usually black but when Barks took up painting he began to 'dress' the boys in differently coloured shirts. This also happened in the pastels. The decision for doing so is really quite natural, because a lot of black colours would not look that appealing on a canvas. Besides, Barks experimented intensely with his colouring in the paintings. Take for instance the ducks themselves: They are not pure white as in the comic books.
Up until the creation of Ducktales, neither Disney nor Barks distinguished any differences in the three nephews in any way. They all had the same personality. Barks drew all the comics in black and white. Different colourists at Western would add the colours and they were never careful about what they were doing. So Huey might have a blue hat on the first page and a red hat on the second.
When Ducktales was created, the studio decided to give the three nephews distinctive colours so Huey wears red, Dewey is in blue and Louie is in green.
In his paintings Barks liked to experiment with different, bright colours, and he had nothing against going against convention. One of the most steadfast surely is Donald's blue cap in the comics. Even that one was toyed with by Barks in the paintings. You will see it in white several times and even in fluorescent green in Leaving Their Cares Behind!!!

 

2002,
Oct.
5th		 Hi, Peter.

Who put colour on the stories? First I thought that it was done by Garé, but someone reckons it to be the work of Western.

Best regards from Thomas Tomcat
(Denmark)

 Carl Barks wrote and drew all his stories alone but in the years between 1952 and 1966 his third wife Margaret (called Garé) stepped in to assist him by drawing the text in the bubbles and filling the large black spots with ink. Those were the two jobs that Barks detested himself.
But neither of them have ever had anything to do with the colouring. Western was responsible for that part of the process.

At the start of his career Barks often gave precise instructions as to which colours should be used in special circumstances but Western just did what they pleased. So Barks gave up. If I asked for a yellow desert, you could be sure it turned out red, he once sighed during an interview.

 

2001, Nov 13th Hi, Peter! I am pleased to visit your Disney/Barks pages. It's really a thrill...
About a year ago I got hold of two Walt Disney autographs. I bought them from an 80-year old collector who had been collecting all his life and his archives contain Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, Neil Armstrong, the Apollo team, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Laurel and Hardy and so on.
I managed to buy two autographed photos of Disney from him. One is a black and white from 1951 complete with an original envelope sent from Burbank, California, and Disney has signed in blue ink.
The other one from 1961 is in colour and he has signed with a crayon.
Are these signed photos worth anything?

Best regards
Sřren Hansen
(Denmark)

 First of all you should know that a lot of forgeries are in circulation but your story sounds fine. I do not know very much about autographs so I contacted USA's leading specialist on Disney-autographs, Phil Sears, who is working for Sotheby's in New York City and Christie's in London. He says that your 1951-photo might have a value of app. 12,500 dollars, i.e. you should receive 50-60% of that amount at a dealer's. Sale through auctions might of course be even higher. All this will naturally be subject to an authentication of the autograph.
The 1961-photo will have a lower value.

I offer my congratulations for your good fortune and I have sent you the full wording of the letter from Phil Sears.

Undoubtedly a lot of people think that Walt Disney's signature is identical to the one seen in all his comics but this is not the case.
Apart from the fact that he alternated between Walt Disney, Walter Disney and Walter E. Disney when signing, his signature looks as shown below in a cut-out actually taken from the movie contract for the second Flubber movie.


m

 
http://www.cbarks.dk/THELETTERBOX.htm   Date 2004-08-08