YOUTH

It was a big ranch. My folks were busy, they had no time for kids!

My brother and I weren't close as kids. He and I are not alike in any way except our voice patterns.

Oh God, what a life. A grain ranch way out there. We were half a mile from the nearest other rancher, an old bachelor, and we had nothing in common with him. The schoolhouse was around a mile away, we walked to school. There'd be a bunch of kids, maybe eight or ten, going to that little one-room schoolhouse. They'd come from a mile away. On that side, two miles away; just came in across the fields and through the sagebrush to that little school, from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, and then they'd straggle off for home.

There were never enough kids to form a baseball team. We'd just play a form of catch and bat. I wasn't interested in athletics, but then that's all there was to do. You'd play baseball, or you'd run footraces, play tag, and hide-and-go-seek and such things as best as you could with that little group of kids. When four o'clock came, back you'd go to the old lonely ranch, nobody to talk to but the cows and the horses and the pigs.

I'd pick a piece of charcoal out of the stove and draw on the walls of the house. Got my butt spanked. Pencils and paper were quite rare, so very little of my stuff was ever permanently done.

CALGARY EYEOPENER

I always felt that cartooning would be an easier job than any of the things that I had worked at.

The job enabled me to move from laborer to starving artist.

I'd look at those Mickey Mouse newspaper strips and think: I'm already drawing like that!

DISNEY

Disney liked to feel that everyone was an extension of his own intellect. He was a sort of dreamer who came up with these quick and brilliant ideas, and who had the aggressiveness to carry them out. Some of the things he did looked so stupid at first sight, that I guess people got the idea he wasn't very damned intelligent for even thinking of such kooky ideas. Like Disneyland. Now, I swore the guy was nuts there, but he was nearly always right.

I felt that it was Disney's genius and aggressiveness that provided jobs for guys like me - the mice men of the world. Of course, I was a duck man, not a mouse man, but I was a mouse by personality. I didn't have the aggressiveness to ever produce a strip of my own. Disney gave me a stage on which to perform my little vaudeville act, and I did all right with it.

I would never have had that opportunity in any other circumstances. He gave me that break, and a great many other artists, too, who would have been waiters and truck drivers and trash picker-uppers. Disney's aggressiveness, and the fact that he was such a genius and an unbelievable optimist got all those jobs for thousands of artists.

He wasn't living like Norton Simon (a famous industrialist and philanthropist in California at the time - Editor's remark) and some of those other millionaires. He was a millionaire for just a few moments until he could find some place to dump it all and get into debt again. I don't think the guy was ever comfortable unless he had the bankers pounding on his door.

When I worked at Disney's, surrounded by all those other hacks, I just felt like I was in prison. I was always so happy when evening came and I could go home and work on some project that involved me in my own thing. I was not a great socializer, not to the extent that the other guys were, although I was in a great many bull sessions with Jack Hannah and Chuck Couch and Harry Reeves.

We would sit and talk for hours instead of earning our wages. But I've always found it hard to keep up an interest in small talk, and that's what most of it was, little things that didn't have any substance to them. I'd quickly get bored with that and go back into my corner and bend over my drawing board and start working on something that interested me.

I would have had the patience and tolerance to stay with the job and keep on plugging away year after year, but the constant thing of going into that air conditioning every day and then battling through with my nose stopped up and my breathing hard... Besides the war was coming! I would have been locked into that place for the duration of the war. I shut the door one Friday night and never came back.

COMICS

I never thought of them as ducks. I always thought of them as people.

I didn't expect any great, rosy things out of life for my characters, and it's a good way to be, I think. If you get too darned optimistic, your stuff gets sweet like Pollyanna.

I developed Uncle Scrooge for the same reason that I developed Gladstone Gander, the Beagle Boys, etc. It was just to broaden out the number of characters that I could use. Each one served a useful purpose in giving Donald something more to do and in taking the load off Donald and the nephews.

Crazy names just popped into my head any time, day or night. Whenever I thought something was real funny I'd write it down. Maybe I would use it right away, or later on. I had quite a list of crazy names.

I think one of the duck's philosophies, as near as I could ever figure it out, was that nothing was ever so damned important that you should worry about it a hell of a lot.

It wasn't that I had the characters' instincts myself, but I could analyze them and see how they could have that instinct. I don't know where it came from, but I seemed to know when I was writing the duck stuff, about Gladstone, or any of them, how they would react when they came to a situation. I didn't do much thinking about it. Well, I sympathized with them, I could see their point of view. I found that if you'll be tolerant of other people and their ideas, you'll find out later on that they weren't so deadly serious after all.

Isolation? It was an isolation that I chose. I preferred it that way. I was never interested in people around me much, or in myself. Was never way out there trying to change the whole structure of the universe. I guess that's why, when I did write the duck stories, I could get completely lost, could lose all contact of where I was and just go ahead and write these things and really live them. It was a place I could escape to.

I didn't ever feel I wanted to travel a lot, or that I wanted to be rich or anything. Just as long as I was comfortable, I was all right. That's how I could find so much fun with old Uncle Scrooge. He was just a fictional character that loved all that kind of stuff. It wouldn't have appealed to me at all.

You notice that I don't use eyeglasses often. When I first started Scrooge, he had the old silver-rimmed glasses with the bows that went back over the ears. I realized that if I was going to carry on using him a lot, I would have to change his glasses, because the bows would always have to be drawn across the whites of his eyes. That would make him look as though his eyelids were half-closed. It was a technical thing, so I just put on those pince-nez glasses that automatically stay on.

The writing of humor is a craft. Some people are born with humor, like Irish wit, that just bubbles out of them spontaneously. I would say that if I had any talent, it was in being able to recognize something that was funny, whether I wrote it or someone else wrote it. And when I was writing my own humor, I would keep polishing it until I found something I could recognize as funny, and put it down on paper in final form. I worked on those little plots. Darned hard!

PAINTINGS

I was inspired to do the paintings by the persistence of these guys who wanted to have them of subjects that they visualized, composite pictures from the stories. Most of them were impossibly complex, so I just compromised on something that was fairly simple but still kept to the gist of the story. Their memory of particular stories, or of some incident within a story, had built up a picture in their head of some derring-do adventure that the ducks might have. I didn't find many such occasions in the stories that I felt lent themselves to a painting, because a painting that's going to hang on somebody's wall can't be all violent action; you'd get very tired of looking at it. It has to be a static moment in some adventure, but one that still implies that they came from here, and they're going to go there; that is just a moment, a pause between these big actions.

I had decided on oils when I began having enough time to paint seriously. I had tried a little landscapes. Oh, I was successful with those landscapes; I sold some of them for 18 dollars - really forging ahead...

It all looked so easy I just started dabbling at it. Oh, I had moderate success in what I got down. I could draw, but handling the watercolors was a little clumsy. Besides, I liked it too much. It interfered with my work on those ducks. I realized that I was taking too much time from my comic books, so I put the watercolors aside and kept on plugging in the ducks.

I find water very difficult to paint.

I painted on Masonite, which gave a very smooth surface, and used a very small brush. I could get the details better that way. At that time we were able to buy Masonite that was already pre-finished at the factory especially for artists. Otherwise, we would have had to prime the Masonite with gesso (back then a mixture of calcium carbonate and rabbit-skin glue - Editor's remark), then sand it and prime it again to get that slick surface.

I used little single-ought sable brushes to paint. It seems as if that would take a long time, but when you figure that there are no big areas in those paintings, that they're all little areas within the confines of the borders of the paintings, there is no place that I would have room to use a big brush. So I would paint those tiny, little areas, and after I had painted four or five of those, I would have done quite a chunk of the painting. It's almost like doing number paintings, in a way. I have to do a very detailed drawing and then start painting between the lines of that drawing.

I tried to show so many elements of a situation inside the frame of the picture, that it would tell a complete story when you looked at it. The value of the paintings wouldn't be up to a Norman Rockwell or N.C. Wyeth, but the subjects would be entertaining and memorable. I hope they will be understandable to people who have never read the comics; that they will be enjoyable for their colorfulness and humor - there's a lot of humor in all these paintings. I think, too, that painting the ducks in the style that portrait painters use for painting people, gives them a little warmth and quality. They no longer look like cartoons. When you look at the money bins, there is a sort of warmth and friendliness about that big, old money bin with the ducks in there doing something pleasant and it leaves you with a nice feeling.