MARK EVANIER

Mark Evanier is a professional writer for a number of popular TV cartoon shows and comic books, and he has even written several Donald Duck and Goofy stories for Disney.

As everyone knows, Carl Barks put in a brief stint as a storyman on the Disney lot, cobbling up gags for animated cartoons. He was far from the first or last to be uncomfy in that environment. 

Barks couldn't take it. His roommate at Disney, Chuck Couch, used to say that Carl, when his work was criticized, responded not unlike the animated Donald Duck throwing a fit. Seeking a venue where he could just sit home and create, Barks fled to the auspices of Western Printing. Good for him, good for Disney, good for all of us.

Western allowed him to do just that: Sit home and create. His editors - Chase Craig, in particular - had more to do with the end-product than some Barks fans seem willing to admit ... but not a lot more. Chase's main contribution seems to have been to keep Carl on the job and at the board.

Every year or two, Barks - having set high standards for himself - would declare burnout. He would steadfastly insist that he'd done everything that could be done with those blamed ducks and that the well was bone-dry. Chase would somehow convince him to excavate deeper and, sure enough, Barks would hit a gusher of some size.

For close to three decades, Western gave Carl the chance to do his own work on, more or less, his own terms. True, it was not on his own characters, but that never seems to have bothered Barks, nor did the fact that the pay would always be modest and the work, anonymous.

Or, at least, that's what he thought at the time.

Barks did not draw all those Disney comics thinking, "Great!  I'll do work so wonderful it will be reprinted forever, all around the world, and I'll become famous and some day, when someone starts comic book fandom, I'll be worshipped and honored. Oh - and maybe I'll even do oil paintings of ducks that will sell for six-figure sums."

None of those perks seemed possible. What the job offered - what he liked about it - was a living wage, a fair amount of security, a general absence of straw bosses and the chance to achieve that pride in craft. He could probably have put less time and creativity into his pages and still earned the first two of these and maybe the third, as well.

But he wouldn't have had the satisfaction ... the delight of turning blank paper into something wonderful. And for Barks, and many others of his generation, that was everything.

He certainly didn't expect to be loved the world over. Barks used to tell the story that, first time he received a fan letter, he though it was a prank - some friend of his, putting him on. (The way they told it around the Western offices was that he stormed in, waving the envelope, demanding to know who had given his name and address to this stranger who was invading his privacy. In short order though, he warmed to the idea that he had an audience - of adults, no less - and welcomed his first fans into his home and life.)

There is wonderful poetry in the fact that the excellence of his work and all that extra effort brought him those two benefits - money and fame - that he'd never dared expect. I have no idea how much cash he realized from the paintings, lithographs and reprint volumes, but it was surely more than he'd expected, and enough to brighten the last fourth of his life.

And he sure became famous ... an impressive achievement for a guy who didn't start signing his work until after he'd retired.

Like almost everyone reading this, I first "met" Carl Barks in the pages of either Walt Disney's Comics and Stories or Uncle Scrooge or some other funnybook full of Disney ducks. The oft-parroted line was that, though we readers didn't know his name, we recognized the consistency of the work in one style, and all came to refer to whoever was doing that material as "The Good Artist." I never called him that. He was terrific but I thought - and still think - there were a lot of Good Artists in those comics.

Comic book fans - the kind that published fanzines and attended conventions - didn't much cotton to funny animal comics at first. When you told super-hero devotees that you thought certain issues of Donald Duck were as great as the best of Batman and Superman - let alone, greater than - they looked at you askance. It was like: "Don't we have enough trouble convincing the world that comics aren't just for children without shining a spotlight on kiddy comics?"

The ones who thought that were taking the wrong side of their own cause. For all its talking ducks, Barks's work was markedly more adult than 95% of all super-hero fodder, and more accessible to a wider range of readers. It wasn't that his "target audience" was younger. It was just wider...and on both ends, younger and older.

That was due to two reasons, I think. One was that, though his players were water fowl, they were ever so much more human than the guys with the capes. And his stories were funny. As a universal language, laughter has Esperanto beat by a mile. It speaks to everyone.

--- o ---

I first met Carl Barks the person in the early-70's. He was living in semi-retirement in Goleta, just outside Santa Barbara. His main pastime was doing his beautiful paintings of Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge, and occasionally scripting Junior Woodchucks comics - a task he soon abandoned.

The going price for a Barks oil was steadily escalating and the day of that first visit, he'd learned one had just gone at auction for a record (for him) high. The precise sum seemed astronomical at the time and would seem like chump change today.

Carl - as he insisted everyone call him - was absolutely thrilled with the sale price, and not just because it represented cash in his pocket. The attitude was more like, "Can you believe it? One of my silly paintings going for that much?". Not a trace of Scrooge about him; just sheer bliss at the new and unexpected career he'd found for himself.

He and his wife Garé were both, as expected, charming people. About Carl especially, there was a beautiful simplicity and a sense of the jolly. If geneticists are ever able to configure the Human Genome to create the Ultimate Grandfather, it will come out a lot like Carl Barks.

Though they were willing to talk about comics and Carl's work - and did - more than half the visit was spent addressing other topics.  I was with a group of three artists and the Barkses were as interested in all our careers as we were in Carl's.  We also talked about the world and politics and books we'd just read ... everything.  Not just comics.

It was the same way on later visits, especially when my long-time collaborator Sergio Aragonés was part of the entourage. Sergio has been to every corner of the globe; Barks had been almost nowhere - often, no closer to the glorious foreign sceneries visited by Scrooge and Donald than his shelf of National Geographic.

He and Garé pumped the Señor for travel anecdotes: Have you been to this country? What was it like? Sergio naturally obliged, once spending more than an hour regaling them with stories. At one point, the conversation turned to some locale Barks had depicted but never visited. When Sergio said, "It looked just like you drew it," The Duck Man couldn't have been happier. Out of him came a wonderful little chuckle.

Which is how I'll always remember Carl. I'll remember a certain little elated laugh he had ... a laugh I can still hear but could never adequately describe. It was a laugh of innocent delight - on the low end, the honest, unfeigned giggle of someone who has just heard or seen something wonderful. On the high end, it was an unrestrained, knee-slapper of a laugh, utterly free of self-consciousness or affectation...

In other words, a lot like the laugh of a kid who just read his or her first Carl Barks comic.

--- o ---

As word of his passing spread throughout the Comic Art community, a tremendous sadness was descending. I don't think it should.

Carl Barks lived to the age of 99 - almost 99 and a half, actually. For about the last four decades, he received more accolades, tributes and appreciations than any human could want. He and his work were venerated and he was made very much aware that, as noted above, it will be reprinted forever, delighting Barks fans yet to be born. I can't think of a better way to go.

I mean, that is, if you absolutely have to go.

Some of us have to pinch spare flesh and remind ourselves that, eventually, Carl Barks had to go. A cause for tears? If you insist. But I was delighted to see the wire services quoting his caregiver, Serene Hunickle, as saying that, though he had been receiving chemotherapy for leukemia, he "was funny up to the end."

He was a master storyteller ... and he scripted an appropriate conclusion for his own, vibrant life: Funny up to the end. And ever after.

This contribution is an excerpt of a story from Mark Evanier's website. © Mark Evanier