SOME BARKS MOMENTS

On the outside he seems to be a gentle and balanced soul, but on the inside - it is quite another story! His knack for an existential impatience showed through at one particular moment in 1994 in Amsterdam, at an arranged party, one of many for this - his first and last - European Tour, where a manager ushered Carl to mingle, to step up to sundry invited guests and start smooth-talking. A man of 93 years ... smooth-talking???
When it came to be my turn to receive the buttering-up he grimly smiled at me and let out a long sigh! As we now know it would be another 5 years (of equal misery?), before Carl started his case against his managers to claim his proper rights and be protected from these harassers and see himself restored as a human being. By law!

We didn`t talk shop, however. Out of deference I started a mundane topic - the O.J. Simpson trial. "Oh, is that thing still going?", was his remark. I never discussed art with him, anyway. During the, I guess, 4 or 5 times I met him over the years when I lived and worked in California, these occurrences were always brief. Mostly they happened at comic cons.

In 1984 I took Wim van Helden, a friend and journalist from Holland, with me to see Carl and Garé Barks when they lived in Temecula northeast of San Diego. Wim had arranged to interview him there. At one point we were discussing the particular graphical pitfalls of searching for a "good", well-composed cover drawing. Carl detested to make front covers, but was always commissioned anyway by the editors at Western Publishing in Beverly Hills.

On our way out he caught the eye of a neighbour living across from his trailer (the Barkses lived in a trailer park with classy, roomy trailers where the wheels didn`t show). They waved at each other. Carl remarked the man was cancerous and only had a month or so left to live!

He recalled a similar situation when living and working from his home in Goleta north of Santa Barbara, where the neighbour used to follow a routine of knocking on Carl`s door, letting himself in, nestling himself next to Carl`s drawing table and starting yapping away, beer can in hand. Never for a moment asking himself if perhaps he was bothering or upsetting the work going on there! Never realizing the work required concentration. Never believing it was actually WORK! Carl felt - he confided - very lonely then.