MEETING CARL BARKS

I suppose I first met Carl Barks in the summer of 1955, although I didn't know it at the time, when my family drove cross-country from California to visit my grandparents in New Hampshire, where we spent most of the summer. On the way we stopped at a cousin's house in Orange, New Jersey. My cousins let me read some of their Disney comics and I read Walt Disney's Comics and Stories dating back to 1947, my birth year, and Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge Comics. When we left, the cousins gave me a couple comics, most likely a couple WDCS, and my favorite of all, Donald Duck in Ancient Persia, but they wouldn't part with any of their favorites, Uncle Scrooge. Somewhere before we got back to California, that comic book disappeared. My mother used to tell me that she and my dad had bought and read Disney comics for me even earlier, when I was 3 or 4 or so, but I don't really have any concrete memories of that. In late 1956, there was a drugstore between my house and the school where I was in 5th grade, and I started buying first Walt Disney's Comics and Stories and very soon thereafter Uncle Scrooge, but rarely Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse.

I was still buying them when I went to college in 1964, and never stopped as long as they were published and had managed to add a few back issues to my Barks collection by that time. Sometime about 1965, after I learned that Carl Barks was the creator of these wonderful stories and had talked with other people I met at college who had read Uncle Scrooge and other Disney comics, I recalled this great comic I had read as a kid, and knew it had to be a Barks story. About a year later I found a copy of Ancient Persia missing most of its front cover for 50¢ in a junk shop in downtown Baltimore. Was it ever a Barks story!  It remains one of my 2 or 3 favorite Barks stories. Unlike many other people, my mother never threw my comic books away. Once I graduated from college and had a job, I went about seriously trying to acquire the Barks comics I didn't have, armed by this time with preliminary work from Mike Barrier's Barks Bibliography, to which I would later contribute.

About 1971, I heard that Barks was doing Duck paintings from my friend Glenn Bray, who urged me to put my name on the list for a painting. But I hesitated, since to me, his comic book work was much more important and I had somewhat limited funds. Perhaps, financially, that was the wrong decision, but I did manage to collect what I still think is the most important part of Barks work, all the comic book stories, and it is a decision I don't regret. In 1975, I hitchhiked to California to meet up with my college roommate to go backpacking for a week in the Sierra Nevada Mountains near Bishop, California. But while I was on the West Coast, I also met Glenn Bray in person for the first time and we drove over to Barks' house. Someone once wrote that Barks was kind of like everyone's favorite grandfather. That is about right. Glenn and I and the Barkses visited and talked for an hour or two, but I had incorrectly loaded the film in the borrowed camera I brought and so there were no pictures.
By this time, Barks' Duck oils were stratospherically priced, at least for someone on a physics teacher's salary, but Carl did have a nice little painting of a forest scene of the type that his wife Garé did better, which I was able to buy, and which he sent to me later after he had done a little finishing work on it. It still hangs in my living room. And at some point, earlier I believe since I paid only $100 for it, I did manage to buy a page from Phantom of Notre Duck, which hangs in my library. But the wonderful stories he wrote and drew still give me the deepest pleasure and satisfaction.
Throughout the 1970s, I carried on an occasional mail correspondence with Carl, largely focused on his comic book work, some of it related to Barrier's Barks bibliography, and some related to tracking down unpublished story pages, about which I eventually wrote an article for Michael Barrier's FunnyWorld, but other stuff, too. And I wrote on rare occasions for another 20 years and occasionally received announcements or address changes out of the blue from Garé.

I didn't see Carl again until about 1996, at a birthday event at Steve Geppi's Diamond Galleries in Baltimore. At that time, I showed him a version of an Index to all of his comic book work that I had been working on for about a dozen years. Originally commissioned for the Carl Barks Library by Bruce Hamilton, it had been a casualty of the rush to get the last 3 or 4 sets of the CBL out quickly before the license with Disney expired. Although the project had been orphaned, I had continued to work on the index with 2 collaborators and had fully indexed 6 sets at the time, for which I had an alphabetical printout, and had partially indexed two others. He expressed enthusiasm for it and the lists such as all the appearances of the varied villains and other things that made up parts of the index, and observed as to how it might be a useful tool for comic book scholars.
It was good to see him again, but we didn't talk about anything deep.  I am glad to have met one of my favorite authors and artists, probably one of the most important and widely read American authors of the 20th century, but his best stories still communicate much more deeply and profoundly with me than brief personal meetings. I believe he has profoundly touched me and many others of his readers, and made us better persons.