Category Archives: carl barks

Mike Matei of Cinemassacre has created a video explaining the significance of Carl Barks’s best work, which is embedded below.

I wrote most of the script Mike is reading, when the original idea was to make this a video about the top twenty stories Barks wrote and drew for Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories (which I chose, at Mike’s insistance). I don’t have any qualms with the selection he judiciously edited from my writing, although I’m certainly disappointed the hypno-gun story from 1952 wasn’t included. No complaints though. I think the video is successful in what we set out to do: convey in layman’s terms why Barks is great, a real rarity considering so many Barks scholars are obsessed with academia (re: seeing things that aren’t there).

Below is that story as it originally appeared in Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories #145 (October 1952). Its root idea, that Donald Duck is so gullible, he’s the only person on earth that the hypno-gun works on, is a shining example of what the man did best: Barks doesn’t need extravagance in drawings and dialog to hammer home the humanity of his characters, nor their complexities. Whereas so many superhero comic book writers and artists express their intricacies so loudly that the stories just read as noise, the ducks in Barks’s world are clearly defined as real people in an unpretentious, simplistic fashion. His stories rank chief among comics that are equally embraceable by kids and adults alike as a result. I’m not sure if it is my absolute favorite Barks story (a decision as difficult as picking your favorite child), but it’s certainly in the top two or three.

I love a lot of comics from the 1940s and 1950s, and own about a thousand of them, but they simply don’t hold up well for rereading. The art can be great to look at (and help ID certain animators’ styles in many cases), but the stories are mostly junk, and repetitive junk at that. Carl Barks, John Stanley, and Walt Kelly are the transgressive artists at Western Publishing, period.

I think this story from WDC&S 173 (Feb. 1955) is probably in my top five favorites; of course I say that about every Barks story I reread and laugh out loud at. At around this time, people were not fond of Barks’s depiction of Donald, writing to him, saying that his behavior upset their children. I don’t have a copy of the letter, but I think Barks responded to one of them saying something to the extent of “tell your kid he’s a nose pickin’ crybaby.”

My apologies for those who hate modern coloring, it’s all I have of the story on file.