You grew up watching Donald Duck cartoons, maybe. But do you know the name Carl Barks? A great many cartoonists know and revere him today, but it took many years for his talents to become properly celebrated—for years he was called just “the Duck Man” or, even more tellingly, “the Good Duck Artist.”
How great a cartoonist was Carl Barks? The Eisner Awards are the “Oscars” of cartooning, and they include the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame. When they kickstarted that category, they chose three cartoonists, of all the cartoonists of the world, to define greatness in cartooning. One of the cartoonists they chose was (duh) Will Eisner. One of them was Jack Kirby. And one of them was Carl Barks.
That’s how great of a cartoonist Carl Barks was.
Barks was the artist who did the most with Donald Duck, but he actually created Uncle Scrooge McDuck. Donald and Scrooge and Huey, Dewey, and Louie are a bigger deal in Europe than in the United States. When Barks died American newspapers barely took any notice, but in Europe they understood that a master had passed.
Praise of Barks’ work isn’t hard to come by, but here are a couple of quotes, chosen almost at random.
Just a couple months ago, Mark Squirek wrote in the New York Journal of Books:
Mr. Barks distills pure comedy down to its simplest form. ... Carl Barks was a true artist who could show us our own world while at the same time making us laugh uncontrollably at the image of a duck walking into a castle or calmly sitting on top of a horse ten times his size.
Try not smiling at Carl Barks’ work. It’s impossible.
Here’s another one. This time it’s Rich Clabaugh in The Christian Science Monitor:
Barks, the artist, is a master cartoonist, drawing lively, expressive characters with a graceful sense of movement. His beautiful, detailed backgrounds plant the ducks in a fully realized world that adds weight to his storytelling. ... But besides the entertaining plots, Barks’ appeal is in his characters. He gives his ducks many human frailties and while they usually try to do the right thing, they make mistakes, get angry, frustrated, and even fail.
In 1994 Danish TV conducted a substantial interview with Barks. The interviewer compares Barks to Shakespeare—really.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Donald Duck takes on Hitler to the tune of Der F?ɬ
Donald Duck teaches men about birth control, 1968