June 30 - Carl Barks

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On this day, in 1966, Carl Barks officially, and reluctantly, retired from drawing Donald Duck comic books. Born on March 27, 1901 in rural Merrill, Oregon, Carl recalled having a somewhat lonely childhood. His parents were farmers and thus always busy, the nearest neighbor was a half mile away (and didn’t have any children) and there were only about ten students total at the little school he attended. He and his brother (they unfortunately didn’t share any common interests) put in long hours themselves on the farm, leaving little time for leisure activities. When Carl was seven, his father moved the family to Midland, Oregon, buying a cattle ranch near the railroad tracks. The mass of cowboys who frequented the Midland Marketplace were the first crows he’d ever seen. After four years of wrangling cattle, the Barks family had made enough to move to Santa Rosa, California trading in the ranch for orchards. The profits weren’t nearly as high, however, and by 1913 the Barks moved back to Merrill. Poor Carl was 12 at that point and still hadn’t finished elementary school with all the moving around. He did manage to finish by 1916, but that would turn out to be a watershed year for Carl: his mother died, his hearing noticeably worsened and, with the nearest high school more than five miles away, he had to end his formal education.

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Carl began a checkered career that could best be described as a jack of all trades, master of none. A partial list of the occupations he unsuccessfully tried to maintain includes mule driver, farmer, woodcutter, printer and cowboy. Later in life, he would attribute many of Donald Duck’s character flaws to this period in his life, namely the drifting from job to job and the inevitable building of frustrations. Ironically, his characters' innate wit would also come from this era. As Carl put it, if you didn’t have a sense of humor about those kinds of situations, you would go insane.

Eventually, after several career failures, Carl began to wonder if he could maybe turn his favorite childhood hobby, drawing, into money. Throughout his childhood, he had tried to imitate the comic strips in newspapers he occasionally found. At one point he tried to take a correspondence course to improve his technique, but his work schedule forced him to quit after just four lessons. In December 1918, he left Oregon for San Francisco. He worked odd jobs while trying to sell his drawings, but met with little success. He returned to Oregon in 1923, worked on his father's farm some more and continued peddling his art. He had some success with the Calgary Eye-Opener, a racy men's magazine based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He soon was hired on as Calgary's editor, moved to the Land of a Thousand Lakes and made a respectable $90 per month, albeit for less than respectable publications. 

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In 1935, Carl heard that the Walt Disney Studio was looking for more animators. He decided to apply, was accepted and moved to Los Angeles for a trial run. He passed the test and began work as a much more respectable inbetweener for a slightly less respectable $20 per week. He also started submitting gag ideas for the studios shorts that were so good he was transferred to the Story Department in 1937. Luckily for Carl, Donald Duck started getting his own shorts that same year instead of always being paired with Mickey or Goofy. Carl quickly became part of the team that was writing exclusively for Disney's resident fowl. His work can be seen in classics like Donald's Nephews (the first appearance of Huey, Dewey and Louie), Mr. Duck Steps Out (Daisy Duck's debut) and The Vanishing Private.

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Part way into World War II, Carl was becoming disillusioned with the working atmosphere at the Walt Disney Studio and with animation in general (he also thought the studio's air conditioning was affecting his asthma). In 1942, he resigned his position intending to go back to farming, specifically raising chickens in the region of San Jacinto, California. In order to make ends meet while getting the farm off the ground, Carl did some moonlighting as a comic book illustrator. His first job was splitting artwork duties with the fellow Disney animator Jack Hannah (not the crazy animal guy) on a special edition 64-page Donald Duck Dell comic, Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold. It was the first original story written for an American Donald comic and the first time Donald and his nephews ever searched for treasure.

Carl then asked Dell's parent company, Western Publishing, if they had any other Donald comics they needed illustrated. They gave him a ten page comic for an upcoming edition. Carl felt the story could use some improvements. Western was so impressed with his revised script that they let him do both the writing and the drawing on most of his Donald comics for the next few decades, not something that many artists were allowed to do. When The Victory Garden was published in April 1943, it was the first of nearly 500 duck stories Carl would produce during his career. That proliferation alone would earn him a place in the Disney Pantheon, but it's the world he created during those stories that really pushes him above everyone else.

When Carl got a hold of the Disney Duck universe, other people had already created Donald, Daisy and his nephews, Huey,  Dewey and Louie. But that was pretty much it. Carl would use those characters and introduce dozens of his own. Just try to imagine Duckburg (which Carl certainly expanded if not outright dreamed up) without the following citizens: Scrooge McDuck, Gyro Gearloose, Gladstone Gander, the Beagle Boys, Magica De Spell, Flintheart Glomgold, Daisy's nieces, April, May and June, The Junior Woodchucks or Cornelius Coot, just to name the highlights. All of them came, and tons more, from Carl's fertile imagination.

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For the first seventeen years of his comic book career, Carl toiled away in anonymity. The only name to appear on the books was Walt Disney's , although sometimes an small identification number would also appear. Avid readers soon learned to recognize Carl's style though, both artistic and story wise, and began referring to him as the Good Duck Artist. In 1960, two different people stumbled on his real identity and quickly let the comic book community know that the Good Duck Artist had a name and it was Carl (although they still mostly referred to him by his nickname). For the next several years, a growing fan base lifted him out of obscurity and into the limelight he so richly deserved. If only mother nature had played along. By 1966, Carl's eyesight was going the way of his hearing (he wore hearing aids all the time) and he could no longer do the fine detail work he was known for. He reluctantly retired from the business, sort of. He would draw one more Daisy Duck comic that was published in 1968 and he would write scripts for several more well into the Seventies. 

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In order to continue making money after leaving the comic book industry, Carl turned to creating oil paintings, mostly of farm life, that he exhibited and sold at local art shows. One day, in 1971, a fan asked if he would do a commission of the Disney Ducks. Carl contacted the company to see if he could get permission to produce some work. Disney surprised him by granting a royalty-free license. Carl was further surprised when word got around that he was taking requests and was inundated with them. By 1974, Carl stopped taking requests and began auctioning off pieces at various comic cons, bringing in thousands of dollars at a pop. Unfortunately, some fans made some unauthorized prints of one of his Scrooge McDuck paintings and Disney ended up rescinding his license.

Carl continued to make appearances at comic cons, though, creating long lines and frenzies wherever he went. In 1981, two different fans wanted to bring new appreciation to Carl's work and published a collection of his paintings and comic stories. By 1983, Carl was getting a little tired of all the attention and moved back to Oregon, quipping that his chicken farm was too close to Disneyland, fans kept dropping by unannounced. That same year, the Carl Barks Library was published, which included his entire Disney comic book oeuvre in an oversized thirty-volume set.

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Throughout the Nineties, Carl continued painting and had exhibits of his work in cities across Europe. In 1994, his final Scrooge McDuck story, Horsing Around with History, was published in Denmark and in 1997 his final Donald Duck Story, Somewhere in Nowhere, was published in Italy, both with artwork done by someone else. In 1991, Carl was officially declared a Disney Legend for his work in turning Donald and friends into international sensations. In July 1999, he was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. After unsuccessfully enduring treatments for nearly a year, he decided to stop them in June 2000. On August 25, 2000, shortly after midnight, one of the most brilliant minds to entertain the masses (even though he'd never even started high school) finally faded to black quietly in his sleep. He was 99.