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.

April 21 - Bob Moore

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On this day, in 1920, Robert C. Moore was born in Los Angeles, California. His father was a violinist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. As Bob was growing up, his father would play on recordings of various projects around town as part of his job. Allegedly, two of those projects were for a fledgling cartoon studio in 1928, soundtracks for a new series of animated shorts starring a scrappy little mouse. One was titled Plane Crazy and the other Steamboat Willie. Whether the fact that dear old dad played for Mickey Mouse sparked little Bob's imagination or not, he began taking classes at the famed Chouinard Art Institute right out of high school. He must have been pretty naturally talented as he didn't stay there long before beginning work at the Walter Lantz Studio in 1938. He was with Lantz for two years, helping to usher in the popular Andy Panda character, before becoming the second person in his family to work for the other Walter in town.

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In 1940, Bob became an animator for the Walt Disney Studio, starting out as an assistant to a third Walter, Walt Kelly. After working under Kelly on Fantasia and Dumbo, Bob became a gag man in the Story Department. As World War II raged on, he contributed to The Reluctant Dragon and The Three Caballeros before being drafted into the Navy to work on propaganda films. He came back to Story for a few years after the end of the war, transferring over to the Publicity Department in 1948. Bob worked under Hank Porter, who had drawn the Snow White and Pinocchio Sunday comics before becoming the head of Publicity Art. Under Hank's guidance, Bob created artwork for movie posters, book covers, greeting cards and any other promotional material you can think of.

When Hank passed away in 1951, Bob was promoted to Art Director of Publicity, a position he would hold for the next three decades. In the early Fifties, in addition to everything he was doing publicity wise, he also began drawing for the Western Publishing comic books the company had licensed. He worked mostly on Donald Duck stories, but his name can be found on Grandma Duck panels and Little Bad Wolf strips. During the same time period, Bob was also illustrating Little Golden Books bearing the famous Disney characters.

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Throughout his 43 year career with Disney, Bob was tapped to do all sorts of special jobs. One of the little secrets the company doesn't necessarily like to talk about surrounds Walt's signature. He got asked to sign so many things, he simply didn't have time to scrawl autographs and run a company. He authorized a handful of his artists to sign things for him and Bob became one of the best (it's apparently really difficult to tell what is Walt's actual signature and what is Bob's forgery). In 1960, when a new school was built in Walt's boyhood home, Marceline, Mo, and named after the town's most famous citizen, Walt asked Bob to design the artwork for the lobby and gymnasium. After Walt passed away, the United States Post Office wanted to commemorate him with a stamp. Bob was one of the two guys asked to design it (Paul Wenzel, another Disney artist was other). In 1984, when the summer Olympics were held in Los Angeles, Bob, who had been retired for three years at this point, was commissioned to create the official mascot of the Games. Not only did he design Sam the Eagle, but he had to integrate him into hundreds of other signs and logos, for everything from individual events to novelty t-shirts.

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In 1981, Bob retired from his post after over four decades of creating thousands of logos, letterheads, brochures, etc. etc. etc. For all his contributions to the company, Bob was honored in two ways. First an exclusively Disney color was named after him. For years (until everything started being done on computers), there were plenty of tubes of Moore Red all over the Ink and Paint Department. Second, in 1996, he became an official Disney Legend. On November 20, 2001, the man who cheekily referred to himself as Bob Moore, MD (the MD stood for Mouse Drawer) left this world in the same city he entered it. He was 81.

January 29 - Bill Peet

On this day, in 1915, William Bartlett Peet was born in Grandview, Indiana. Bill was a typical Midwest boy in that he spent hours with his friends in the woods trying to catch animals, hours hanging around the local train station trying to catch a glimpse of the inner workings of the engines and hours getting in the way of the crews trying to set up the Big Top whenever the circus rolled into town. Bill was atypical in that he did all of those things in order to draw them. And whenever a conductor or crew foreman chased him away from what he was trying to sketch, he had already memorized the scene and could pretty nearly reconstruct it perfectly later on.

Bill wasn't terribly interested in a career as an artist, though, and enrolled at Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis. After failing every class but Gym, he reconsidered his life choices and started taking art classes. His talent would earn him a scholarship to attend the John Herron Art Institute at Indiana University. In the very first class he took, Bill met a young woman, Margaret Brunst, who would become Mrs. Peet in 1937, the same year Bill began working for a little animation studio in Burbank, California.

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After graduation, Bill heard that Disney was hiring artists, so he sent his portfolio off to California. He was accepted for a one month audition period along with 14 other young hopefuls. At the end of the month, Bill was one of only three who passed the test and he was put to work finishing up whatever needed to be done on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. When production on the First Feature was finally over, he moved into the Shorts Department as an inbetweener on Donald Duck cartoons. He was less than thrilled by the position. He submitted some character sketches to the team working on Pinocchio, but apparently it took too long for him to get some feedback. One day Bill stormed out of the studio, shouting "No more lousy ducks!" Fortunately, he had to come back the next day to retrieve a jacket he'd left behind. He found a letter on his desk saying he'd been promoted to the Story Department.

Bill spent the next several years as a sketch artist, turning scripts into storyboards for Pinocchio, Fantasia and Dumbo. By the end of World War II, he was a full fledged story man, one who could not only describe a character or scene but draw it too. He contributed story elements to classics like Song of the South, Cinderella, Lambert the Sheepish Lion, Ben and Me and Peter Pan. Bill and Walt worked closely together during this entire period, with mixed results on a personal level. Both men were not only passionate about their work, but both were unyielding when it came to their opinion on something. A minor quarrel blew up between them during the production of Sleeping Beauty, but it clearly wasn't anything too deeply felt. Walt tasked Bill with developing the script for the next film, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, allowing Bill to become the first person to get solo story credit for a Disney animated feature. He repeated the feat on the studio's next movie, The Sword in the Stone, but Stone wasn't as well received as Dalmatians and their relationship wouldn't survive much longer.

Early in production on The Jungle Book, Bill had taken Rudyard Kipling's stories and woven together what he thought was a masterpiece, leaving many of the darker, more dramatic parts intact. Walt took one look at his script, decided that the next movie was not going to be full of sinister tension and told Bill to lighten the whole thing way up. The argument that ensued became almost legendary. It ended with Walt replacing Bill as Jungle's story man and then Bill leaving the studio on his 49th birthday, January 29, 1964.

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Following his abrupt departure from Disney, Bill became a highly successful children's author and illustrator. Many of the books he published were based on stories he'd developed for his own kids' bedtimes. His cautionary tale about man's relationship with nature, The Wump World, predated Dr. Seuss' The Lorax by a year. His version of Aesop's The Dove and the Ant, where he changed the dove to an elephant of all things, was adapted into a moderately successful children's musical. All told, Bill published 33 children's books over the two and half decades he was active as an author, some of them still in print today. In 1989, he won the Caldecott Honor Book Award for his autobiography, Bill Peet: An Autobiography. Bill passed away quietly at his home in Studio City, California on May 11, 2002, after having survived a heart attack in the Seventies and throat cancer in the Nineties. He was 87.

January 5 - Jack Hannah

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On this day, in 1913, John Frederick Hannah was born in Nogales, Arizona. Another Legend that it's hard to find background information on (other than he enjoyed hunting with his dad), we pick Jack's story up in 1931. He'd made his way to Los Angeles and was attending the Art Guild Academy. As a student, one of the first jobs he managed to get was designing movie posters for local theaters. As the Great Depression ground on, Jack made a visit to the Walt Disney Studio to try for a job. His portfolio was deemed good enough and, in 1933, he began his animation career as an inbetweener on Mickey Mouse shorts.

Jack had moved up to full animator by 1937, when his contributions to The Old Mill helped win an Academy Award for the studio. After slaving over the drawing board for 12 more shorts, Jack moved over to the story department and started writing for Donald Duck shorts. From 1939-43, he wrote 27 stories for the cantankerous fowl, sometimes collaborating with the legendary Carl Barks, including Donald Gets Drafted (where we learned Donald's middle name is Fauntleroy). Jack and Carl would also work together on the first couple of Donald comic books. Carl would leave the studio for the comic world full time, but Jack stuck around and became a director.

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The 1944 short Donald's Off Day was the onset of Jack's spectacular run of feathered mayhem surrounding the perennial second banana at the Disney studio. Over the next decade, he would helm 94 shorts, most of them featuring Donald. Jack would introduce the world to classic foils for his fowl friend, including Chip and Dale and Humphrey the Bear. He was so prolific in developing Donald's character that more than one Disney historian has referred to him as "Donald Duck's Other Daddy."

As the studio began winding down short production in the mid Fifties, Jack tried to make the transition to television. He was able to direct several episodes of the Disneyland series, all of them involving Donald, usually having conversations with Walt. He tried to get Walt to let him direct more live-action projects, but claims that Walt had him pigeon-holed as an animation guy and wouldn't do it. Whether or not that was true, Jack would retire from the Disney Studio in 1957, mildly disgruntled. He wouldn't stop working though.

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Following his departure from Disney, Jack went to work for another animation legend, Walter Lantz. For the next several years, he directed Woody Woodpecker shorts and became Assistant Director on Lantz's television project, The Woody Woodpecker Show. In 1963, he retired a second time.

By the mid Seventies, Disney was starting to feel the pinch as all of the original crew of animators were retiring (or passing away) and a vacuum was being created with no readily available replacements. Studio executives approached Jack with a proposal to jump start the Character Animation program at Cal Arts. He teamed up with T. Hee to create it and actually taught classes himself for the next eight years. Countless members of the current pantheon of animators cut their teeth studying under Jack and the fabulous Cal Arts program.

In 1992, Jack was made an official Disney Legend, not only for all his shepherding of Donald but for basically ensuring the continuation of the medium in general. Two years later, he would pass away on June 11, 1994 in Burbank, California. He was 81.

December 2 - Clarence Nash

On this day, in 1933, Clarence Charles Nash became the 125th employee of the Disney Studio. Born on December 7, 1904 in Watonga, Oklahoma (before it became a state), Ducky Nash, as he became know later in life for obvious reasons, grew up on a farm developing impressions of the animals around him. It became a tradition whenever school talent shows rolled around that Ducky would sing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" in his trademark billy goat voice. After high school, he hit the vaudeville circuit doing his impressions and playing the mandolin. By 1930, he'd secured a spot on The Merrymakers radio show on channel KHJ in Los Angeles. This led to a gig as Whistling Clarence the Adohr Bird Man, a promotional character for the Adohr Milk Company. Clarence would ride around on a milk wagon pulled by miniature horses and give treats out to the kids. One day, his route took him past a date with destiny.

As Whistling Clarence was trotting by the Disney Studio, he decided to stop in and drop off one of his publicity sheets. Because an episode of The Merrymakers had been rerun just a couple of days before, the owner of the studio recognized his name and set up a formal audition. When Clarence did his billy goat voice, the casting director immediately called Walt into the room saying "We've found our duck." Walt agreed and the voice of a new character, Donald Duck, was hired.

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A few words about that voice that Clarence originally thought sounded like a goat but was clearly a duck. It did not come from his throat as most people who try to imitate it seem to think. He produced that classic sound through a process called buccal speech. A pocket of air is trapped between the cheek and the jaw and is slowly squeezed past the teeth. It's generally a self taught kind of thing. When done well, about three quarters of the words spoken can be understood and singing can happen in up to a three octave range. And no one did it better than Ducky.

Clarence and Donald were together from the beginning. Starting with 1934's The Wise Little Hen, Clarence voiced his beloved duck for the next 50 years. A great thing about their relationship is that it was one of the few in the industry that truly spanned the globe. Because of the unique sound of Donald's voice, Clarence himself dubbed it in every language that Disney films ended up in basically using a phonetic alphabet (it helps that Donald is normally largely unintelligible). He once said that German, of all the languages, was the most difficult to "quack" in.

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 Donald became one of the world's biggest animated characters mostly because of Clarence's performances. In over 120 shorts, several features, television appearances, advertising, records and just about everything else you can think of, he perfected the duck that was destined to play second fiddle to Mickey Mouse. But that wasn't his only contribution to the studio. Clarence also voiced Donald nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie when they came along. And, believe it or not, he was the first voice of Donald's girlfriend, Daisy Duck. His talents can be heard as the Rough House statue in Pinocchio, a bullfrog in Bambi, Figaro the cat in shorts and some of the dogs in 101 Dalmatians. When Jiminy Cricket's original voice, Cliff Edwards, passed away in 1971, Clarence took over for a little while.

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Clarence's last performance as Donald Duck was for 1983's  Mickey's Christmas Carol. He was the only original performer for a character in the entire film. His 50 year career performing the same character puts him in a select group populated by only two other people: Mel Blanc for his Loony Tunes gigs and June Foray for Rocky and Bullwinkle. Near the end of his life, it became increasingly difficult to produce Donald's voice and Clarence limited his performances to the recording studio and entertaining kids. He could never pass up a chance to wow the kids. On February 20, 1985 Clarence passed away from leukemia in Burbank, California in the same hospital that his boss did nearly two decades before. His hometown of Watonga named a street after him and he was officially made a Disney Legend in 1993.