September 20, 2000

Carl Barks: The man who put the ducks in Duckburg

By ROGER ANDERSON Scripps Howard News Service

He invented Donald Duck's rich, irascible uncle, Scrooge McDuck. He also invented Duckburg, the town where Scrooge, Donald and Donald's nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie, have been living in a brightly colored comic-book eternity since 1947.

But when I hear his name, Carl Barks, I don't see the greatest artist in the history of comic books, which is what he was. I see a bomb-throwing Duckburg anarchist with floppy dog ears and a black button nose, maybe an ally of "the terrible Beagle Boys,” those doggish malefactors who are always trying to steal Scrooge's money (and who are yet another unforgettable Barks invention).

Barks died recently at age 99, Just about a century past the time when Scrooge, his most brilliant creation, made his first pile of money digging for gold in the Klondike.

In flashback episodes in the Uncle Scrooge comic-book tales Barks wrote and drew for Walt Disney, he showed that Yukon world: rickety houses and muddy streets, melting snowfields, vast forests, shabby miners and their stubborn mules.

Mainly, though, the stories took place in Scrooge's elder years, after his gold-digging and other ventures turned him into an uncountabillionaire with a subterranean money bin overflowing with greenbacks, coins, jewels and doubloons that he loved to swim in.

Scrooge in his money bin is a fitting analog for Barks at work: the old duck and the man who made him both liked to dive as deep as they could - Scrooge into money, Barks into dreams.

Steven Spielberg admits that the Barks tales that show Scrooge and his nephews searching for treasure in exotic African, Asian, Latin American or Oceanic locales, with big panoramic panels showing shipwrecks and temples and jungles and volcanoes, was a major influence when he went to make movies featuring the adventures of Indiana Jones.

When he died, Barks did get his due from scribes and pundits, who hailed him as the best of the funny-animal comic-book guys and maybe the best comic-book artist, period. Such was his due - but not his full due. To give him his full due you have to place Barks alongside artists like Pablo Picasso, Charles Dickens, Franz Kafka and P.G. Wodehouse.

Artistically, it isn't even much of a stretch to compare him with Picasso: each of them could draw a line so appealing you want to put it between two pieces of bread and eat it like a sandwich.

But when you think of Scrooge, you think of Dickens - not because the author of "A Christmas Carol" was there first with his Scrooge, first name Ebenezer, but because of the Barks-like high adventure and good cheer of Dickens novels like "The Pickwick Papers” (and you don't have to look at his resume to know that Barks had read them).

Kafka was a different story - a famous pessimist and existentialist who wrote stories in which strange things happen to humans, like "The Metamorphosis," about a young man waking to find himself turned into a cockroach. But Kafka was more than a pessimist: he was also, like Barks, a dreamer with the uncanny ability to make his dreams take on a visible life of their own so the rest of us can see them.

Famous for turning a boy into a bug and (in "Report to the Academy") a gorilla into a savant and (in "Investigations of a Dog") a canine into a philosopher, Kafka might be the first to admit that he had nothing on Barks, who turned all us humans into ducks and dogs.

But the literary artist who really puts a cap on Barks comparisons is P.G. Wodehouse, the British creator of the butler Jeeves and his hapless upper-crust master, Bertie Wooster.

The world of Bertie and the world of Donald have one big element in common besides all the lighthearted fun they're filled with: There is no such thing as procreation. There are no mothers and fathers to speak of. The adult figures in Bertie's life are aunts and uncles. And just where are Donald's parents, to say nothing of Huey, Dewey and Louie's? Duckburg is like Wodehouse's England: a world of delight in which flirtation runs rampant but sex plays no part.

Barks did what all the great tale-spinners, painters, filmmakers and fireside fabulists back to the beginning of time aim to do: divert and entertain by fanning the flames of imagination.

He left behind a radiant world filled with funny animals and dramatic shipwrecks, sweeping storms and mysterious landscapes. Those luminous comic-book adventures are like Scrooge's money bin: all you have to do is dive in.

Roger Anderson is arts and entertainment editor at Scripps Howard News Service.

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