Keskustelujen arkisto

I'm saddened to report that Carl Barks passed away at about 12:15 AM PDT on
Fri., August 25, 2000. There are no words that can adequately express
express the loss to the world.

Donald Ault
Dept. of English
University of Florida
ault at nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu
ault at ufl.edu
http://web.nwe.ufl.edu/~donault/
FAX: (352) 332-0551

This just in:

Carl Barks, 99, died yesterday. Ill with leukemia, he had gone to hospital in
June, renouncing chemotherapy. We sadly say good-bye to the man who gave us the
big epos of the ducks.

DREIDREIZEHN

At some point I will find the strength to say something about this, and the
editorial that just appeared in this weeks CBG. But for now, my thoughts are my
own. Goodbye Carl.

Fernando Ventura wrote:

>I'm translating a Renato Canini's Ze Carioca story, that
>Amadeu appear! Probably you all will can read it next week!

The story is available at the following page:
http://members.forez.com/alfredsirven/index.html

As Fernando said, in this story Amadeu is a poor living in a
slum in Rio de Janeiro. I've never been in South America, but
I was told that some Favelas often are located on hills. This
seems to be the place where Joe's house is, but maybe I'm
drawing conclusions too fast...
Nestor and Pedr?o also appear in the story.

It's nice to see Roberto Canini's work. Thanks for your help,
Fernando!

Favio

______________________________________________________
Bo?te aux lettres - Caramail - http://www.caramail.com

I have always been a fan of the ducks mr. Barks created. I'm sorry to hear
has departed the fuss of this life. All that I can think is he must lived a
good life and he certainly did give something to this world. I hope he also
received as much in return. He will not be forgotten.

Teemu

Carl Barks passed away.
That are sad news, though we all knew he was ill and he was nearly a
hundred years old.
He really became a personage of the 20th century.
And he was a true artist of his own.
In 1994, when he visited Germany, I had the luck to be with him in
Stuttgart and I was amazed how lively he was then at the age of 93.
After all, the influence of Barks' art led me to work nowadays for the
German Disney Publisher.
Anybody else here at the dcml who was influenced by The Duck Man in
looking for a certain job?
Yes, it makes me so sad that he is dead.
But we shouldn't forgett: wasn't he a lucky man, making so many people
happy?
Farewell, Unca Carl!

Erik Rastetter, Germany

According to the news, Carl Barks died last night.
May he rest in peace.

We should take great joy in the legacy he left -- his
stories and characters will live on!

/Mikko

The following segment is part of a conversation I had
with Mr. Don Rosa on 8-13-00. This segment deals with
Mr. Carl Barks.

"IMPORTANT:" Mr. Rosa was answering a question about
Mr. Barks for a small tv audience of local access
viewers in South Western Indiana, and would've
answered the question quite differently under other
circumstances.

Still, this is something I didn't want to put off from
being read. In any language it speaks true.

CARL BARKS

ME - I guess we really should talk about Carl Barks.
For anyone who doesn't know, he's The Grandad of the
duck books. The gentleman's 99 years old right now,
and just a few years ago he actually wrote a script.
He drew and wrote the books in the 40s, 50s, and even
into the 60s. He retired in 1967. After that he went
into doing paintings; very beautiful oil paitings and
other types.
Talk a little bit about him; why you respect him,
and what you drew from his work?

DR - Well, Carl Barks, the fascination that I have for
his work, and that I'm sure most all his fans do, if
not all his fans, is that he... he wasn't paid any
more than anybody else in those days. He saw comic
book work, as anybody who worked in it in the 40s or
50s, as just hack work; low paid hack work. He was
doing this work just... I think he really just wanted
to get a job doing a newspaper comic strip. An
adventure strip like Terry & the Pirates or something,
which is where money was in those days. Comic book
work was just hack work. But the difference between
all the other artists, and writers, and Carl Barks
was... Well, first of all he wrote and drew his own
material, which is incredibly rare.
But aside from that, he's the sort of person who,
no matter what his job was, he did it to the best of
his ability. He didn't worry about who was reading it,
or if it didn't get respect. It was his job and he was
going to do the best job he could at it. Not
necessarly, because he thought there were people
watching. He didn't think anybody was reading these
stories as he could figure out! He was never told
about any fan mail that he might have gotten through
all those years. But, he still did the best job he
could.
Now the difference between the job he did and
other people, was that he had a respect for his
readers. He told stories that he thought he would
enjoy reading. He put characterization into the
personalities of Donald Duck and all the characters
that Barks created to go with Donald Duck. They had
real human personalities. They had their human
foilables, an you know, they weren't perfect! They all
had... they were flawed personalities, which is a
reason I think his characters were so popular. And
they weren't goody-goody like Mickey Mouse. They had
bad tempers! They had all the 7 deadly sins of man I
think. And yet, they would always suffer for whatever
imperfections they had.
Aside from that, he would build his stories on
real history. He would build his quests for actual
treasures. He didn't treat the kids like they were
little idiots, and make up all sorts of phony facts.
He would build his stories around actual facts. And
that's how I try to do my stories, and I found out
it's a bigger chalenge. First of all, it's more
interesting for me to do the story. I think it's a lot
more interesting for people to read the story. But,
it's also quite a challenge to create a hopefully
entertaining story out of actual facts.

But, yea, like you were saying, Barks retired in
1967 at the age of 66; he was born in 1901. Five or 10
years after that he began another career doing
paintings, which would be turned into lithographs by
publishers, and sold for... The lithographs alone
would sell for hundreds of dollars apiece. And, he
would get up to a quarter of a million dollars for
some of these paintings. So he had a secondary career
that completely eclipsed his first career, and finally
was very well paid for his legacy.
Still, which is not to say he made as much money
as he should have because of the system being what it
is. He created the entire Donald Duck universe. What
the publisher Dell, that he worked for, licensed from
the Disney corporation was simply the name Donald Duck
basically. Donald Duck was a very simple character
that just made little slap-stick cartoons. He was
actually like an actor. He was a different character
in each cartoon. A comic book has to be based on an
actual character with a history. So Carl Barks took
the name Donald Duck and created a... well, a
character that didn't even look exactly like the
Disney Donald Duck because animation has to work one
way; whereas, a character on a flat piece of paper has
to look and behave in a different manner. But, he
created an entire history around this duck; a family,
Uncle Scrooge, Duckburg, Gladstone Gander, etc. These
were all creations of Carl Barks. This is the universe
that all the other duck writers and artists based
their stories on.
And, then, I don't even know if Barks was aware
of this, anymore than I was, but this spread over into
Europe, and around the world, where even more writers
and artists were creating more stories about this Carl
Barks' Donald Duck universe. So it's uncalcuable how
much money Barks should've made in these years?
Billions of dollars? I don't know! Decades! Fifty
years! Sixty years of Donald Duck comic books all over
the world are based, not on Walt Disney's version of
Donald Duck, but on Carl Barks' version of Donald
Duck. But thankfully, even though he didn't make much
money while he was doing the stories, after he retired
he started making plenty of money doing limited
edition work and selling original oil paintings and
such.
And he just began to slow down a year ago at the
age of 98. He's 99 years old now. His health, I think,
is failing a little bit now. We're not too sure how
he's doing. We're concerned about it currently! But
still, he's not doing bad for being 99 years old.

God bless,

F.A. Elliott.

=====
The 'one' who has a finger on 'it'... scratches against the mahogany lining of a coffin crying, "I am Jonah! I am Jonah! Spit me back out so I may see and feel the light of day again." And, the levithan does not heed for it knows every great epic must come to an 'end.'
A tasty morsel known as... "understanding." (F.A. Elliott)

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Free email you can access from anywhere!
http://mail.yahoo.com/

At 12:00 25-8-00 +0200, you wrote:

>I really hated even seeing a 'not-too-distant-future' version. When the show
>"Quack Pack" came on, and tried to present a teenie-bopper version of Huey,
>Dewey and Louie, I was SO mad!!! It was TERRIBLE. It really frustrated me,
>because the audience of Disney comics is unfortunately small (well, in the
>US anyway) so the vast majority of people take what's on tv as the "real
>HD&L", completely missing all the wonderful depth to their characters...
>sigh... i give up...

Why? What's more (or less!) 'real' about the Quack Pack HD&L than about the
Barks, HD&L, the Str?bl HD&L, the Scarpa HD&L....? I got the feeling they
sometimes are more different than Quack Pack. A little thread about HD&L's
age has been up shortly, Quack Pack is only another story making them quite
a lot older. Okay, they're after the girls they once despised; is this what you
think terrible? Or maybe you're disliking their not being quite alike anymore
(possibly _not_ identical triples, after all.... ;-)? Please tell me; if not
exactly top of the bill, I found Quack Pack still interesting, and I'm just
a bit
embarrassed about a Duck lover condemning it so hard.

>I'm pleased to report that it seems that Carl Bark's Duck universe isn't
>quite as dead in the US as it appeared to have been. Ubi Soft will soon be
>releasing a Platform game starring Donald Duck for the Nintendo 64 and the
>Playstation 2 video game consoles.

Nice to hear, but is it coming out for a simple PC, too? (Possibly in a more
distant future.)

Rosa's EC Comic covers are great! Taking a look, is sound advice for all of
us....well, for most of us. This time, I _can_ imagine not every Disney lover
is going to like this, but the drawings offer me no problem. I see the
characters
confronted with their deeply hidden desires (well, not that very deep for
Donald,
I guess.... <g>), and at times, I like taking a look in the psychological
backyard.
Don, keep up the good work!
Greetings, Henri