Keskustelujen arkisto

As I was watching I Walked With a Zombie last night, how could I not think of Barks and tell you about it when I saw this?

http://i152.photobucket.com/albums/s173/Justine_Smitha/IW-5.jpg

Though he is not explicitly described as such, the man, clearly is a zombie; like Bombie, he is sent after the person represented by the doll he is holding (though not to give her the doll; he is to take her back).

I'll have to re-read the notes in the Carl Barks Library in Color (I don't have the CBL set featuring this story) to see what was said of Barks' possible references.

- Update -
I see now in the INDUCKS that Geoffrey Blum's "Power Games in Voodoo Land" was written for the CBL in Color; does the CBL article "Birth of a Zombie" mention any specific references for Bombie's origin?

(Yes, I have thought of drawing a Bombie emoticon ;) .
I did one some time ago, but I was not satisfied with it; I need to correct it or do it all over again)

I scanned this out of "The Carl Barks Library of Donald Duck Adventures in Color" printed by Gladstone.
Thought you might like to read it.

Power Games in Voodoo Land

by Geoffrey Blum
Gothic romance, as Leslie Fiedler has ob-served, is a type of parody, a way of examining conventional subjects by exag-gerating them. It's a difficult trick to bring off, for it leads easily to the grotesque. Plumb any sub-ject deep enough, and you start creating your own depths, until you are sucked down in a whirlpool of histrionics. For writers with sufficient artistic control, it can be an immensely powerful form: witness the legendary quality of gothic creations like Frankenstein, Dracula, and Sherlock Holmes. Certainly it was a literary mode suited to Carl Barks, who in the late 1940s had knocked the rough corners off his style, adapted Disney's ducks to his own needs, and was beginning to push outward.
"Voodoo Hoodoo" (Donald Duck Four Color 238) began as a simple take-off on horror films and the sen-sational reportage about voodoo in the popular press. According to Barks, the initial inspiration for Bombie was a scene from Bela Lugosi's film White Zombie. "A movie I saw had flocks of zombies working tirelessly pushing the arms of a giant grinder that crush-ed ore or something. Every few seconds a zombie would lose his footing and fall into the grinder where he silently got ground into hamburger, all without blood becoming visible. I became con-vinced that zombies do not feel, and I set out to preach their virtues as ideal
stooges for anyone who needed a dangerous job done cheaply?? l The tongue-in-cheek flavor of this last remark shows how the artist was already turn-ing over the humorous possibilities in exaggerated horror.
To model the character of Bombie, he found a lurid painting in The American Weekly accom-panying a 1942 story with the title "I Met a Zom-bie!" This was a bit more sensationalism than Barks needed. He softened the grisly aspect of art-ist Joe Little's monster by giving his own zombie a forlorn expression and a very tattered look. All the terror is shifted to Donald's perception of Bom-bie. Thus Barks created numerous opportunities for comedy at the same time that he unlocked the gate to the dark gothic region of personal fear.
Bombie's menace is psychological, not physical.
He serves as a reminder that Donald at any minute could lose control of his destiny and become as helpless as a drugged or shrunken man. Our hero is really no hero, and this is what frightens him. Before Bombie even comes on the scene, Donald's friendship with the jazz musician Bop Bop has
placed him on the fringes of society, a place where artists, minorities, and people who don't really work for a living congregate. Metaphorically speaking, he already is a zombie, "solid from the neck up;' putty in the hands of his nephews, and an unwilling pawn in the seventy-year-old strug-gle between the real power moguls, Scrooge and Foola Zoola. These are the movers and shakers of Barks' story: masterly, vindictive, mercenary patriarchs. Just as Bombie mirrors Donald's im-potence, Zoola's tribal raids parallel the thuggery by which Scrooge once seized the witch doctor's land.
Like "Ancient Persia" and "The Golden Helmet" (DD FC 275 and 408), two later adventures dealing with threats from the past, "Voodoo Hoodoo" is a story about power. Once we realize this, the whole gothic jigsaw puzzle falls into place. There is no heroine-no fragile woman to suffer at the hands of men-because Donald assumes the stereotypical role. Step-ping into the part of the victim, he waits in horror for the moon to reach its zenith and the ghoulish Foola Zoola to attack him with the force of an an-cient curse and the point of a voodoo needle. Even the quiz show episode, which seems at first to delay the plot, contributes to this dialectic of power and submission. The emcee is another master like Scrooge and Foola Zoola, dominating the stage, casting a spell
over his audience, and putting words into Bombie's mouth. So unchecked is his power that the radio show would continue even if Bombie suddenly spoke for himself.
It is appropriate, then, that the action resolves itself precisely at the point where Donald takes charge and starts manipulating Bombie, albeit with more conscience than Scrooge and Foola Zoola have displayed. Borrowing an animation gag from yet another master-Barks himself-the duck ties rubber slabs to Bombie's feet, pushes him off a cliff, and watches the bouncing zombie flatten the voodoo tribesman. Having taken that decisive step, he next catches onto the commodity most coveted by Scrooge, Zoo la, and the quiz show host. "Now we can go home and spend the rest of Bombie's money!" he crows. Donald has begun to wield power. In the final panel he can look back not with the uneasy, eavesdropping visage we saw on him in the opening sequence, but with a confident smirk .?
1 Notes written for the Carl Barks Library, November 17, 1985. 2 Barks first tried out this gag in storyboards for the unproduced cartoon The Rubber Hunter (c. 1938).

Oh, okay. Well, maybe someone else would like to read it then. I see now, after rereading your post, should have paid more attention. Sorry, can't help with the "Birth of a Zombie" article. :)