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Carl Barks' Duck universe is immensely popular worldwide, but at the end of the day, it's still technically a subset of the Disney Universe. This connection is superficial when you think about it (Barks' final comic book versions of Donald and the nephews are completely unlike their animated Disney counterparts), but the fact that the universe was spun off Donald means that Disney as a company gets the credit (and the licensing rights) for Barks' genius. Which leads me to wonder ... what if Barks developed Duckburg independent of Disney? What if Scrooge McDuck wasn't Donald's uncle, but, say "Daniel" (or some other non-Disney) Duck's? What if we had the same basic characters, stories and mythology but they weren't ducks at all, but lions or tigers or bears or even humans? After all, what made these stories popular was Bark's ducks, rather than the Disney ducks they were originally inspired by but bore little resemblance to beyond the physical. If Barks could sign his work back in the 60s and had the rights to his own stories and art, how different would things have been?

Quote from user: Baar Baar JinxWhich leads me to wonder ... what if Barks developed Duckburg independent of Disney? What if Scrooge McDuck wasn't Donald's uncle, but, say "Daniel" (or some other non-Disney) Duck's? What if we had the same basic characters, stories and mythology but they weren't ducks at all, but lions or tigers or bears or even humans? After all, what made these stories popular was Bark's ducks, rather than the Disney ducks they were originally inspired by but bore little resemblance to beyond the physical. If Barks could sign his work back in the 60s and had the rights to his own stories and art, how different would things have been?
It's hard to say what would have happened if Barks had developed a Duckburg-similar comic world on the basis of non-duck characters of his own.That could have resulted in a hit as well as in a flop. It's all speculation, and there are many "alternative histories" thinkable.

Thinking about that, one must always consider a whole couple of aspects, however. One for instance is that it was exactly Carl Barks' professional situation as low-paid free-lancer living and working like a hermit completely without touch to his many fans and with no own rights on "his" characters that constantly put the pressure on him to generate all those wonderful stories in the 1940s and 1950s. It is a good question if the man really would have created something similar if he had been an accredited and celebrated artist in financially comfortable circumstances already from the beginning, or if he got one at least very early ...

Barks indeed did play for a long time with the idea of creating his own comic characters, and he would have liked to draw comics with real humans (like Prince Valiant or Flash Gordon) rather than with funny animals--but then he never could or wanted to do the actual steps to realize those plans.

It was exactly the blank shape of the world of Donald Duck, as Barks got it from Disney, and the personal-professional situation with Barks being a "drudge" in the service of Western Publishing on which basis the Duckburg of Carl Barks grew and flourished. It's really hard to say what the genius would have given the world if everything would have been different.

I think Coolwater nails it--it is not pleasing to think that Barks' greatness was catalyzed by economic exploitation, but it seems very plausible to me. I can imagine that if he had been working for a different publisher under similar circumstances--if he'd drawn Warner Brothers comics, say--we would have seen those achieve a similar level of transcendence to that ducks in this universe, but if he'd been working at his leisure? Not likely.
This leaves open the question of whether there's something particular about the ducks that lent themselves to being made great. I want to say that there is, but I also recognize the possibility (probability?) that I'm just saying that because I find it so difficult to conceptualize this alternate universe in which Daffy is a comparably complex character to Donald in this one.
As to the question of what duck comics would have looked like sans Barks, the mind revolts at the concept. Some of those early duck comics--before Barks's sensibility became the dominant force that people tried, with varying success, to copy--are okay, but a lot of them really aren't okay at all, and even in the best of circumstances, they're not exactly Timeless Treasures. Maybe someone would've stepped up to the plate if Barks hadn't been there to fill the vacuum (or maybe not), but no doubt the characters would have developed quite differently with this individual shaping them.
'Course, I'm pretty much talking about the US here. I'm not sufficiently familiar with early European duck comics to really make much of an informed speculation--though these Federico Pedrocchi stories that we've seen in English are pretty cool. One really wonders what might have been had Pedrocchi survived the war.