Updated July 8, 2001
THE IMAGINATION OF CARL BARKS
Updated July 8, 2001
Let's face it. Carl Barks is one heck of a writer and artist. But seeing
as how you are visiting this site, I'm sure you feel the same way. This is the
man who almost single-handedly created hundreds of stories for Disney
comics over a period of a few decades. There are not that many people in
any profession that could match the creative output that Barks has managed,
let alone without any drop in quality. His original work has appeared in Walt
Disney's Comics and Stories, Donald Duck, and of course Uncle
$crooge, and has been reprinted in many other titles around the world.
I have a great many of these in my personal collection, alongside the superheroes
of Marvel and DC. And although I love these comics also, my interest in them has waned,
for a number of reasons. But there is one thing that has kept me coming back to the
duck comics after all these years. And that is the imagination of Carl Barks.
In creating these books, Barks imparted such an obvious love for the characters, that
you couldn't help but be swept away in the stories and taken along on the adventures.
Whether they were diving to the deepest depths of the ocean, finding ancient treasure
in the jungles of South America, rocketing through space to find a moon made of gold, or
just saving Duckburg from the Beagle Boys, Barks always managed to draw you in to the story,
and make you care about the outcome. You knew Scrooge pretended to be a heartless tycoon,
but that when it mattered, he would do the right thing. Donald was frequently portrayed as
a none-too-bright, firey tempered loser, yet would usually emerge victorious. Huey, Dewey,
and Louie were us, the kids who were reading the stories, and who somehow managed to
be the smartest ones around. And it was this combination of characters that I loved. I could
read every story time and time again, and it would always retain it's original flavour. Barks'
artwork could stand on its own, the way he brought his characters to life, and the little
details that he would include in the backgrounds. One of my favourites has always been
the paintings that would hang on Donald's walls. They were usually family pictures, but
they would be such strange images that it always made me chuckle. You knew where
Scrooge's sentiments lay, because on his walls were pictures of money, his one true love.
But the vivid pictures weren't the sole reason for my continued reading, long after I had
entered adulthood. The sheer feelings of adventure that I was left with after every issue
are what it was all about, as far as I was concerned. Not only would the ducks cross America
(and occasionally into my home of Canada), but they would also traverse the globe, going from
continent to continent, by land, air and (sometimes under the) sea. They flew into the farthest
reaches of space, and somehow managed to come back a little bit wiser. And Barks
would always have a moral to his story, although it would be told in such a way that it wasn't
glaringly obvious. In other words, he wasn't just writing for children, he was writing for the
child in all of us.
This site is a dedication to Carl Barks, and to all those artists and writers who have continued
to carry the adventure onward. I hope that you keep checking back to see the updates, and
if you find any articles in newspapers or magazines that relate to the ducks, please
let me know! And please,
sign the guestbook!
March 2000
- Charles Muller-
Editor-In-Chief, The Daily Quack
In North America, he's a retro-'30s waterfowl with a sailor suit and stormy attitude. But in Finland, Donald Duck is a rock star.
As I stumble off my plane at the Helsinki Airport, quick as a quack, the girl who had been sitting behind me since take-off whipped out
a Donald Duck cell phone.
"Cool Donald Duck phone," I smiled.
"No Donald! Aku Ankka!" she hissed angrily, and stomped away.
Aku Ankka? Was that Finnish for "push off, I have a boyfriend"? An answer came as I stepped into the kiosk by the luggage carousel to
buy some gum. I surveyed the row of faces smiling down at me from the magazine rack: George Bush, Donald Duck, members of MTV-Nordic
rave band sensation The Rasmus, Donald Duck, Oprah, Donald Duck... and there, emblazoned across each fowl comic book cover: "Aku Ankka!"
Donald's name in the Land of the Midnight Sun; my first Finnish phrase.
I learned soon after that The Adventures of Aku Ankka is Finland's most widely circulated magazine.
A few days later, I met the deputy mayor of Savonlinna (a small Finnish city best know for its famous opera festival). The picture on
his silk tie displayed Donald standing in the military posture of the warrior king St. Olaf, Savonlinna's patron saint, his Viking spear
aimed defiantly at a Soviet flag. The entirety of Finland's 20th-century relationship with Russia summed up in a stripe of Disney-patterned silk.
"I traded my favourite sauna water ladle to [Finnish President] Tarja Hallonen's husband for this tie," the deputy mayor intoned gravely.
Not every Finnish politician loves Donald like the leadership in Savonlinna: in 1974, Helsinki city councillor Markku Holopainen lost a bid
for the Eduskunta (national parliament) after his opponent successfully branded him "the man who banned Donald". Turns out that Holopainen
had once chaired a committee that eliminated Helsinki public libraries' "wasteful" subscriptions to the Aku Ankka magazine.
Finnish tabloids began reporting that Holopainen had moral objections to Donald's sex life -- "Donald, are you married to Daisy Duck or not?" --
and a quarrel with the fact that Donald doesn't wear pants.
At the museum of Sami (Laplander) Culture, I saw a historical timeline linking the first translation of a Donald Duck comic book into the Sami
language to the coming of Christianity to Finland and the end of the Second World War. In Stockman's (the West Edmonton Mall of Helsinki), I found
a beautifully illustrated version of the national Finnish epic Kalevala starring Donald Duck as the bard-hero Vainemonen. I wrote back to my parents asking
for more black socks on a postcard emblazoned with one of five much-demanded Donald Duck stamps.
My deepest Donald epiphany came as I gazed at a print in a public washroom displaying the Duck Dauphin vigorously scrubbing his tail feathers
in a golden Louis XIV bath. I realized suddenly that Donald incarnated "sisu", that peculiar brand of Finnish chutzpah so unique and descriptive
that the English language has no way of translating it. "Sisu" is a breed of courage that Finns associate with fearless soldiers, angry prime ministers,
detirmined mountain climbers, and people who plunge straight from the sauna into icy lakes or snow banks. Teetering for a millenium between the
hegemonies of Sweden and Russia, Finland can only admire a bird gutsy enough to claim a tub at Versailles as his own private pond.
Word on the street is that Nokia is head-hunting a new CEO. My money's on Aku.
*(Aidan Johnson is the editorial page editor emeritus of the University of Toronto Varsity student newspaper)
