(speechless)

Danny Coenen saturn_78 at yahoo.com
Sat Aug 26 01:43:30 CEST 2000


Man Who Gave 'Donald Duck' Charm And Character Dies 

By Arthur Spiegelman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Cartoonist Carl Barks, who
drew Donald Duck comic books for three decades,
turning the quacking, cranky waterfowl into an
unlikely, universally loved ''Everyman,'' died on
Friday at age 99 at his home in southern Oregon, the
Walt Disney Co. said.

Associates of Barks in Grants Pass, Ore., where he
lived for many years and maintained a studio, said he
died of leukemia.

As an artist, Barks was expert at creating ``poultry
in motion'' and invented the character ``Scrooge
McDuck,'' who went from the pages of the Walt Disney
Comics & Stories to becoming a full-fledged film
cartoon character on his own -- the world's funniest
miser.

Barks, whose work went unnoticed for years with many
thinking that Walt Disney himself drew Donald Duck
comics, developed a world-wide following for his
vividly colored works.

After he retired from drawing comic books in 1966, he
became a painter and some of his portraits of Disney
characters fetched more than $200,000.

Born and raised on a ranch in Merrill, Ore., Barks
liked to recall that he grew up with ``well-armed
cowboys'' and people who had fought in Indian wars.

In the early 1930s, Barks began as an ``in-betweener''
at the Disney studios, drawing frames between action
in animated cartoons.

He then transferred to the story department and helped
create the gags and stories of early Donald Duck
cartoons -- including having Donald turned upside down
and shaved by robot barbers in the short ``Modern
Inventions'' while he squawked to no avail. Donald was
already a cartoon character when Barks went to work on
the animated shorts.

By the early 1940s, Barks had left Disney and gone to
Western Publishing, which produced Walt Disney comic
books and there he gave the famous duck a
career-prolonging personality transplant.

``I get credit for practically raising Donald Duck,''
Barks told the Baltimore Sun in a 1996 interview.

``He was just a noisy, quarrelsome brat in the movies.
When I started doing the comics in 1943, I couldn't do
enough stories with him like that. So I changed
Donald's character. I put him in a role where he had
to act intelligently and speak well enough to put his
thoughts across. He's a lot like a lot of us, though,
wanting to speak his mind.''

He liked to say also that he had turned Donald into an
''Everyman,'' although one that quacks.

Barks also created Scrooge McDuck, with his Gold Bin
stuffed with gold and jewels. ``He's a stingy old
millionaire miser but people love him because they see
that he has as many troubles as people who don't have
money,'' Barks told the Sun.

Barks created ``Ducksburg,'' the town where Donald and
his crew lived and he used photographs from the
National Geographic to inspire the backgrounds for the
stories he drew when Donald and his nephews -- Huey,
Dewey and Louie -- would go on an adventure.

In the more than two decades that he drew the monthly
10-page Donald Duck segment for Walt Disney Comics &
Stories, he developed such other characters as
Donald's super-lucky cousin Gladstone Gander and the
addled inventor Gyro Gearloose.

Paid only about $45 a page for his comic book art,
Barks did not start to make money until his painting
career took off.

Disney had given him permission to paint its
characters when he retired in 1966, but withdrew its
permission in 1976 when fans began to sell photos of
his work for $500 apiece.

For the next five years, he painted scenes of American
history using duck characters while the price of his
Donald Duck portraits soared.

Finally Disney relented and renewed permission for him
to paint its characters and his prices reached into
the six figures.


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