Lonely Oregon boy grew up to be a comics legend

By Finn J.D. John
February 25, 2024

I.

SOMETIME IN APRIL of 1960, a shy, retiring, hard-of-hearing comic-book artist named Carl Barks got a letter at his quiet suburban home.

When he opened it, he found that it was a letter from a stranger named John Spicer. And to his astonishment, he found that it was — a fan letter.

“Believe it or not, I have been planning this letter for about four or five years,” Spicer wrote. “I have been kept from doing so for the simple reason that I knew not your name or address. I tried several times, however, but all were in vain.”

Spicer’s letter was how Barks found out that he was, and had been for at least a decade, a legend — and the most popular comic-book artist in the world.

And at first he refused to believe it. Wary of some trick, or a prankster pretending to be a fan to humiliate him, he hesitated to engage with it. But then he decided, why not?

“After eyeing your letter with dark suspicion for several weeks, I have decided to answer it on the assumption that it could be a genuine fan letter,” he wrote back.

And that’s how the world started to learn, for the first time, who Walt Disney’s elusive, anonymous “Good Duck Artist” was.

SHORTLY AFTER THE Second World War, comic book readers started to notice that some of the comics signed by Walt Disney were better than others. The kids mostly assumed that everything came from the pen of the great man himself, but everyone who knew anything about comic art knew that couldn’t be the case. Walt had a stable of writers and illustrators, they knew. Some of these writers and illustrators were better than others.

And one particular artist stood head and shoulders above everyone else at Disney. He was the anonymous artist who wrote, designed and inked Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics published under Disney’s license by Dell Comics, a division of Western Publishing (best known for its Little Golden Books series of children’s books).

This artist was good enough, and his style was distinctive enough, that fans and fellow artists started to recognize his work. They called him “The Good Duck Artist,” or simply “The Duck Man.”

And everyone wondered who on Earth he was! Inquiries sent to Western Publishing and Disney were ignored or answered with unhelpful form letters. The companies' official position was that Walt Disney was the author of all the comics, no matter who held the actual pen that drew them.

Over the years, it became a whole big thing, and a total mystery.

Finally, the editor of an amateur fan magazine called Destiny published a long, flattering article about Walt Disney and his company, forwarded a copy of it to Western Publishing, and asked if they might do an interview with The Duck Man.

Someone at the company apparently found the article charming enough to respond, and revealed Barks’ name and address.

And that’s what led to that fan letter finally arriving at Carl Barks’ desk — seventeen years after he took on his role as the lead Donald Duck comic-magazine writer and artist.

As a side note, it would be another ten years before the world at large would be allowed to know about Carl Barks. That’s because of the Disney policy of pretending Walt himself created all the comics and cartoons. It wasn’t until 1968, four years after Disney’s death, that the company allowed interviews with him to be published, so that folks outside the little world of comic fanzines and comic-cons could learn about him.

By that time, though, he was for the most part done — at age 67, ready for a well-deserved retirement.

CARL BARKS WAS born on March 21, 1901, on a large dryland wheat farm homesteaded by his parents, William and Arminta Barks, near Merrill, about 20 miles southeast of Klamath Falls and just north of the California border.

“We had to work all the time,” Carl recalled later, “so we had very little time to play. We went to school in a little one-room schoolhouse, and there were very few kids to play with. The school was several miles away from a town of any kind — just a little old schoolhouse sitting out there in the sagebrush.”

In the time he had, though, Carl drew comics every chance he got, imitating the styles he saw in the Sunday comics. He got no encouragement from his parents, but he kept at it.

In 1908 the family moved to Midland, about 30 highway miles away from Merrill. There, Carl’s father went into the livestock business. Carl, of course, was pressed into service building stock pens, feeding animals, and helping load them onto train cars. In his spare time, he and his brother Clyde liked to hang around with the cowboys who drifted through Midland looking for work.

As he grew up, Carl got to spend some time working as a cowboy himself, riding horses around Southern Oregon with a six-shooter on his hip. It was just one of the many experiences of working life that would inform his art, many years later.

Something else that would influence his storytelling was the experience of watching his father’s career. William Barks was from Missouri originally, and came to Merrill to try and prove up a homestead as a dryland wheat farm. Fate (as well as the weather) was kind to him for the first few years, and he successfully proved up the claim, leased it out, and expanded into the livestock business in Midland. Then he moved the family to Santa Rosa, down in California, where he bought a prune orchard for $4,000. But he’d overextended himself, and a combination of a dry year and a sharp drop in prune prices ruined him just as Arminta was diagnosed with cancer.

William lost the prune farm and the family retreated to the feedlot in Midland, which they soon lost their lease on. Then they had to move back to the farm in Merrill. All William’s optimism and striving had been for nothing, and the family was back where they had started.

It was a darker version of the “hard-working unlucky Everyman” persona that would become very familiar to Donald Duck fans in future years.

CARL ENDED HIS schooling with the eighth grade. Work desperately needed to be done around the feedlot and farm, and the nearest high school was more than five miles away — too far to walk. After that, for the next decade or so, Carl set out to build a pretty standard-issue working man’s life for himself, polishing his craft as an artist as a side hobby that he hoped might someday grow to become his life’s work. For the time being, though, life conspired to keep him very busy making a living with his muscles.

An early attempt to break into animation in San Francisco ended when his father got sick and he had to hurry home and help on the farm.

Then in 1921, Carl fell in love with a local logger’s daughter, Pearl Turner, and took a job on her father’s crew as a swamper. When the job ended, he took what jobs he could to keep the money coming in. He ended up laboring on a riveting crew in a railroad shop. By now he and Pearl had two daughters, Peggy and Dorothy.

But Carl was always working on cartoons and drawings, trying to develop a comic strip or something that he could try to get some traction with. Art consumed all his evenings and spare time. It became a sore point with Pearl, who wanted a normal social life like every other couple she knew.

Finally, the couple split up, and Carl moved back to Oregon. There he took whatever jobs he could find and continued working on getting work as a freelance cartoonist.

At last, that started to happen. A Minnesota-based risqué gag magazine called The Calgary Eye-Opener started buying his work.

Then a new owner took over the Eye-Opener, laid off the entire staff, and offered to hire Carl for $110 a month. This was in 1931.

AT THE EYE-OPENER, Carl Barks learned his job was basically to crank out as many drawings and write as many gags as he possibly could. The magazine would then buy a few freelance pieces from other artists to fill the issue.

Carl was fast enough that the magazine became almost entirely a one-man show. To disguise this, Carl signed his work with a variety of house names or pseudonyms.

It was a good job, good enough to ride out the first few grim years of the Depression at any rate; and Carl met and married a woman in Minneapolis, Clara Balken, a gorgeous telephone operator at the hotel he lived in.

Then in 1932, a new owner, Annette Fawcett, who called herself the “Henna-Haired Hurricane of Joy and Laughter,” bought the business and fired the editor. Her chaotic, ebullient management style spilled over into the finance department, and Carl and the other employees started regularly getting stiffed on their paychecks. Figuring the Eye-Opener was about to go belly-up, Carl started looking around for another job.

In 1935 he found one, through a newspaper ad for animated-cartoon artists at The Walt Disney Company.

It would involve a fat pay cut — from $120 a month down to $80. Also, when the Eye-Opener learned he was planning to quit, they offered to raise his salary to $160. But it was too late. Carl Barks had just been offered his dream job, and he wasn’t going to let a pay cut stop him from grabbing it. He was already a huge fan of Disney, from the animated shorts they played between features at the movie theaters.

“I just split my sides for weeks laughing at the Big Bad Wolf,” Carl recalled later. “I really wanted to do that stuff.”

After Carl submitted his application, he was immediately invited to come out to California and join the Disney crew — on probation. It was not only a big pay cut, but a big risk as well. If someone at Disney decided he wasn’t good enough, or fast enough, or even the right fit — he’d be out on his ear with a month and a half’s meager pay in his pocket, and maybe not even enough scratch to slink back to Minneapolis.

But he didn’t hesitate.

II.

ON SEPT. 14, 1964, the steamship Al Kuwait was moored at the dock in Kuwait City when something terrible happened: The ship capsized and settled to the harbor floor.

This was bad enough news for the town by itself. But the real problem was, the Al Kuwait was a livestock transport freighter. It was full of sheep. Five thousand of them.

These poor animals were, of course, drowned when the hull flooded. But then the carcasses started to decompose.

This was an environmental disaster, because Kuwait City got its drinking water from that harbor, via a desalinization plant.

Ordinarily cranes would have been brought in to try to pick the ship up. But there just wasn’t time to do that, and anyway if the ship were to break open while on the sling, thousands of rotting carcasses would be dumped into the harbor just a few hundred feet from the water-plant intake. It couldn’t be risked.

The solution came from a Danish engineer named Karl Kroyer. Kroyer’s plan was to rig a pipe to the ship and blast thousands and thousands of small polystyrene balls — Ping-Pong balls, basically — into the hull of the ship. Eventually, he reasoned, there would be enough balls in the ship to float it to the surface; and he could, by carefully choosing where to inject the balls, bring it back onto an even keel at the same time.

Kroyer was given the green light, and on New Year’s Day he was ready to do the job. He turned on his Ping-Pong pumps and blasted 27 million of the balls — 65 tons in all — into the sunken ship.

It rolled upright and lay there low in the water, ready to be towed away from the water plant to safety. Success! The city was saved!

The total cost: $345,000. To save a ship worth $2 million — not to mention the drinking water supply for about 300,000 people.

Kroyer promptly filed patent applications on this ping-pong ball method. In the United Kingdom and Germany, he was duly awarded a patent.

But he ran into trouble in the Netherlands. There, his application for a patent was denied. It seemed someone in the Dutch patent office recognized Kroyer’s “new” technique … from a Donald Duck comic book, “The Sunken Yacht,” published in 1949.

In the comic, Donald and his three nephews — Huey, Dewey, and Louie — raise a sunken yacht from the ocean floor by filling it with Ping-Pong balls shoved into it through a tube.

Since patents can’t be issued on ideas that other people have previously published, the Dutch authorities denied Kroyer his patent.

The man who could have patented this idea, if he hadn’t been too busy pumping out Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic books, was of course native Oregonian Carl Barks — who by 1949 was already Walt Disney’s most valuable comic-book artist.

When Carl first came aboard at Disney, though, that status was still far in his future. He was hired in 1935 as an “inbetweener,” one of the lower-level artists who drew the less-important cels “in between” the keyframe cels that the lead artist would do. It was grueling, uncreative work, but every new animator had to pay his or her dues as an inbetweener — like every new hire at a sawmill has to pay his or her dues pulling green chain.

While he was doing this, though, Carl worked on the side developing gags. One of these got him noticed by the big guy himself, Walt Disney, and resulted in a memorable scene in the cartoon Modern Inventions (1937) in which a robotic barber chair accidentally flips Donald Duck upside down, gives his butt-feathers a “high and tight” haircut, and applies shoe polish to his beak.

After that, Carl was assigned to the story department, and for the next five years or so he was an animated-cartoon artist.

But by 1942, he had developed an allergic reaction to something in the air conditioning system at Disney. So he quit, planning on moving to the dry country east of Los Angeles and starting a chicken farm.

But just before he left, he collaborated with Jack Hannah in a one-shot 64-page comic book titled Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold, published under contract by Western Publishing.

Pirate Gold was a huge hit, and Barks asked Western if they had any more similar projects he might like to do. They immediately gave him an assignment, a synopsis for a story to draw.

As time went on, Western soon realized that Carl Barks worked best on his own. By about 1946, they were simply buying everything he did. He would develop a story, outline it, pencil it, ink it, letter it, and send it to them; if it didn’t violate any of the house “don’ts” (no sex, no cursing, no blood and gore, etc.) they would simply shoot him a check for $12.50 per page and he would be on to the next one.

OVER THE NEXT two decades, Carl Barks would crank out an enormous volume of Disney duck stories. He added classic characters to the roster — the most famous one being, of course, Scrooge McDuck, but also evil sorceress Magica DeSpell, infuriatingly lucky loafer Gladstone Gander, rattlebrained inventor Gyro Gearloose, the diabolical Beagle Boys crime family, and several other minor characters, all inhabiting a town called Duckburg.

Clara, Carl’s new wife, sank deep into alcoholism. They were divorced in 1951. It seems to have been the same thing that ruined his first marriage — she wanted some of his time, and he wanted to spend all his time on art. Carl’s third wife, Margaret “Garé” Williams, was already a successful landscape artist when they met, so she understood. They were married in 1954.

Under Carl’s direction, Donald Duck became a sort of relatable everyman. Usually accompanied by his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, he traveled around the world on improbable quests, getting in and out of trouble in exotic places, getting involved in hopeful hustles, getting defeated by bad luck, rescuing and being rescued by his three nephews, and reflecting many of the changes the world was going through at the time.

One particularly interesting aspect of Carl’s panels was how he integrated gorgeous, detailed landscapes into them. He collected National Geographic magazine, and used photographs from it as models for his stories when the ducks went to some exotic location for a bonkers adventure, as they frequently did.

So under his direction, the Donald Duck comics became a combination of serious art, complex storytelling, and funny-paper slapstick. With a Westerner’s disdain for snobbish distinctions, Carl regarded his art as no less valuable than the fine art displayed in galleries. He wasn’t just pumping out silly talking-animal crap to entertain children — he was fully committed to expressing himself as an artist and a storyteller in the medium he had access to.

And readers, to Disney’s probable surprise, responded accordingly. At one point Donald Duck was selling more than 3 million magazines a month, which was the second highest circulation of any periodical (behind only Reader’s Digest). Many, if not most, of those were being bought and read by adults, not children. Many children of the baby boom grew up with Donald Duck and never outgrew him. The stories continued to be interesting to them decades after they got bored with more traditional children’s fare like Bugs Bunny, Archie, and Ri¢hie Ri¢h the Poor Little Rich Boy.

In terms of worldview, you could think of Carl Barks as the sort of character Archie Bunker was based on. He was socially conservative and felt that America was at its best when it minded its own business and stayed out of foreign affairs, and had noticeable contempt for loafers and people who wouldn’t work. He drew fairly heavily on racial stereotypes in his art, and some of it has not aged well; but he doesn’t seem to have shown any particular racism or antisemitism. His political philosophy was similar to that of Edgar Rice Burroughs, another individualistic Western ex-cowboy storyteller from the same era (who, by the way, also had an Oregon connection, although not as strong; here's a link to the Offbeat Oregon column about that).

ONCE THE COMIC-BOOK world knew who he was, Carl acquired a sort of cult following in the growing world of comic conventions and fanzines. After John Spicer’s letter, Spicer and his brother came out to visit, which was nice, and other fans followed as well. But after a few years, as word got around, the hospitality duties became a bit of a chore, and his home was close enough to Disneyland that some fans actually took to dropping by in hopes he’d be around. So in 1983, Carl moved back to Oregon, settling in Grants Pass, and that’s where he lived when, in August of 2000, he died at the age of 99.

Today, there is an asteroid named after him — Carl’s favorite Donald Duck story was “Island in the Sky,” in which the ducks fly off to the asteroid belt to find a safe place for Uncle Scrooge to store his money. Steven Spielberg and George Lucas are on record stating that not only did they get the rolling-boulder booby trap scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark from an Uncle Scrooge comic, they planned the visuals of the entire movie around an aesthetic developed from Carl’s duck comics.

And Osamu Tezuka, the most important seminal figure in Japanese manga and animation and the creator of Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy), borrowed some key insights and techniques from a stack of Donald Duck comics given to him by an American soldier friend in 1946 to create basically the foundation of modern manga and anime.

Not bad for a humble farm boy from a remote part of the Oregon Outback, eh?

(Sources: Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book, a book by Thomas Andrae published in 2006 by University Press of Mississippi; “The Hunt for the Anonymous Cartoonist Who Transformed Pop Culture,” a video essay by Matt TT (youtube.com/@mattwith4ts) published Jan. 20, 2024, on YouTube; “The Donald Duck as Prior Art Case,” an article by Arnoud Engelfriet published in 2006 on the Ius Mentis Website, iusmentis.com.)