Barks covers question

jvainio@urova.fi jvainio at urova.fi
Tue Jan 22 21:33:39 CET 2002


In November I visited the editorial offices of the Finnish Aku Ankka. While I 
was there up came something that I hadn't really thought about before. They knew 
me as something of an art collector and the conversation turned to the two Barks 
pieces I have: two blue pencil cover preliminaries, one for Walt Disney's Comics 
and Stories #281 ("Feud and Far Away" and a Daisy Duck's Diary story) and one 
for Uncle Scrooge #58 ("Giant Robot Robbers"). They're from 1963-1964. 
Looking at the published covers I've always thought that they were inked by 
someone else than Barks. They don't LOOK like Barks! Yet when I mentioned this 
to Markku Kivekas, the Aku Ankka editor, he looked shocked. He challenged me to 
prove my point and said that he had never read anywhere anything like that. 
I thought about this and went through 'all the usual suspect' book sources. 
Nowhere could I find any mention of this. Where did I get this notion?
Now, I'm not an expert on Barks's later work because I don't care too much for 
what happened to his drawing style after mid-50s, but did it get THIS bad?? 
Comparing the blue pencil sketches (and there's a whole section of them 
published in the hardcover Carl Barks Library) and the published cover I see a 
definite non sequitor: the sketches DO look like Barks's work, but the inked 
work DOESN'T. (I'm not talking about all of them, because many clearly were 
inked by Barks, but some, like the ones I mentioned). 

So, in a nutshell, here's my question to the list: did Barks ink all his covers 
himself or was someone else inking them in the later years, based on Barks's 
pencils? If someone else inked them, can you point me to a written source saying 
that? If Barks inked them himself, can you explain why they look different than 
the art in the stories? Did he ink them with his feet??

Even suspecting something like this lead Markku to announce that this would be 
the "biggest news since the burning of Rome".

---Jyrki Vainio, Finland (currently U.S.)



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