AW: Barks consistency

Cord Wiljes cord at wiljes.de
Thu Aug 21 14:20:16 CEST 2003


Nils from Norway recently sent some very insightful comments on the
topic of continuity in Barks' duck stories.

Here are excerpts taken from Donald Ault's compilation "Carl Barks
Conversations" which contains lots of highly interesting interviews with
the grand master. So here is what Barks thought about continuity.

The interview was taken in 1973 by Donald Ault (typos by me, sorry):

p. 45/46:

CB: I just built each story as a little story and wound it up with a
comical ending without worrying about whether it made any sense. [If
Uncle Scrooge loast all his money in one episode,] the next time I
wanted to use him and his money I just went ahead and used them. I
didn't think it was necessary to worry as to whether he got it back from
this previous episode or not. The episodes were not even connected; they
were different comic books. Each one sold for a dime.

p. 48/49:

DA: When you first introduced your characters - Scrooge, Gladstone, Gyro
Gearloose, the Beagle Boys - you treated them as if they'd been around.
It really fascinated me. Do you have any thoughts why you did that,
because it seerns like a pattern?

CB: I guess I did it so as to save myself a heck of a lot of
introducing. I would introduce them in such a way that you knew what
they were and then let the story develop their character. As you read
more of the story you began to understand more about the guy. Instead of
trying to do it all in one series of pages, why it was just sort of fed
to you a little time, like vitamin pills.

DA: The sense of reality of the stories - I got the feeling that the
events going on between or outside the stories, and every once in a
while you get a glimpse into this world. And yet you rarely made a
reference between stories. The ducks would never say, "Remember when i
to get the Golden Helmet." But when you were introducing new characters,
quite often there would be this indication that things had be on that
the reader hadn't known about. You never thought about that?

CB: I think that what has happened now is that over the years all
stories have been read and the relation of one story to another has come
apparent to all of you readers, and you can see the connection to the
characters and the build-up of the characters and all. Now when I was
working, I was working from the other end of the line. All of these
charkters were all strangers to me, and each story had to stand by
itself; and when I was developing these characters, I rernember having
thoughts like "Should I mention something about a previous story that
had taken place?" And always I discarded that idea because I felt
there's no worse in picking up a comic book on the stand and starting to
read and finding that you are reading something that is continued from
some earlier book that you don't have and have no means of getting. I
find a frustration in that. I notice that is used a lot in these Marvel
comics, but I wouldn't go in for that stuff. I felt that each story had
to be a complete story in itself, and whatever introduction of a
character that took was just an incidental part of the story. lf I used
that character again, he was just introduced in the part that he was
going to play in that story, not on the strength of what he had been in
the past. Take a character like Gyro. He was an inventor, but I didn't
go back and rehash a bunch of his earlier inventions in order to show
what a great inventor he was. I let him go ahead and show what he could
do in this story in which he was acting

DA: But when Scrooge had his own comic, you did sort of assume that knew
who he was, since he was the main character?

CB: Well, I tried to guard against it, but occasionally it did get to
where, carelessly, I just let things go as if whoever was reading it
would know who in the hell he was. That was bad.

DA: So when you were doing the Uncle Scrooge comics-am I putting words
in your mouth-you were sort of introducing him every time you wrote the
comic, as if this were the first time anyone had ever read an Uncle
Scrooge comic?

CB: I wasn't exactly that so much as to say that, well, here is a rich
guy -he's got such and such an influence over Donald or over the events
in this story. It's hard to put it into words. He was not deliberately
introduced as a new character each time, but he was treated as an
understandable character; that is, you understood that he was a guy with
certain characteristics. I felt he should be handled in such a way that
the reader need to ever have known about Unde Scrooge before, that he
could still gather enough out of this role that Scrooge was playing that
he would still get sense out of it.

DA: Scrooge wasn't ever exactly the same character in any two stories,
was he? There were certain aspects of his character that were added just
fo one particular story, and he would have those characteristics for
that story alone. For example, in the Klondike story he had a bad
memory, but he had a noticeably bad memory  in only one story. In more
subtle ways, in other stories, he would have certain characteristics
that were totally developed, explored, and then dropped after that one
story.

CB: Each was a gimmick, each was the vehicle or the running gag of the
story. Like the story in which he was addicted to nutmeg tea. I'm
beginning to get some clippings out of some underground comic called
Creem that implies that he was a drug addict because he was addicted to
nutmeg and that nutmeg taken in sufficient quantities can have an effect
on your

DA: That's true, supposedly.

CB: The reason I chose nutmeg was that it was something that grew in the
tropics and gave him an excuse to go to the tropics. God, otherwise I
could have said, "codfish tails," and sent him to Iceland.

DA: But t his craving for nutmeg tea never appeared again.

CB: No, no. It was just a gimmick to make a story. (laughs)


Cord
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