3. essay on Barks 99 in `Dagsavisen'

[Halsten Aastebol]

At 03:18 11.07.00 -0700, Trygve Vatle wrote:
>For those interested and who knows Norwegian. The article can be found here:
>
>http://www.dagsavisen.no/kommentar/fritanker/2000/07/489918.shtml?string=barks
>
>Unfortantely, no drawing...
>
>
>Trygve

Here follows a translation of the essay by Anders Heger in Dagsavisen of 2. 
July 2000:

***************
About a week ago a laconic message appeared on a net site for specially 
interested: "Over the past 4 to 6 weeks Carl's health has steadily become 
worse. He is very weak and tired, and spends the greater part of his day in 
bed or resting in his chair. Carl has requested all medications that are 
prolonging his life be stopped.He will no longer be given his chemotherapy 
pills".

There must be some ten thousands of net surfers who has felt a strange 
sadness upon reading the message. They know 'uncle Carl', at least they 
feel they know him. Death is no tragedy. They know that this is about a man 
who is 99 years of age, with a life achievement that will outlast his own 
life span several times.

I met him once. By then, he was already near deaf, and I had to shout my 
few words into his ear. None of those words contained what I really wanted 
to tell him. First of all that he is one of our times' greatest adventure 
writers. Secondly that he taught me how to read.

To read is sheer magic. It is to follow some scribbles with the eyes, while 
becoming something else, realizing something new, experiencing something. 
Anyone can teach us to combine letters to words. Anyone can bring the words 
into his head. But only when we let the words take us to somewhere else we 
become true readers.

I was 6 when it happened, and since then I have remained with the words. I 
still remember in which panel I deciphered the code. It was in the middle 
of a story about a stubborn old duck who was unrolling a ball of string 
through Africa to prove that he was the richest in the world.

Carl Barks, who may just not reach the age of 100, created uncle Scrooge. 
And cousin Gladstone. And the Beagle Boys, the money bin, Magica, Gyro 
Gearloose and the universe in which they live: Duckburg. In many ways he 
also created Donald, even though a man by the name of Walt Disney had 
scribbled down a few Donald sketches before uncle Carl turned him into a 
literary giant. Walt was a business man. Carl was only an employee, an 
artist and a wage earner. Only an artist. Anyone who knows anything about 
America will realize why one of them became famous while the other one had 
to be laboriously discovered.

About Yggdrasil, the tree that in Norse mythology embraced the entire world 
with it's branches, it was stated in a book I had as a child that: "It was 
not possible to see, exactly because it was so big". Only as an adult did I 
realize the meaning of this. What is everywhere becomes almost invisible. 
Asphalt doesn't show in the city.

This is probably the reason why it takes so unreasonably long time to 
discover some art forms. This is especially true when it comes to the old 
man who is sitting in Oregon, USA, letting his life come to an end. Sure, 
his work was distributed all over the world with the aid of the most 
powerful commercial machinery. But just because of that, it became more 
invisible. Donald was everywhere, he was more common than The Beatles and 
Proysen [a Norwegian writer]. And what is everywhere cannot be art. Not 
until later. It was only the kids in the street who asked each other if 
there were any stories by "the good artist" this Wednesday. And to this 
day, one can still meet people who will give you a strange look if you 
state that it's possible to write Homeric stories about the worlds richest 
duck travelling across the sea in search for a box of horseradish.

Since then I have watched 5 kids achieve the fantastic: to learn how to 
read. I know what they have yet to discover, that it's not in the words, 
but in the story that the art of reading is hidden. And all of them have 
been helped into it by Carl Barks. One got his breakthrough in the story 
about Magica de Spell and Odysseus. Another in the tale of Scrooge and the 
pygmy indians who talk in the rhythm of Longfellow's poem. All of them 
learned the classic tale about Jason and the argonauts, and the dream of 
Shangri-la for the first time in a comic. Maybe they will discover that the 
latter stems from one of the most famous books in the history of 
literature. Just like they might also discover it was Charles Dickens who 
first wrote about Scrooge. And if not, they still have had the pleasure of 
reading how Donald drowned the fairy tail land with a billion bottle caps. 
These are the great stories of our time, and sometime in the future they 
will  be ranked together with Dickens'. Who was also only popular 
literature in his time.

Carl Barks brought comics up to the level of true art, just like the famous 
writers he used in his panels. And he did it without the pompous fuss one 
can see in ambitious "art"--comics of today. He was, like for instance 
Homer or Snorre, most concerned about if the reader could follow him. This 
way he became our first true friend in literature.

Like it says in the story about Scrooge and the scientist who wanted to 
make smell free cabbage (he happened to invent a lethal ray instead): 
"There are too many masters in the world. And too few good friends".

***************************

Regards
Halsten