DCML digest, Vol 1 #220 - 10 msgs

[bhc@primenet.com]

Don wrote:

>in my opinion, a living wooden puppet and a big Blue Fairy and a
>really big talking cricket dressed in an insect-size tuxedo are a lot more
>fantastic than lost civilizations of square people or underground folks.
>Barks often used stories where Gearloosian science performed impossible
>wonders which is a "fiction" still based on the existence of the wonders of
>real science. Yes, he told stories many ways, but still  *within certain
>bounds* and I do so as well, even though my ways are obviously not
>*precisely* Barks', only based on his foundations.

There does seem to be in Barks an inclination to see things happening 
in scientific and/or natural ways, and applying his ingenious senses 
of exaggeration and extrapolation to create the fantastic aspects of 
so many of his all-original stories. That's one of the things I loved 
most about them, and kept me reading them (mostly in reprint) even as 
I was getting away from "kids" comics and into super-heroes and 
science fiction. Heck, it's what I still love.

However, I don't think Barks worked "within certain bounds"; in fact, 
I think he spent his career breaking out of them. How else to explain 
the 10-page wonders he conjured from Donald's daily life? How else 
could he have captured the imaginations of so many readers with 
adventures spawned from what he found in National Geographic? He had 
the strictures of the medium, and of working in it, to win through, 
which required nothing less than 100% of everything he had in his 
creative arsenal. Had he held anything back, erected deliberate 
boundaries around his genius, then I believe it's very doubtful we 
would ever have heard of Carl Barks.