Carl Barks doesn't live here any more

Kriton Kyrimis kyrimis at cti.gr
Mon Oct 2 07:36:17 CEST 2000


[I'm posting a translation of the article about Carl Barks' death from
this month's issue of Komix. There's some pretty strong stuff in here,
so I hope that you forgive me for not not going through the text to
correct any spelling errors I may have made while translating on the fly.]

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    The great Duck Man has entered the Pantheon of immortals forever

              CARL BARKS DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANY MORE


  Carl Barks is no longer with us. He passed away in his home in Grants'
  Pass, Oregon in August 25. The news of this loss filled the entire
  world with sorrow and was announced from all the media throught the
  planet... And this was to be expected, as we all were his children.


In March next year, the great Carl Barks would have completed a century of
life, and we had already been preparing to celebrate in a fitting manner.
Fate, however, wanted things to be different, and uncle Carl, a little before
completing his hundredth year, flew above th clouds for a voyage on the wings
of his beloved ducks... For all of us who got to love comics through his
stories, uncle Carl was one of our own people. Even when we made this
magazine, a magazine inspired from his work, we had a picture of him in our
minds, thumbing through it and smiling in satisfaction. We still think of him
in such a manner... Smiling in the company of his ducks, satisfied for the
unique work that he left us.


THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BARKS

Unknown to the wide public until the seventies, the "good artist"--as readers
of the fifties and sicties, who didn't know his name, called him--was born on
March 27, 1901, began working in Walt Disney's Studios in 1935 and soon rose
to become a basic member of the team that created the most enjoyable of Donald
Duck cartoons. In 1943 he dedicated himself exclusively to comics and, until
1966, the year he retired from action in the field of the ninth art, he wrote
and drew more than six thousand pages full of humor, adventure, and mainly an
original comic poetry that marked the history of American comics indelibly.


POETRY IN BARKS' WORK

Barks gave a complex, almost human personality to Donald Duck and set up an
entire world around him. His imagination gave birth to numerous new characters
that came to bring life to thw world of the most famous duck in the world: his
eternal fiancee, Daisy, lucky cousin Gladstone, inventor Gyro Gearloose, teh
Beagle Boys, and, most important, Scrooge McDuck, Donald's extremely rich
uncle, who soon became the central figure of Barks' world.

This world of Barks is a comic and poetic reflection of the real world in
which the "good artist" was living. Injecting the humorous "realism" of
cartoons with references to history, classic literature, world mythology, and
the epic of the great explorations, Carl Barks slowly set up a world of his
own, where the boundaries between and increasingly more pedantic reality and
imagination were becoming less and less distinguishable. The "good artist"
did not just give human characters to his heroes; he taught his readers to see
the world through more "duckish" eyes, to search for a nostalgic and merry
magic, even in the most pedantic aspects of everyday life.


FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

For the heroic crew of _Komix_, Carl Barks was not just one of the great
artists of the golden age of American comics. He was a distant uncle... That
aged uncle with the smile of a child and the sparkling gaze who made us laugh
and daydream, when he would take us on his knees and tell us jokes and stories
about distant lands and lost treasures.

Uncle Carl doesn't live here any more. He is somewhere in heaven. We imagine
him strongly built like a Beagle Boy, elegant like Gladstone, with a smile
bursting through his face as he is making up new jokes and new stories about
ducks, distant lands, and burried treasures... And, maybe, he is even coming
at night to tell them in our dreams... We imagine him fit and well-dressed,
with that old-fashioned nobility, that gentleness of the artists of old times,
sculpting clouds: perhaps that cloud over there that looks like Donald has
been sculpted by him. Good-bye, uncle Carl. Thank you.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

	Kriton	(e-mail: kyrimis at cti.gr)
	      	(WWW:    http://dias.cti.gr/~kyrimis)
-----
"In this world we have an honourable tradition of tactical withdrawal."
-----





More information about the DCML mailing list