COMICS JOURNAL

[Don Rosa]

I don't know if there's a website to go to to read bits of the new COMICS
JOURNAL or if it's sold wherever any of you are... but the current issue
has an excellent essay by Michael Barrier of, more or less, final thoughts
about Carl Barks and his life and works. Barrier deserves the title as
"world's greatest Carl Barks fan/expert" since he was one of the earliest
fans who sought the Old Master out, and has done more than anyone else to
write about the greatness of his works. So I was particularly pleased that,
amid the many other superb observations, Barrier expounds something I've
always thought -- that Mr. Barks should be remembered strictly for the work
he did in writing and drawing comic books stories prior to 1967, and not at
all for his paintings and other "collectibles" endeavors of his final
years. Actually, Barrier is a bit harsher than even I am on this matter --
I've always thought of the paintings as "fun" but not done in the original
spirit of the "real" stories, and I liked them primarily because they
enabled Mr. Barks to finally get just a fraction of the $ he should have
earned for creating the world's most popular comic books. Barrier calls the
paintings "awful" and "kitsch" that got worse as they went along, and since
he thinks Mr. Barks was far from poverty-stricken before the paintings
began, Barks and the world would have been better off if none of that had
ever happened. Maybe so... Barrier uses as his proof of that the state of
affairs which all that finally culminating in involving the so-called
"Studio" which he declines to explain in painful detail, which I think was
the proper way to handle it. That 5 years of Mr. Barks' life would be best
wiped from the collective memory of the planet at large, even though that's
a "revisionist" attitude for a history buff to have.
I even liked the one mention I received -- even though it was a negative
comparison to Mr. Barks, it was nonetheless absolutely 100% true!  But I'll
let you hunt down the article and read that and all the other excellent
thoughts and reflections in it.