Barks late stories and paintings

[Donald Ault]

 (I'm writing this not in an awful hurry, so please forgive any
typographical errors.)
Before I leave for Aix-en-Provence on June 13 to teach a course in
international comics (including sessions on French and English versions of
many Barks stories), I felt the need to contextualize a few of the comments
that have been made recently about Carl Barks' late stories and his
paintings. Much of this will soon appear in my books "The Comic Vision of
Carl Barks" and "Conversations: Carl Barks," both from Mississippi Press:

 I agree that there is a very complex methodological relationship between
artists' statements about their work and the accurate and imaginative
interpretations that must be given to them by scholars and readers if they
are to remain a part of scholarly (and popular)discourse. I would like to
suggest that there is a kind of proportional equation between "intensity of
intention" and the emergence of legitimate "unintended interpretive
consequences" from works of great narrative art:



"The greater the intensity or focus of intention, the greater the
possibility for unintended interpretive consequences."



Barks had a prodigious capacity for focusing his attention on his conscious
intentions--for example, timing gags "to the split second" ("You have to do
it like you were directing a play and phone up all the actors and tell them
exactly what to do. Everything has to be timed down to the split second."
[Ault phone conversation with Barks, May 20,1996]). His attention was so
great that after he mailed off a story, thrown away his minimalist notes for
it, and started another, he couldn't even remember what the previous story
was about! (Phone conversation with Ault, date temporarily misplaced)
Because he was such a great narrative artist (and this tends to be true of
all great narrative artists), his attention on what he was intensely aware
of doing allowed a whole domain of "something else" (multiple unintended
interpretive consequences) to show up. I do feel it is important to take
into account what Barks thought he was doing, because it is often an index
to what he was doing "accidentally," which was often a lot more complex than
he thought it was: "Actually it is interesting that it's possible to find
such construction in my stories, because so much of it was done
instinctively by me that I didn't have time to stop and think of the
construction that I was building. It just came out and fell in place, and I
had to work fast, had to turn out so many pages a month, so an awful lot of
the stuff that looks like it was carefully planned was really accidental."
(Barks interview with Donald and Lynda Ault, 6-13,99)



Here are some interview excerpts (some of which appeared in the Comics
Journal Barks commemorative issue):



Barks interview 6-13-97 (with Donald and Lynda Ault)



"I believe that as time goes by people will realize those paintings I've
done are all based on stories, and if they don't know the story, the
painting will be kind of meaningless, and so I believe the stories will be
the thing that lives on into posterity. If a couple of generations come
along that have never read my stories, those paintings will become just
meaningless pictures of funny animals."



Ault: "This has been a bigger part of your career than anything else; you
put your heart and soul into them."



"Yes, but that's my workaholic way of living-if I don't paint something that
I can feel a little pride in, I don't want to paint it in the first place. I
like to outdo my own expectations and outdo whatever the guy expected when
he ordered it."



Expansion and modification of this statement in Barks Interview 5-30-00
(with Donald Ault, Bruce Hamilton, John Ronan, and Nicky Wright):



"[Knowing the stories] would make a big difference in the paintings-you bet.
I feel that if nobody would have read the stories, the pictures would be
meaningless..You are telling a situation-a happening, a short happening from
any particular story. You're not telling the whole story, but I put enough i
n a painting like 'Spangled and Flashy' that anyone who had never read my
comics could look at that and wonder, 'Why is Uncle Scrooge eyeing that
chick there by the piano in such a hostile way?'"



In the Barks interview with Donald Ault and Thomas Andrae (August 5, 1975),
Barks mentioned that he liked to do the paintings better than the comics
because he had "more complete control" over all aspects of the final
product, and he got a good deal of satisfaction from sometimes being able to
"see the expression" on the buyer's face-something that never happened in
all his years of comic book work.



I'm adding the following piece of commentary from my Preface to the Finland
Barks commemorative issue (which has thus far appeared only in Finnish):

 From Preface by Donald Ault:



Barks' worldview and visual style.determine his each other in different
periods-but his style was continuously shifting, so the body of his work
constitutes a moving, transforming world view-indeed, a multiplicity of
world views always pulling against one another. Not only is the way the
characters look at different times in Barks' career expressive of shifts in
narrative and worldview but the ink work and panel layouts themselves were
constantly undergoing transformation. Consequently, Barks never repeated
himself. He could not keep his style static even if he had wanted to do so.
He often told me that it was just "natural" for an artist to keep changing
his style without ever thinking about it, and his style continued to change
into the very last drawings he ever made. Because the style of his drawing
is interior to his vision, he could never at a later period fully recreate
his earlier ink (or drawing) style. In the different medium of painting (and
late in his career, color pencil) he could reconstitute (and not just
simulate) and give "a different view of" events in his earlier work (Ault
interview, June 13-14,1997). Unlike the artists who have tried to emulate
Barks' style from a particular period, Barks never copied or simulated
himself. He did have a definite opinion about the relationship between the
periods of his visual and storytelling styles, however:



I did the best art in the 1960s-the best line work, the best drawing; the
best stories with the most spontaneity were in the late 1940s and early
1950s; in the earlier 1940s I was still searching for ways to tell my
stories." (Ault/Hamilton/Ronan/Wright interview, April 30,1999)



I liked to draw Donald best in the sixties because I had finally gotten
around to a style and proportions for the duck that suited me fine, and I
had a great set of pens to draw those accented lines very nicely. My lines
were stronger in the sixties, and it was harder for the background colors to
sort of nullify my drawing-cover it up or hide it. (Ault/Hamilton
interview/Ronan/Wright interview, April 30, 1999)



I think my drawing in the last few years was getting to be pretty darned
professional-looking. My pen and ink lines had gotten to where they had a
nice polish and a swing to them. (Ault interview, June 13-14,1997)