Donald Duck first appeared in Disney’s 1934 automobiletoon The Smart Little Hen (beneath). In his subsequent roles, he fastly developed into that still-familiar figure the New Yorker as soon as described as “personified irritability.” However it might take him another decade or so to turn into greater than an incompetent, quick-to-anger foil for Mickey Mouse. It will additionally take the thoughts and hand of Carl Barks, a former Disney artist who’d retreated to the sting of the California desert to boost chickens and draw just a few comic books for additional money. That ostensible aspect gig finaled thirty years, during which Barks wrote and drew about 500 Donald Duck stories, constructing a whole world round him now regarded as one of many niceest works of American comic artwork.
At the same time as Barks’ comics turned enormously popular, he labored on them in complete anonymity; followers known as him “the Good Duck Artist” (which now appears extra of a commalestary on the artistic standards of Disney comics on the time) or “the Duck Man.” As comics Youtuber matttt places it in the video above, “within the early 9teen-fifties, the Duck Man was promoteing three million comics each single month, and but nobody knew his identify,” as a result of “Disney was intent on holding alive the parable that Walt Disney himself personally drew the comics.” Regardless of that, it was clear to many learners, younger and outdated, that one particular Donald Duck artist was professionalducing material of exceptional ambition and “astoundingly excessive quality.” It will take the especially dedicated amongst them years and years of repeated makes an attempt earlier than discovering out his identify.
“The duck comics have been, at their greatest, rip-roaring, edge-of-your-seat, globe-trotting comic adventures,” says matttt. “They really feel much less like Steamboat Willie and extra like Indiana Jones or Star Wars — or, ought to I say, Indiana Jones and Star Wars really feel just like the duck comics, as a result of each George Lucas and Steven Spielberg grew up learning, and are vocal followers of, the Duck Man.” Other avowed Barks enthusiasts embody R. Crumb, Matt Groening, and even Osamu Tezuka, the “God of Manga” himself. “Even once I open manga from a lot later, like Dragon Ball or One Piece, by artists who, to my knowledge, have never learn a Donald Duck comic, I see the Duck Man’s influence: in these half-page scene-setting splashes, the massive eyes, expressive faces, the sense of movement and pacing.”
Barks solely got here into the public eye after his actual retirement, and in his later a long time discovered himself fêted around the globe. Generations of learners had grown up familiar with not simply his sophisticated interpretation of Donald Duck and his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie, but additionally the town of Duckburg he created and the characters with whom he populated it: Gyro Gearunfastened, the Beagle Boys, Magazineica DeSpell, and most distinguished of all, Donald’s impossibly rich uncle Scrooge McDuck. Like most millennials, I first encountered all of them by way of DuckTales, the Disney TV collection with a Barksian penchant for exotic travels and ironic finishings; this prepared me to appreciate Barks’ original stories as Gladstone Comics subsequently reprinted them within the nineties. And like all former younger Barks followers, I’ve solely come to appreciate them extra in grownuphood.
Related Content:
How Walt Disney Automobiletoons Are Made: 1939 Documalestary Provides an Inside Look
An Early Version of Mickey Mouse Enters the Public Area on January 1, 2024
Watch 13 Experimalestal Brief Movies by Tezuka Osamu, the Walt Disney of Japan
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the ebook The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles and the video collection The Metropolis in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceebook.
