Biography of Carl Barks

Mayor of Duckburg

27 March 1901 25 August 2000 Carl Barks was born on 27 March of 1901 on a farm near Merrill, Oregon, a tiny town on the border with California. Carl is a young loner, partially due to the isolated location of his house character and partial deafness that afflicted him during those years. The tendency to isolate themselves and to avoid contact with others brings it immediately became interested in drawing, closing for hours in his room to make squiggles or those that could be called, maybe improperly, "studies". In December 1918 the family Barks, following an accident that destroyed their home, tried your luck migrating from Oregon. The character of Carl Meanwhile, fortunately all maturing, arriving in time for a decent self-confidence. Here then face many different jobs in order to keep, in the best tradition of the "american way of life". Does the cowboy, the farrier and blacksmith but meanwhile does not abandon the design, its authentic aspiration. Its first trials were published in the 1920s by a Canadian magazine (the "Calgary Eye-Opener"), while, in 1935, he was hired by Disney, who had created the character for a year of Donald Duck, known as Donald Duck. Working hard at Disney, Barks in a few years would become known just as "The Duck Man", the man of the ducks. This extraordinary artist, in fact, gave Donald a new appearance and a personality very much characterized clownish and irascible together. Rivers of ink have been spent to frame Donald, seen from time to time as the average American or the prototype of a certain type of character in today's society. It remains only to refer to the words of the same Barks, which in a statement said: "there is no person in the United States that it can't identify with him. It's like everybody and everybody makes mistakes. " To this, add that Barks gave to the famous duck also has an adventurous spirit and indomitable in his own way, that brings him so to travel and explore the world, facing a thousand adventures. Careless then reality or historical verisimilitude, often the adventures of Donald Duck were placed in different periods of history and mythology, enriching this way the range of its narrative possibilities. In 1947 another stroke of genius: invents the rich uncle of Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, able to exploit it and to vessarlo in a thousand different ways. Following the resounding success that the stories were, and appreciation that Disneyesque videos "additions" and the new characters generated in public, by the time the duck family expanded more and more, giving way to the amazing creativity of Barks to let off steam. Readers learned to become familiar with the characters then entered forever in the collective imagination as Huey, Dewey, and Louie or as the obnoxious cousin Gladstone Gander; or fishing from the extensive gallery disneyana, as the inventor gyro Gearloose or Amelia the witch who lives on Mount Vesuvius and has as its sole purpose the theft of the lucky coin that Scrooge McDuck guards religiously and so on. In 1973 he decided to leave the task to a professional designer and scriptwriter and switched to oil painting. Despite everything, however, it fails completely to distance himself emotionally from what, for better or for worse, has affected his life. His paintings are populated by ducks, almost as if he wanted to "lift" in consideration of the public and give them a "noble" version. He died on August 25, 2000 for leukemia at his home in Grants Pass, Oregon, at the ripe old age of 99 years. Leave an heir recognized it, Don Rosa, faithful to the unmistakable style of the master.
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.