Carl Barks: Conversations (Conversations With Comic Artists) (Paperback)

~ Donald Ault (Editor) "The original interview for this article was conducted in December 1962 in San Jacinto, California, by Malcolm Willits..." (more)
Key Phrases: comic strip department, riveting gang, money bin, Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck, Walt Disney (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Barks may be history's most widely read anonymous storyteller. When he wrote and drew the Donald Duck comic books in the 1950s, they had an estimated monthly readership of more than 10 million, and the only real person's name that appeared on the comic was Walt Disney. The lovingly drawn stories, encompassing uproarious comedy and rousing adventure, also expanded Donald's one-note animated-cartoon personality and introduced Donald's magnificent skinflint uncle, Scrooge McDuck. In keeping with Barks' obscurity, the 24 interviews collected here come from small-circulation fanzines or are first publications. The earliest was conducted in 1968, after Barks' retirement; he lived another 30 years, painting fine-art renditions of the Disney ducks. In the interviews he veers from seeing himself as a nameless hack to revealing how seriously he took his work. His anonymity allowed for no reader feedback, and when he received his first fan letter in 1960, he thought it was a fellow cartoonist's joke. He probably would have been bemused yet impressed by this tribute to his work's lasting significance. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Description

Disney artist Carl Barks (1901-2000) created one of Walt Disney's most famous characters, Scrooge McDuck. Barks also produced more than 500 comic book stories. His work is ranked among the most widely circulated, best-loved, and most influential of all comic book art.

Although the images he created are known virtually everywhere, Barks was an isolated storyteller, living in the desert of California and preferring to labor without public fanfare during most of his career.

He created work of such exceptional quality that he was accorded the greatest autonomy of any Disney artist. He is the only comic book artist ever to receive a Disney Legends award.

The influence of Barks's work on such filmmakers as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and on such artists as Gottfried Helnwein has extended Barks's significance far beyond the boundaries of comics. After Barks's death at the age of ninety-nine, Roy Disney praised him for his "brilliant artistic vision."

Carl Barks: Conversations is the only comprehensive collection of Barks's interviews. It ranges chronologically from the very first one (with Malcolm Willits, the fan who uncovered Barks's identity) to the artist's final conversations with Donald Ault in the summer of 2000. In between are interviews conducted by J. Michael Barrier, Edward Summer, Bruce Hamilton, and others. Several of these interviews are published here for the first time.

Ault's friendship with Barks, ranging over a period of thirty years, provides an unusually intimate resource not only for standard q&a interviews but also for casual conversations in informal settings.

Carl Barks: Conversations reveals previously unknown information about the life, times, and opinions of one of the master storytellers of the twentieth century.

Donald Ault, a professor of English at the University of Florida, is the author of Narrative Unbound: Re-Visioning William Blake's The Four Zoas and Visionary Physics: Blake's Response to Newton. His work has been published in Studies in Romanticism, The Wordsworth Circle, Modern Philology, and The Comics Journal.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 248 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi (January 23, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578065011
• ISBN-13: 978-1578065011
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,176,424 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Funny, Insightful, Great!, July 19, 2003

By	Rudy Carter (Newark, NJ) - See all my reviews

Wow, I picked up a copy of this book in paperback near where I live and I loved it. Just LOVED it. I'm lucky it made it up here where I am. I'm a big Duck fan, so I wanted to read more about the history and stuff, but I never knew how well-spoken a man Carl Barks was, and this Donald Ault--he's super! He's super because he takes Barks seriously AS A CREATIVE GENIUS, which he is/was. I see from the back cover Ault's written some pretty deep stuff, he's a professor, but he's really readable. I tend to think most (or lots) or people who are really into the Duck are pretty intelligent folks--those I know are. I don't have a heck of a lot of education, like a master's degree or book writing or whatever, but I read this whole book and I understood it and it's truly enriched my experience--and not just of Donald Duck. I can't recommend it enough.

~Rudy C.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Informative But Repetitious, January 11, 2007

By	R. Kane (California) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a good book for finding out about Barks' life, but it is very repetitious because different interviewers kept asking him the same questions over and over. As Perry Mason said, "that question has been asked and answered." I would prefer a straight chronological biography that doesn't keep going over the same ground. Also, it could use a few more illustrations and a better discussion of how Barks taught himself cartooning.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Carl Barks: Master story-teller and artist, June 17, 2009

By	Nevet Serome (Springville, UT USA) - See all my reviews

For those of us who grew up during the 40's, 50's and even the 60's, comic books were our favorite literature. Comic book lovers mostly fell into two camps, the action comic fans of super heros, and the those who enjoyed comics of cartoon animals. But the king of this latter group was Carl Barks who drew Uncle Scrooge, Donald Duck, and Walt Disney's Comics and Stories. Western Publishing produced these comics for Disney but really did not credit its artists as the perception that Walt Disney was the artist was an image they embraced.

Carl Barks understood his role, and as long as he had the maximum amount of creative freedom to write his comics, he was mostly ok with his role. He had bosses of lesser talent in charge of his work, yet he managed greatness despite misguided management.

The style of the book is of interviewer and interviewee, which allows Carl to tell his story in his own words. Not being one to seek the spotlight, it is doubtful that we would know much about Carl Barks without people such as Don Ault who were willing to deal Bark's reclusivness by telling the Carl Barks story by way of an interview format.

A word of advice: Reading this book will only be meaningful if one has read the comics in which Bark's stories are found. If you are not familiar with these comics, find a Carl Barks fan and ask him/her to share some of his stories with you. Then if you find yourself enjoying his humor, his artistry, and the depth of his stories, you will want to know more about the man. This book is a great way to gain such an insight.