UnBarks it

Reverse engineering the brilliance of Carl Barks

I got a lot of response on my recent post about ‘Duck Man’ Carl Barks - this Disney artist is obviously an inspiration to many others too - so I’m happy to pursue my research into what EXACTLY it is that makes his Duck-stories so timelessly brilliant…

Re-reading the old Duck-albums I devoured as a child, I came across this story from 1958, titled ‘Dramatic Donald’:

Left: the Dutch album, with cover by Daan Jippes; right: the opening page of the original story (found on Inducks.org)

On the second page of this story there’s an excellent example of Barks’ funny and engaging visual storytelling style:

The best way to uncover Barks’ creative brilliance, is to “unBarks” this sequence, as I have done here:

Technically, the same thing happens: Donald hears Daisy wants him to take part in a play and he goes to the theater to hear more. Yet, what Barks does is so much more engaging!

I love “deconstructing” Barks like this. It makes me more confident in “finding the funny” in my own comic plots. Sometimes I tend to think that putting in more humor will give me less space to tell the story - but Barks proves the opposite is true: he uses less words and we get to know much more about Donald’s character and intentions this way!