Barks, Carl (27 Mar. 1901-25 Aug. 2000), cartoonist, was born on a wheat ranch near Merrill, Oregon, the son of William Barks, a homesteader, and Arminta Johnson Barks, a housewife. Carl attended a one-room school in the Lone Pine District and practiced drawing by copying newspaper comic-strip characters. In 1908 the family moved several times as William pursued other ventures but returned to the ranch in 1914, where Carl's mother died of cancer. At fifteen, Carl left school after finishing the eighth grade and worked for his father. In 1917 he completed some work of the Landon Correspondence School of Cartooning, and in December 1918 he moved to San Francisco, working in a print shop and trying unsuccessfully to sell cartoons to local newspapers. In 1920 he returned to the ranch and the next year married sixteen-year-old Pearl Turner; they had two daughters.

In 1923 Barks moved to Roseville, California, and worked in the railroad shops of the Pacific Fruit Express. He also freelanced cartoons to College Humor, Judge, and such mildly risqué humor magazines as Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang and the Calgary Eye-Opener, both published in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In 1930 Banks separated from his wife, then he returned to Merrill and sold cartoons through the mail, mostly to the Calgary Eye-Opener, which hired him in November 1931. Shortly after arriving in Minneapolis, Barks became editor of the magazine and was one of its few contributors until he left in November 1935 for the Walt Disney Studio in Los Angeles. Assigned to the in-between department, where he did the drawings that completed the movement between key poses, he soon moved to the story unit being formed for Donald Duck shorts. In 1938 Barks married Clara Balken, whom he met while in Minneapolis; the couple would later divorce and the union would produce no children.

In the seven years he worked at Disney, Barks collaborated on about three dozen Donald Duck shorts, including Modern Inventions, Good Scouts, and Timber. In 1942 he left Disney and moved to San Jacinto, California, where he set up a chicken farm. Almost at once, he began writing and drawing Donald Duck comic book stories for Western Publishing, which produced Disney's print offspring. Beginning with his first story in the April 1943 issue of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, Barks created ten-page Duck stories for all but thirty of the next 280-plus issues.

Structurally, the stories resemble the animated cartoons--a dilemma initiates a string of humorous crises, each more extreme than the last, culminating in a comic crescendo that yields a denouement with moral import. One story seems to prove that extremism is ultimately destructive. Another demonstrates that braggarts are always deflated. In others, greed leads to defeat, and the egotist who heeds no advice is likely to be proven wrong. In September 1943 Barks began to hone his storytelling skills with the book-length stories he produced for the Donald Duck title. Although laced with comedic moments, these tales were otherwise straight adventure. In the ten-pagers, Donald was a logical extension of the hot-tempered bumbler of animated films. As the parent figure for his nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, he was a disciplinarian but usually wrong-headed, a braggart and, predictably, a fraud. In the adventure stories, Barks took this blustering bungler and made him occasionally heroic--and made his readers believe it. Depending on the needs of the plot, Donald could be cowardly (it made him more suitable for jokes) or brave. Usually he was simply well intentioned; he was brave when his nephews were threatened and impulsively quick to act, which got him into difficulties that he couldn't get out of without substantial assistance from the nephews. Barks made it all fit into one personality, a signal creative achievement.

Barks explained that he felt like Donald, an unlucky victim of circumstances. "He is everybody," Barks told Edward Summer, "he makes the same mistakes that we all make. He is sometimes a villain, and he is often a real good guy, and at all times, he is just a blundering person like the average human being" (Andrae, p. 66).

With the story "Christmas on Bear Mountain" in Donald Duck for December 1947, Barks introduced a duck character of his own who emerged as his stellar creation--Donald's fabulously rich uncle, Scrooge McDuck, a web-footed evocation of the celebrated Charles Dickens character of Ebenezer Scrooge. In "Only a Poor Old Man," the story in the first Uncle Scrooge comic book (Dell Four Color No. 386, March 1952), Barks found the formula that converted Scrooge from an unsympathetic skinflint into a beloved comedic star. In a key development, Scrooge visits the swimming-pool-sized bin where he keeps his cash, dives into the heaped-up lucre "like a porpoise," burrows through it "like a gopher," and tosses it up and lets it hit him on the head. This inspired maneuver, repeated as ritual with almost every appearance of Scrooge, reveals that Scrooge isn't greedy for money in order to gain the power that it brings or the things that it can buy; nor is he a miser for the pure sake of possessing money. For Scrooge, his money is a toy; he plays with it. No longer just a grasping and somewhat menacing tightwad, he now seems a comically quirky obsessive compulsive to which Barks added a pronounced streak of Yankee ingenuity and Puritan work ethic. In more than seventy issues of Uncle Scrooge, Scrooge McDuck's wealth financed escapades that take Donald and his nephews from Duckburg to the Andes or to the bottom of the ocean.

In the other major support characters that he concocted--Gyro Gearloose and Gladstone Gander--Barks completed his portrait of the American mythos. If Scrooge is capitalism, then the virtuoso inventor Gyro represents the technological expertise that nurtures capitalism. And Gladstone, so lucky he need never work or otherwise lift a hand, suggests that without a measure of luck, no one wins on the stock market, that ultimate symbol of effortless capitalism.

In July 1954 Barks married Margaret "Gare" Williams, a wildlife painter who had been assisting him by lettering and inking backgrounds. In June 1966 Barks retired from comic books; still, like most Disney artisans, he was nearly anonymous, but his work was readily recognized by generations of readers, who thought of him as "the good artist"--"the Duck man." As comic book collectors grew more numerous, Barks was widely identified by name, and in 1971, through a special arrangement with the copyright holder, he began doing oil paintings of the Disney ducks. He produced over 130 canvases, the first ones priced at $150 to $300; ultimately, they were selling for several hundred thousand dollars. In 1994 Barks made guest appearances in eleven European countries, where he was accorded rock star status. By 1983 he and his wife had settled in Grants Pass, Oregon, where she died in 1993 and he, in 1999, of leukemia.

In creating stories for children, Barks, "the Duck man," joins Dr. Seuss, A. A. Milne, Kenneth Graham, and Lewis Carroll in elevating the human spirit with an oeuvre that also engages and entertains adults, embodying the enduring axioms of American mythology by wrapping them in good-natured laughter with the giddy excitement of rollicking adventure and tales both funny and fun.

In addition to producing stories for Walt Disney's Comics and Stories, Donald Duck, and Uncle Scrooge, Barks created material for other duck titles (sometimes just the scripts or art only), Gyro Gearloose, Huey, Dewey and Louie: Junior Woodchucks, Grandma Duck's Farm Friends, and a few summer and holiday specials entitled Vacation Parade and Christmas Parade. Early in his career (1943-47), he also did over two dozen stories about Barney Bear and Benny Burro for Our Gang Comics. The earliest substantial work on Carl Barks, and the foundation for much of what followed, is Carl Barks and the Art of the Comic Book (1981) by Michael Barrier; it includes an extensive bibliography of Barks's work as well as a short biography. Barrier also produced a useful appreciation, "The Duck Man," in The Comic-Book Book (1973), 206-225. The most detailed treatment of Barks's life is in the "Chronology" of Carl Barks Conversations (2003), which contains interviews compiled by Donald Ault; and the most thorough examination of his duck stories is by Thomas Andrae in Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity (2006), with a filmography and extensive notes citing numerous sources and interviews, including Edward Summers's "Of Ducks and Men: Carl Barks Interviewed," Panels 2, Spring 1981, quoted above, p. 4. In 1991 Barks became the only comic book artist to receive the Disney Legends award. Many papers having to do with Barks and some of his works of art are stored in the Walt Disney Archives. An obituary appeared in the New York Times, 26 Aug. 2000.