Carl Barks - comic-book artist and writer

ArtForum, Oct, 1994 by Diedrich Diederichsen

It's an old story: the Author rejected by high culture pops up in another part of the culture industry heretofore deemed vulgar. Just as the literary author is pronounced dead by Roland Barthes in Le Degre zero de l'ecriture, he is reincarnated as film auteur in the pages of Cahiers du cinema. While the movies have long been the favorite stomping ground of illegitimate intellectuals (Pierre Bourdieu's name for those without legitimizing academic credentials and careers), younger generations have discovered new authors in the most diverse areas of the culture industry (cameramen, comic-book artists, record producers). By the '80s, when the concept of the Death of the Author was a high-culture commonplace, graphic and furniture designers were being celebrated as artists, even stars. As much accidentally as through their unpredictable independence and anarchic production relations, people who may never have imagined themselves as Authors have kept alive the old dream of a truth-seeking pop culture in the very belly of the beast, the "culture industry."

As early as the '50s, comic-book fans wanted to know the names of their favorite artists. Some publishers obliged--Marvel, for example, always printed the names of its contributors. But Disney guarded the identities of its artists and writers jealously. Although the first letters asking the company about its "good cartoonists" (a designation, as I've learned, independently adopted both in the U.S. and in the various European countries where Donald Duck stories were carefully read--the Netherlands, Germany, Scandinavia, and Italy) arrived in the mid '50s, it wasn't until 1961 that a fan finally discovered that Disney hadn't drawn all the cartoons himself and unearthed the name of the author of the best of the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics, the inventor of all the characters except Donald and his nephews, including Scrooge, Gladstone Gander, Gyro Gearloose, and the Beagle Boys: Carl Barks. In 1970, a German weekly catering to the educated classes, Die Zeit, opened its culture section with an article about Barks, and today, at more than 90, he is finally known to a wider audience.

Disney eventually ended its policy of concealing artists' names, and beginning in the '80s a series of classic reprints of Barks' drawings appeared. Somewhat later, the Barks Library, a complete edition of his work in multiple volumes (now translated into several languages), began to be published in the U.S. When Barks left Disney in 1967, the company made an exception to its copyright policy, allowing its scandalously underpaid employee to paint portraits of the ducks in oils and to sign them with his own name. These paintings, which Barks produces to this day, consist mostly of classical motifs--from the Mona Lisa to scenes from Wagner operas, reminiscent of Peter Saul's paintings--all, of course, populated by ducks. Only in the art world, it seems, does Barks remain virtually unknown, although academics have not proven much more attentive: nowhere is this great exception to the corporate ideal of the cultural producer mentioned in the 182 pages of the South Atlantic Quarterly (Winter 1992/93) devoted to the Disney empire, although the journal correctly points out the previous failure of cultural studies readers and anthologies to address the contributions of individual artists.

The fervor of the German Barks cult extends to an admiration for the long-time translator of all Disney artists, Erika Fuchs. (For this reason the illustration on the facing page appears in German.) In Fuchs' translation the ducks speak a comic High German laced with literary references. Even the youthful language of Huey, Dewey, and Louie is a mixture of contemporary teenage slang, classical and internal rhyme, and artfully composed alliteration. The characters' linguistic manners reflect their economic status: the penniless Donald, for example, who appears to be an unemployed casual laborer, or at best an adventurer, speaks in a style that is contemporary but sloppy (albeit an extremely artful form of sloppiness). Scrooge McDuck accumulates archaic bits of high-flown rhetoric like the real dollars he has withdrawn from circulation. (On account of this withdrawal, Barks, in one of his rare explanations, declared that Scrooge was not a capitalist.) Huey, Dewey, and Louie, as the avant-garde of a technologically advanced world, are always well-informed and scientifically knowledgeable.

Critical studies of Barks, which have principally confined themselves to viewing the ducks' foreign adventures from a Latin American perspective (Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, 1984, for example), have discovered imperialist tendencies in his work. But if this ideological analysis has had to consider Barks a special case within the Disney corporation, it has often failed to grasp how his multilayered stories transcend their apparently imperialist world view. (Barks' knowledge of other countries, incidentally, is based solely on what he read in National Geographic.) The complexity of these stories is not restricted to Barks' much-praised vocabulary of grimaces, or to the coded construction of his images. (In our example, the opposition between successful communication represented by symmetrical compositions and failed communication represented by asymmetrical or chaotic ones is especially evident.) As with other great affirmative artists from Warhol to Tamla Motown, an exploration of the emotional composition of "official" stories and legends leads directly to a revelation of their ambiguities.