\u201cHuman beings are a bunch of maggots consuming the body of the earth.\u201d \u2013 Carl Barks.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think of death as total peace \u2013 you\u2019re beyond the clutches of all those who would crush you.\u201d \u2013 Carl Barks. <\/p>\n It\u2019s true that Barks drew stories about Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. But read those stories. As Art Spiegelman has noted, they reveal that Barks had a fundamentally \u201cflinty\u201d view of life. All his characters are at heart selfish: profit-maximizers to use the language of economics. Scrooge is a successful, hard-working profit-maximizer, Donald a would-be profit-maximizer whose plans all go blooey, and Gladstone Gander is so lucky profit comes his way without the will to maximize. Being young, \u201cWe\u2019re like a weed \u2013 you see it and trample it to the ground and don\u2019t think anything about it. We\u2019re like that weed \u2013 we have our little life and when we\u2019re gone, we\u2019re gone.\u201d \u2013 Carl Barks.<\/p>\n Barks\u2019 world is an affectionless one. It\u2019s hard to recall a moment where one character feels any genuine friendship or fellowship for another. Huey, Dewey and Louie, it could be argued, work as a team but they are not really separate personalities: They seem like clones. It\u2019s a Darwinian universe where everyone is looking out for number 1 (and Scrooge for his number one dime).<\/p>\n The most harrowing comics-related reading I know is Donald Ault\u2019s Carl Barks: Conversations<\/span> (University Press of Mississippi, 2003). That\u2019s the source of the quotes used above. The final interview in the book was conducted just two months before Barks death in 2000. The cartoonist had lived nearly a century and it showed. This interview reads like a Samuel Beckett play, a pure distillation of despair. After reading it, you want to pick up Kafka\u2019s The Metamorphosis<\/span> to get some good cheer. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cHuman beings are a bunch of maggots consuming the body of the earth.\u201d \u2013 Carl Barks. You can talk all you want about the misanthropy of R. Crumb, the bleakness of Chris Ware, or the flesh-crawling creepiness of Charles Burns but if you want to read a cartoonist who really has a dark vision of life go no further than Carl Barks. \u201cWhat the hell!?\u201d Readers may ask. \u201cDidn\u2019t Barks […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[197,358],"class_list":["post-534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-barks","tag-disney"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
You can talk all you want about the misanthropy of R. Crumb, the bleakness of Chris Ware, or the flesh-crawling creepiness of Charles Burns but if you want to read a cartoonist who really has a dark vision of life go no further than Carl Barks.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat the hell!?\u201d Readers may ask. \u201cDidn\u2019t Barks do bouncy and buoyant adventure stories featuring talking ducks? He was a Disney artist wasn\u2019t he? How could he have a dark vision?\u201d<\/p>\n