Donald Duck and Carl Barks

The Los Angeles Times' Hero Complex takes a look at vintage Donald Duck, Carl Barks who drew him, and Fantagraphics Comics who is eager to keep that legacy alive.

From the piece...

There are few storytellers in comics history that are more revered than Carl Barks, a titan figure who was one of the three inaugural members in the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame — the other two were Jack Kirby and Eisner himself, who once called Barks “the Hans Christian Andersen of comics.”

While Kirby filled the skies of multiple universes with superheroes, gods and aliens, Barks has a legacy that is more narrowly defined: The Oregon native was the creator of Duckburg, a place he populated with Scrooge McDuck, Gladstone Gander, the Beagle Boys and others both feathered and furry.

Fantagraphics recently announced a deal with Disney that will allow them to reprint the Barks run in a truly definitive collection. Our Geoff Boucher caught up with Fantagraphics’ Gary Groth to discuss the project’s heritage and ambition.

GB: It’s hard to talk about Carl Barks without mentioning emotion — there’s a startling depth of emotion in the characters themselves and then there’s the connection that fans and collectors feel toward his work. Can you talk a bit about that? It seems similar somehow to Charles Schulz.

GG: I think the connection — which I agree with — that you’re seeing between two cartoonists who couldn’t, in many ways, be farther apart from each other, is that they both succeeded in creating vivid characters who lived in a fully realized world, distinctly stylized but analogous to our own in all the important emotional ways so that it didn’t matter if there was a dog dreaming of being a World War I fighter pilot or a family of ducks going on an adventure looking for the source of square eggs. There is in fact an emotional truth at the center of Barks’ work; he even said that this was his primary goal, though I can’t dig up the quote at the moment, perhaps I’m thinking of when he told an interviewer that in his stories he was “telling it like it is” and “laying it on the line.” The comics critic Don Phelps once told me that it was Barks who made Donald Duck a citizen of the nation of comics characters, which I always remember as being a particularly eloquent way of saying that he invested Donald with such humanity.