THEBUGGYSTORY

Carl Barks' comic book stories usually reached a much higher artistic level than those of his contemporaries for inventiveness, plotlines, and graphics. But even The Good Artist's stories reached varying levels of quality. The stories mostly lie in the upper end of the scale, but it is unavoidable that a few stories were just a little further away from being perfect. Still, Barks really cared for his work so he made far less factual errors and graphic blunders than the average artist, and it is quite difficult to find stories with an overabundance of faults.
But on this page you are presented to a story that has many more bugs than was the standard for Barks' work. Of course, he is granted a large measure of freedom to express his graphics to the exaggerated level common for funny animal stories, but the defects pointed out below are of a more 'sleuthish' nature based on factualities. It is important to underline that this page in no way tries to criticize Barks' work. In fact, it has been quite difficult to even find such a faulty story, which underlines the understanding of fans' acknowledgement of Barks' outstanding abilities.

The story that has been dissected is WDCS072 'Playing Hooky' from 1946, and you really need to have the story at hand if you wish to extract the full benefits of the commentaries. You may even be able to find one or two more bugs yourself...

PAGE 1:

Panel 1: The face of the alarm clock is not visible to Donald.
Panel 2: Donald cooks on a stove that has no visible heat elements. He seems to have only two large buttons in his blouse (normal is 4 small ones).
Panel 3: Donald lays out forks and knives, yet none are used during breakfast*.
Panel 5: Door opens the opposite way compared to panel 4.

PAGE 2:

Panel 1: Donald yells out for his nephews towards the closed garage door. The walkway is not tiled on page 3, panel 1.
Panel 2: One of the utensils used is a spoon which was not placed before. Another spoon is bent.
Panel 4: Only two small buttons on Donald's blouse this time.
Panel 7: The fence is taller than in the previous panel. Donald has no buttons on his blouse.

PAGE 3:

Panel 1: Donald's car cannot pass through the narrow gateway.
Panels 1+2: The straps tying the books together move around.
Panel 4: (Explanatory remark): The boys are on the right sidewalk and about to turn to the right down another street.
Panel 5: The perspective changes; now the boys are on the left sidewalk turning left down an alley, i.e. heading towards the school they are trying to avoid. Donald drives his bicycle on the sidewalk.
Panel 6: Through silhouettes and heavy blotting out Barks gives the illusion of evening all of a sudden.

PAGE 4:

Panel 3: The boys run barefoot over the bed of puncture weeds.
Panel 5: From now on the schoolbooks have disappeared.
Panel 8: Donald must have had ample time to avoid the 'landslide' as the truck must have taken some time (and noise) to tip over the dirt. The shadows from Donald's head and his hands point in three different directions.

PAGE 5:

Intermission...

PAGE 6:

Panel 2: The train official emerges from a moving train.
Panel 4: The telephone lines disappear in the next panels.
Panel 5: The shadow from the water tank has moved considerably compared to panel 1.

PAGE 7:

Panel 3: The late-in-the-day sun shadow from the flatcar indicates that the step is on the east side (see page 8 for reference).
Panel 8: Donald is missing one finger on his left hand.

PAGE 8:

Panel 1: The sun rises from where it went down the day before.
Panel 4: The shadow from the water tank is wrong (compare with the shadow(s) on page 6).
Panels 6+9: The telephone lines are still missing.
Panel 9: The boys did not hear the motor noises from Donald's car, when he drove up to them.

PAGE 9:

Panel 3: The woman clutches the dollar bill as if it was a cylinder. Donald's blouse has only 3 buttons. The top of the refrigerator is placed partly behind the cupboard.
Panel 5: The glasses have no side-pieces as they have in the surrounding panels.

PAGE 10:

Panel 5: One nephew holds the fork in his left hand, the other nephew holds it in his right hand (and the third nephew eats with a spoon).
Panel 10: Donald's beak is too long especially as it also curls up.
Panel 11: The front of the desk is up against the wall. Is Donald really still sitting waiting for his nephews at 3 o'clock in the afternoon...?

Most utensil users around the world may think that Donald (i.e. Barks) is making a mistake placing the knife to the left of the plate and the fork to the right, but this used to be (and to some extent still is) fairly common practice in the USA, and must not count as an error here.
It would seem that Barks himself was undecided, because he drew his primary characters using forks and knives in different hands in his stories. A prime example is the long breakfast scene in WDCS182 'Johnny the Bull', in which the nephews are eating pancakes.
And in FC0189 The Old Castle's Secret Barks showed us a suit of armour that once belonged to the late Sir Roast McDuck (he was late from 1205...). The Scot is holding knife and fork the American way - and the fork was not even introduced as a dining utensil in Europe until 300 years later!