THEFAMILIALSTORIES

When you read Carl Barks' Disney duck stories you are not likely to recognize the familial ties hidden in several of them. No wonder, as you had no idea that they are there in the first place! But Barks used family members to work for him, and he occasionally used personal information as in-jokes when describing specific events. Below you are presented to some of these two groups of covert information.

INPUT
A flow of family help

WDCS205 'Apple Dabble' - 1957

WDCS198 'Knight for a Night' - 1957

PEGGY

Peggy was Barks' eldest daughter. For some years she would occasionally mail her father rough ideas and short synopses for possible use in his storywriting (see more HERE).

In 1956 Peggy made a full synopsis to one of her father's most treasured 10-pagers, namely WDCS205 'Apple Dabble'. He used most of the main plotline fairly unedited (see more HERE).

In 1957 and 1958 she contributed the initial ideas for five 10-pagers (see more HERE) and one 6-pager known as U$24 The Magic Ink.

Sadly, Peggy died of lung cancer at the age of 42 (1923-1963). Undoubtedly, she had inherited some of her father's gift for storywriting, and we shall never know, what additional ideas she might have come up with if she had not been swept away.

WDCS057 'Elusive Woodpecker' -1945

WDCS086 'Volunteer Fireman' - 1947

CLARA

Barks' second wife, Clara, was never interested in her husband's comic book work, nor was she gifted like Peggy. Still, he managed to persuade Clara to lend him a helping hand from time to time.
From 1943 to 1951 she actually inked the solid blacks as well as the borders around the panels for many of the stories.

In an interview many years later Barks offered this evaluation of Clara (excerpt): I taught her to black in my stuff, that is, put in the solid blacks with the brush, and she did that for me for several years. But as she became more and more of an alcoholic, she got to where she would get on belligerent spells and try to tear up a bunch of my drawings. She would have torn up my drawings - and probably chopped me up with a meat cleaver or something - on one of her big drunks.

WDCS160 'The Christmas Camel' - 1954

WDCS405FC - 1974

GARÉ

Garé was Barks' third wife. Late in 1952, following a car accident, she was temporarily unable to pursue her career as a very skilled painting artist and Barks suggested that she could help him with his work instead. She agreed and from 1953 to 1966 Garé took it upon herself to do all the tedious lettering (that her husband detested), which meant that her own career went on the backburner! And if this was not sacrifice enough she also inked backgrounds and solid blacks for almost all the stories.

Garé on her first job for her husband: I started working with Carl in 1952. The very first thing I did was the top half-page with the masthead on it (WDCS139 'The Racing Pigeon' - Editor's remark). It said 'Donald Duck' in white outline, then had a black shadow around the outside. I was so tense about doing it right that I put it in the wrong place - I put the black on the inside of the letters and it all had to be erased!

Occasionally, Garé also inked objects shown in large quantities. Examples are U$09 The Lemming with the Locket (lemmings) and WDCS182 'Grandma's Bull' (crockery).

In 1953 Garé performed the full inking for FC0456 Somethin' Fishy Here, and in 1974 she inked the front cover for WDCS405.

In 1954 the couple join forces in a special project, where Garé's childhood expertise came to good use. The project was U$04 'Hawaiian Hideaway' (see more HERE).

As a painter Garé was quite familiar with the basic graphics of her husband's stories, but she did not have the gift of writing (see more HERE under EXTRA). Except in one instance! In WDCS160 'The Christmas Camel' from 1954 she contributed a gag: The nephews have bought a camel at a bankruptcy sale for only 50 cents and continues: 'If we'd had two dollars, we could have bought an elephant!'.

OUTPUT Shards of insider information
WDCS167 'The Salmon Contest' - 1954 The location - as seen here in Barks' very first half-page splash panel - was drawn from a real site named Puget Sound in Washington State where he occasionally visited daughter Peggy.	WDCS192 'The Kingfisher' - 1956 During the 1950s Peggy's husband managed a salmon hatchery close to the aforementioned Puget Sound, and Barks made this story based on casual observations at the site.	WDCS210 'Donald the Baker' - 1958 Barks paid tribute to some of his grandchildren by mentioning them in the first panels of this story. Their first names are Bradley, Jackie, Patty, and Teresa Jane.
U$09 The Tuckered Tiger - 1955 Barks mentioned more of his grandchildren on an animal racing list.	WDCS267 The Log Jockey - 1962 Barks had several odd jobs before his artist career, one of which was as a lumberjack.	WDCS154 'Clubhouse for Sale' - 1953 The estate shown in this panel resembles Barks' childhood home in Oregon.
WDCS238 The Dog Sitter -1960 In 1908, when the farm failed, Barks' father got a job at the new railroad station in the neighbouring town of Midland. He realized that there was a future in railroads, and both he and his boys were employed with the cattle transports feeding the livestock in the corrals before moving them down the line for slaughtering.	WDCS190 'The Swimming Race' - 1956 In 1911 Barks' father took the whole family and moved from Carl's and Clyde's ancestral home in Oregon to Santa Rosa in California where they started working in a large plum orchard. Father Barks was convinced that they would strike it rich, but those years were the worst within memory of man for harvesting plums.	WDCS178 'Noisy Neighbours' - 1955 Carl and Garé had firsthand knowledge of the annoyance of noisy neighbours, because they were living in a San Jacinto apartment house next-door to inconsiderate people at the time: At one side a couple played loud music, and upstairs an alcoholic woman was knocking empty bottles about every night.
WDCS206 'Hotel Manager' - 1957 The potato sacks bear two names: Tulelake is the town in California where Barks' older brother Clyde lived as a hotel manager most of his life, and San Jacinto is the name of the area where Barks lived at the time of the story's publishing.	WDCS312 Not-so-Ancient Mariner - 1966 In this story Tulelake pops up again, this time accompanied by Klamath, which is the Oregon county where Clyde and Carl were born.	U$56 Mystery of the Ghost Town - 1964 During a car trip Carl and Garé drove by a hotel in Nevada which was said to be haunted by a girl and her newborn baby who had both been killed. Barks then dreamed up a story about a ghost infested hotel as graphically rendered in the story.
U$42 Case of the Sticky Money - 1963 Barks mentioned grandchildren Jackie and Pattie and - in an earlier panel from the same scene - Teresa as graffiti on the soda bar wall.	WDCS133 'Playing Hooky' - 1951 Young Carl attended a typical one-classroom school in a small wooden building. The school seen here resembles the one that the youngster attended.	CP09 Christmas in Duckburg - 1958 Barks drew Garé's name on a department store's front. Notice that he omitted her name's diacritic acute probably in order not to clutter it with the apostrophe.