Door-to-door salesmen are a phenomenon that many of us have experienced. Officious by nature they offer numerous objects from magazine subscriptions and encyclopedia to brushes and vacuum cleaners - and always at special rates and easy terms. In Barks' stories they are still pushy but they also offer strange gizmos. In WDCS083 'Vacation in Bed' he dedicated a whole story to these foot-in-the-door types, who tried to peddle very special gadgets. How about The Speeches of Senator Soapbox in either 10 brass-bound volumes or on phonograph records, a doorbell silencer (consisting of a piece of gum), an old paper bag wrinkle straightener, or a door periscope building set?

Throughout his stories Barks also showed his disdain of professors and scientists filled with hot-air and who were widely admired for pseudo achievements. One ironic example - where a supercilious professor advocates free child upbringing - is seen in WDCS092 'Pulpheart Clapperhead'. Furthermore, Barks usually caricatured Duckburg's constantly changing mayors by portraying them as fat pigs with big, empty gestures. And in WDCS246 Lost Frontier he was really letting steam out by letting Donald proclaim the following after having been convinced that a certain adventurer was nothing but a smug fraud: That Captain Gadabout is a two-bit fraud! A pernicious prevaricator! A prince of hokum, and high hipster of hogwash! Presumably, this small outburst was in accordance with Barks' general view of the people mentioned above...

FC0408 Sharky

MOC41 Sylvester Shyster

FC0318 Shyster

The most despicable beings! Barks had several run-ins with representatives from this profession during his lifetime. In 1952 his second marriage had just ended in a painful divorce, and his bad experiences with greedy and talkative lawyers during the divorce proceedings inspired the self-righteous character of Sharky in FC0408 The Golden Helmet. But three years earlier Barks had already begun satirizing lawyers. It started in MOC41 Race to the South Seas, in which a lawyer was named Sylvester Shyster. Barks actually paid tribute to Mickey Mouse artist Floyd Gottfredson by naming Scrooge's lawyer Sylvester Shyster, which was the name of Gottfredson's evil lawyer character (Shyster is a term for an unethical and unscrupulous person). In Barks' last years he had several additional run-ins with lawyers over estate matters and he felt both betrayed and disgusted.

Barks' motto was from the Christian Bible, Luke 6:31, where it says: Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do To You. In his stories he sometimes sneaked in some of his favourite aversions in single panels. For example, in WDCS144 'Billion Dollar Spree' Barks ridiculed the fact that gullible tourists are happy to buy meaningless junk at exorbitant prices, and in several stories he poked fun of fortune-tellers, soothsayers, and palmists for their alleged abilities to predict the future.
But most of all Barks disliked modern art. This should come as no surprise when one thinks of both his and his wife Garé's enormous output of 'straightforward', realistic paintings. Neither of them ever even attempted to produce any type of modern art. In WDCS294 Duck Out of Luck Barks satirized the subject to its fullest by letting Gladstone win first prize for a 'painting' consisting of incidental objects casually glued to the canvas...

Barks' number one aversion was Real Estate Agents. He portrayed them in quite a lot of stories; admittedly, some were righteous but most were deceiving and chiseling characters and their names matched: Honest Hal (WDCS051 'Seaside Home'), Skunkum (WDCS143 'Gems in the Desert'), I.M. Slick (WDCS243 Turkey Trouble), and Boaregard Swinely (WDCS271 A Stone's Throw from Ghost Town) say it all...

Crooked moneylenders may be considered the nastiest businessmen in the world. They thrive on desperate people, who are deceived into trustfulness by tongue-wagging sellers, who seem to be giving their money away! Not even Scrooge escaped such a 'talent' in his younger days; in U$57 North of the Yukon he had to make out a treacherous I.O.U. (One hundred per cent interest per month, compounded forever!) to borrow some funds. The moneylender's name was Soapy Slick - what else?
Auctioneers make their livelihood by fast-talking. You will often have the distinct feeling that they do not even understand themselves at times, and it is all in a 'good' cause - to bewilder and confuse the unoffending victims! Just look what poor Donald winded up with in FC0256 Luck of the North - a mouldy old trunk...
Once in a while new movements - often of a religious persuasion - arise, and Barks gladly satirized the phenomena. The most poisonous attack came in WDCS149 'Flipism' in which Donald is persuaded by a fraudulent liar (appropriately named Batty) that he can leave all his life's actions and decisions in the tossing of a coin. Donald does so and his world slowly falls apart.

WDCS245

U$08

WDCS286

Barks never made a secret of his dim view of politicians, but he was normally careful not to bring them into his stories. In a few, though, we are presented to various fictitious politicians; FC0386 'The Car Raffle' (a poster announcing Vote for O.U.Drip), WDCS245 Sitting High (Gasmore Gravytrain), U$38 The Unsafe Safe (a poster announcing Joe Snake for Congress). The individuals' names leave us with little uncertainty as to how Barks perceived politicians! But it did not stop there: In WDCS286 The Olympian Torch Bearer we witness how Donald accidentally sets a banner on fire. The banner originally reads 'Vote for Thistly Ratchet', but after having been partly torched it reads 'Vote for This Rat'..
And if this is not enough, we are, in U$54 Billion Dollar Safari, presented to a certain species of eagle with two heads in Scrooge's Zoo - the so-called Two-faced Politician Bird. Barks' political views in a nutshell...