THECREATOR

Carl Barks was a highly-gifted creator all of his adult life. Some people tend to think of him 'only' as a brilliant and inventive storyteller, but he was creative in many other fields as well. It is true that without a Barks on their payroll his publisher Western (and for that matter Disney as well) would have faced serious difficulties on the comic book market, because he must be seen as the primary incentive behind the books' hastily growing success after several meager years. This was caused by a combination of a number of different ingredients (good stories, new characters ... ) which Barks handled with incredible virtuosity.
In several interviews Barks expressed that he would have liked to be an inventor if all else had failed. In this statement lies the seed to his astonishing inventiveness during his actual career - he was always on the lookout for something new and interesting to occupy himself. An early example showing Barks' excellence in creating complicated inventors' scenarios was published in a local newspaper as far back as in 1948 (see it HERE, second paragraph). It is almost Gyro Gearloosean in its approach - four years before the absent-minded chicken character himself appeared in Barks' panels.

So, beside all the suitable titles posterity could rightfully attach to Barks the honorary title of Creator might be one of the most merited...

Storyteller creations

Barks always took the trouble to deliver something extra for his comic book readers:
He wrote stories of unheard vigour and charm, he introduced great numbers of new characters, he presented exciting new objects and buildings, he dreamt up hilarious gimmicks, he used small background happenings as vignettes in the backgrounds, he invented numerous surprising character and location names, he spent countless hours with information books striving to research the locations in which he placed his characters, he used play on words in both his dialogues and his story titles, he often used great splash panels in the stories.
The list seems without end, and most of the creations are still very much alive through other artists to this day...

Professional creations

In those days comic book artists did not experiment with their medium as it is done frequently nowadays - but Barks did! He was not afraid to introduce new creations in the field of special panels. He did it simply because his stories often called for something different in order to present a plot or an action in a more precise way than a normal square panel could master. That way he could make the necessary room for the characters in certain positions.
Through time Barks introduced highly irregular panels that wrapped around the important features in the panels (left), elastic panels, panels-in-panels, vignettes binding panels together and, not least, imposing and detailed splash panels taking up the space of four regular ones.

Painting creations

When Barks started painting the ducks he was forced to use techniques miles away from his comic book work: I figured: 'I'm going to do away with the outline on the ducks. They won't look like colored cartoons; I'm going to see if I can't make them look like real, round ducks. I wouldn't draw outlines if I was painting a bunch of sailors - I would draw them with colors. And I did that with the ducks.
I was experimenting with ways to take those white ducks and make them look round. I gave them a shadowed side and a lighted side, and still I had the same problem: They are little devils to paint. It was hard to put personality into their special shape, which was basically that of a round ball.
Barks' wife Garé told a story of when he first wanted to start painting the ducks: He got out a Ping-Pong ball, attached a string to it, and studied it under different lighting conditions to figure out how shadows looked on a sphere. It was from studying that Ping-Pong ball that he finally learned how to shade the heads of the ducks. That's the way he approached everything.
After he retired Barks made up for the many colourless years by using breathtaking colours in his paintings. Although he had no control in what was used in the comics at Western's, he was always very fond of bright and strong colours. He actually felt that the special colouring in the Disney cartoons greatly contributed to their success, and he tried very hard to incorporate the same type of colouring into his paintings. Barks' paintings are built up from many layers of base colours before the final layer is added. This protracted technique gives the paintings their special bright and rich glow which can never be reproduced on paper let alone on a computer screen. Barks preferred to paint on Masonite because of its smooth surface and the bright way the colours turned out. But, he is known to have said that he was never entirely satisfied with his results.

Personal creations

Barks never ran out of ideas that called for a certain creativity on the more personal level. Here are three examples:
In order to create the best possible workplace for his comic book work he designed and built his own drawing tables. The desk tops were made out of plywood painted dark brown, and in the upper half he incorporated a small glass pane through which a lamp could be lit when he needed transparency for certain tasks. One of the original, worn plates partly covered by an original half-page splash panel is shown to the left (courtesy of Donald Ault).
Garé became increasingly ill in her last years, and her husband decided that they should move to a new dwelling in Grants Pass, Oregon. In order to offer the best accommodations for her and her wheelchair he took upon himself the humongous task of designing a brand new house from scratch! Barks was, of course, never an engineer but he managed to develop a huge house that best possible would fulfill Garé's special requirements. Regrettably, she died only a few days after they moved in...
Late in life Barks would often confine himself to his bedroom part of the day, because he had increasing trouble getting around in the house. Here he could rest and listen to music, and he also tried his hand with solitaire card games. The old creator failed not to add his own invention to the row of games; he simply invented a complicated and challenging solitaire game consisting of no less than three decks!