A VISIT WITH CARL BARKS

It was one of the usual days at the office. I sat quietly working, took a few calls, and continued to work. Suddenly the phone rang - a call that would completely change my life.
“Good day, my name is Kari Monsen from A/S Hjemmet”, said the voice, “Is it so that you are Tor Ødemark, and that you are a comic book collector?”
I couldn’t openly deny that, so I answered “Yes”. Then she started asking me questions about Carl Barks:
“Do you know him? / Have you written to him? / Have you talked to him? / Do you know his stories?”, and a lot more.
“Well, he has sent me two letters answering two from me”, I admitted, without really understanding anything about the call at all.
“Why I call you,” she said finally, “is that Hjemmet (which is the largest selling Norwegian weekly magazine, and which also is the publisher of Donald Duck in Norway) wants to take you along to California to visit Carl Barks!”
“What?”
“We want to take you to the U.S. to meet Carl Barks!!”
“What??”
Ten What's later she said, “You heard me right! What would you think?”
“I have dreamed about such an experience for many years!” I said, “But I had realized that I would never get to make such a trip.”
“Well, one should never say never”, she said.
From that day on my feet no longer touched the ground.

On August 25th, 1980, we left Oslo by plane, and reached Los Angeles via Seattle. We entered the Beverly Hilton Hotel of Beverly Hills, one of the most fashionable hotels in L.A. After a day that had lasted 33 hours, I went to sleep, but a huge collection of butterflies, centered in my stomach, woke me up early next morning.
Today I was going to meet Carl Barks!

Avis took the chance of renting us a car, and with it we found our way down to Temecula, where Carl and Garé Barks live. Strangely enough we found our way down to Temecula, but not to Barks’ house. A girl in a grocery shop couldn’t help me when I asked her if she knew where Carl Barks lived. “Never heard of him” she said, “but where are you guys from?” I told her, and also why. While she fainted away, I grabbed the telephone and called Barks up, and he promised to come and meet us.
They both came, and invited Peter (the reporter from Hjemmet) and me to “The Homestead”, where we ate Carl Barks’ favorite meal - a Reuben sandwich - a really memorable start for my first meeting with the author that for me is the personified Duckburg, and Shakespeare of the comic books.

Carl and Garé have a beautiful home just outside Temecula, in a mobile home park, surrounded by a few other houses, a dry, desert like landscape, and, they told us, rattlesnakes. Luckily, we only saw the first two mentioned subjects.
After having answered thankfully “Yes” to a beer, some of my 10,000 questions started to pour out. But before I tell you the answers to my questions, I have to tell a little story.
I assume the readers of The Duckburg Times have read Carl’s (he insisted that I called him that) story ‘The Lemming with the Locket’. You have, I’m sure, read ‘The Golden Helmet’, too. As the happy man I am, I have a wife who enjoys reading Carl's stories together with me. And before I left for California, she said “Why not bring with you a Viking ship like the one that was dug up in Herring, in the Golden Helmet story?”. I thought that was a splendid idea. Therefore I had this Viking ship with me to give to Carl, made out of tin, with ‘Greetings from friends in Norway, Aug. 1980’ engraved on its sail. The boat was loaded with GEITOST (goat cheese) that they did sell in Larsen’s Ost (Larsen’s Cheese) in Herringtail, Norway from ‘The Lemming with the Locket’. I had sent Carl geitost before for one of his birthdays, so I knew both he and Garé liked it. And boy, was that popular!

Before my endless flow of questions started, we looked at the paintings on the walls. There were great contrasts to see; from Carl’s funny duck paintings to Garé’s wonderful paintings of fantastic sceneries from different parts of America. There wasn’t only one great artist in that house. Indeed, there were two.

My first question was why Carl divided the ‘Pirate Gold’ story with Jack Hannah the way they did. Carl told me they did that because Jack Hannah wanted to draw all the inside action of the story, and the rest was left to Carl.
“How come you cooperated with Jack on that story?”
“We worked in the same room at the story department.”
I asked Carl if he knew anything about Jack Hannah, and what he was doing now. He said, paradoxically, that he painted landscapes. Besides he did teach animation at a school of arts.
“Which one of your characters do you like best?”
“Donald!!” And that was obviously definite.
“Why Donald?” I asked.
“Well, I could do whatever I liked with Donald. Making stories with Uncle Scrooge, I had to connect it with money. Gyro Gearloose stories had to have to do with inventions. With Donald I had no such limits. I could do whatever I liked with him.”
“My personal favorite”, I said, “is Gyro. I think he’s the most sympathetic person in Duckburg. A Norwegian Donaldist says that Gyro is chaos inside cosmos. Anyway, he always tries to do the best for mankind.” I mentioned two of his stories, the one about Gyro’s toaster, and the one where he could make milk out of dirt on Grandma’s farm.
At that point Garé told me about one occasion, when Carl had finished a page of a Gyro story. He read through it, and began to roar with laughter. Boy, had I only been a fly on the wall then.

“It happened you did some stories twice. Why did you do that, Carl? Were you asked to do it?”
“No” said Carl, “I went to the chief of the Western Publishing Company, and asked if he had anything against it. He told me “Nobody will ever remember the stories you made 10 years ago. Just go ahead.” And so I did.

P.G. Wodehouse is one of Carl’s favourite authors: “He used the same plot over and over again with just a few variations. So I thought the same way.” The only thing was, that Carl’s stories were read 10 years later. And they will forever be read by new generations. What he didn’t know then, but what we all know now, is that his stories have in fact become immortal.

Carl had no bitter feelings about the Walt Disney Studios, and now they had taken away permission for him to paint Disney characters (or in fact his own characters). “But they still live on you”, I said, “they still live on your stories, they reprint them every month!”
“I know, I know”, Carl said. “But you see, there was a guy once, who asked me for permission to reprint one painting I had made. I told him he couldn’t because of the Disney copyright. But this guy reproduced it anyway, so I had to go to the Disney Studios myself to tell them. That’s why they denied me to paint the Disney characters. As for the stories I made, I just looked at them as a job, as regular work, like doing the bookkeeping in one firm or another”.

As for the cutting of the stories, Carl had indeed bitter feelings. Several times Western threw some pages of Carl’s stories in the waste-basket to make room for ads, that had nothing to do with the magazine.
“The most extreme and known ones are ‘Trick or Treat’, ‘Back to the Klondike’, and 'The Milkman Story’, I said. “Were there any more?”
“Oh, yeah, several”. Frankly, Carl was speaking sadly about those occasions. Another victim of that ruthless censorship was his story ‘Mythtic Mystery’ (I know that you don’t like me to quote you, Carl, but I can’t express this 20% as well as you did yourself, so I hope you don’t mind):
“That story, as it finally came out, was a terribly weak one. I had a big scene in there where the kids, or maybe it was Donald, got old Thor in his chariot, and took him right down over Main Street of Duckburg; the main intersection with all the automobiles and streetcars and the smog and the noise, and old Thor said “My God, I couldn’t stand that our planet became part of this earth, and we have to live like that. We would be better off dead!”. So he goes back up to Valhalla and fixes it so that that guy who was turning iron into gold thus changing the magnetism of the two planets, had to reverse the process and make it so that Valhalla took off into the other direction. But that big panel, oh, I worked a couple of days on it, beautiful drawing, all this traffic and stuff, they took that out, because some BB gun outfit had bought an ad in there”.

Carl told me this incident with such eagerness, that it was obvious that this had hurt his feelings. And why shouldn’t it have? I have seen both ‘Back to the Klondike’ and ‘Trick or Treat’ in full versions, including the lost pages, released in Holland! By God, what you Americans have missed!
Also, a lot of other stories received the same treatment, and it’s a pity that we never will be able to see these missing pages. They’re gone for good.

Carl has, as I told you, always liked Donald the best. When I mentioned my personal favourite, Gyro Gearloose, I asked at the same time about Gyro’s little helper, and Carl told me that had just been a bright idea of his. He couldn’t just let Gyro stand there alone with a bunch of thought balloons. He had to speak to someone. Besides, what would an absent-minded guy like Gyro do without a helper that could get him out of all the tricky situations he stumbled into? Therefore Carl valued this idea highly when he got it, and suckled it into a great number of funny scenes.

Carl has a lot of favourite stories among his own. ‘Omelet’ is his favorite 10-page WDC&S story, the one where Donald puts up an egg farm just outside a small village, and where an “egg avalanche” turns the whole village into an omelet, which also became its name.
‘Lost in the Andes’ is another favourite of Carl’s (especially as for the drawing technique). And also ‘In Old California!’. Not really surprising. But one of his favourites may possibly surprise some of you (not me, though, because I have always loved that story) is ‘Micro-ducks from Outer Space’, a story he made in 1966.

Carl rarely cooperated with other artists. He was what he called himself “a loner”. When other artists went around with an idea in their heads, discussed the ideas with another artists that had some new ideas to add to it, and so on, until it became at last one big idea, Carl used to get his ideas by looking at a bare wall. There was little or nothing on a bare wall that could distract him, and out of these walls came all those ideas, that for us are now known and beloved stories.
When he received an idea, he wrote it down, very carefully. He usually divided his stories into three parts: beginning, middle, and end. The end always came out of the business that took place in the story. It was not that simple every time to make the end; therefore he often used to draw the first 9 pages of a 10-page story, then drew the last panel of page 10, then the next to last, and so until he ‘met’ page 9.
On other occasions he wrote stuff for only 5 pages, drew these 5 pages, and then wrote down the rest. He also happened to send along 10 pages of a longer story to Western, and then sent the rest later.
It wasn’t always the bare wall that gave Carl his ideas. Books were also an important part of his idea sources. Among lots of other things, he showed me a book about ‘Jason and the Golden Fleece’, an old, Greek myth, which gave him the idea of making the story about Uncle Scrooge and the Golden Fleece.

It wasn’t always simple to make stories in exactly 10 pages. With his longer stories he had a greater liberty, but a 10-page story cannot possibly be 12 pages long. Often Carl had enough material for both 12 and 13 pages, and he then had to cut out 2 or 3 pages. That was a minor problem compared to those occasions where he didn’t have business enough for more than 8 pages, and it required 2 more pages. Carl was scared to death that people should discover those 2 pages of ‘garbage’ (it’s our own word, Carl) he had to put into the plot, but as far as I am concerned, I never discovered a single panel I would call garbage in Carl’s stories (except for last two panels of ‘The Firebug’, but they were done by another artist (if not two), to replace the ending Carl had done).

I was quite interested in knowing why he sometimes divided the panels the way he did, as in, for instance, ‘Dangerous Disguise’, and why he didn’t continue doing so. He told me he had personally had a lot of fun dividing the panels up that way. Why he had to stop doing it, was because the publishers weren’t too content with it, because it created a lot of difficulties when translated into other languages. With that, this quality had an abrupt ending.

Many critics look for hidden meanings in comic book stories, even Carl’s. The most eager ones manage to find a lot of them. Political opponents of Karl Marx manage to find parallels between him and Carl Barks, but so do the supporters of Marx. Admirers of Marx, of course, take advantage of the name-likeness and have no problems finding positive, hidden connections. But Carl had none. The only meanings in his stories are not hidden ones. He wanted people to have fun, laugh at his stories, and laugh with him. He only meant to make good stories, good plots, where the reader instantly caught interest in the plot and kept the interest and attention through all the pages. Carl didn’t imagine that somebody would care to remember his stories 10 years later. He meant it to be ‘just a moment’s fun’, and not at anybody’s cost. Therefore, he did not like political satire in comics either. (I will once again quote you, Carl, because you express yourself much better than you could expect me to do), so this is what he said about his situation today:
“I’m tired of the old ducks. Now I paint my own stuff. If I had kept on writing stories, I would have ended up repeating myself. I would have become tiresome to people. I’m glad I quit when I did. I was then still fresh enough for my stories”.
Those were hard words, though not as badly meant. He had lots of sketches at home, that were all recently made of ‘the old ducks’. “Just for practice”, he called it, but I think I know the truth - You still love ‘the old ducks’, Carl, as you have always done and always will.
But one thing that he was afraid of, was repeating himself, though, I think, that nobody believes that he would ever have.

Now, he paints pictures, and enjoys doing them. He has lots of orders for them, but many of them are too special and detailed for him to start on, so he puts the pictures he most would like to paint up first. But he makes a living of it, and he lives with it. As I mentioned earlier, Garé also paints beautiful landscapes with animals, trees, mountains - in short, she paints the beauty, and Carl paints the fun. And it seemed that the little community on the outskirts of Temecula gave them both the tranquility, harmony and unity that was necessary to develop and maintain these abilities.

We ate a late dinner at 10 o’clock in the evening at a restaurant in Temecula, and half past 10 I said goodbye after 8 hours together with the (was it 29 years old?) Donald Duck artist that has made Duckburg what it is, and given The Duckburg Times its very good reason to exist.
Thank you, Carl, for what you have done for millions of children, teenagers and adults up through the decades. Thank you for the most wonderful trip of my life!
And thank you, Garé, for the way you treated me. I will always cherish the memories of the moments we had together, and I will always love you both.

Presenting the Viking ship