Week Four: The Comic Book

I decided to start by reading Carl Barks and The Art of the Comic Book by Michael Barrier before I read the other comics to kind of get more information about Carl. The most interesting part of reading Michael Barrier’s interpretation is that he doesn’t see really feel nostalgic or the memories of childhood. He talks about looking back at Carl Barks comics is that the feelings were relatable and magnified emotionally even the negative ones. Reading over his bibliography, he seemed to have a very hard-working and difficult life. Doing a lot of labor jobs like working on cars or farms and a lot of times he had only a bit of money to his name moving around the country. 

Even the comedy of the comics is based in some amount of seriousness. Common themes of the comics are self-pity and taking a closer look at them its about doing our best or die trying. He starts to talk about Carl Barks being quite unique as an artist and I’m inclined to agree. Especially in more of a world and characters that are supposed to be funny, like Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge. While reading, I found out that he became a full-time cartoonist around the Depression and is probably what influenced the type of story-telling he does. Rather than Donald was being developed and changed by Carl its said that Donald was the one the influenced Carl. Donald started to become a more interesting and funny character for this reason and being more fleshed out. Carl Barks seemed to be more interested in getting more interpretation out of one drawing rather than a sequence of them trying to tell a whole story. I think the most interesting part about Carl Barks is that he was an artist that seemed to be able to relate to his characters and their experiences and they don't seem two dimensional for this reason. He wanted to have characters that people could relate too also, the gags are well thought out because he really thought about what he was drawing and trying to get the audience to perceive. I also added this image of Carl Barks reference sheet because its the most popular and reference for Donald Duck. I think this adds to another layer of being able to understand a character deeply.