Yes, that's Carl Barks, the delightful cartoonist who wrote and drew Donald Duck comic books for years and created much of Donald's supporting cast, including The Beagle Boys, Gyro Gearloose and Uncle Scrooge. This is a photo I took in 1973 on a visit to the home he and his wife Garé then had in Goleta, California. His main preoccupation at the time was doing oil paintings of Donald, Scrooge and the gang…lovely paintings which then sold in the astronomical price range of $500-$1000. He would live to see some of them going for close to six figures. Anyway, he was working on this one at the time. He didn't work on it while we were there but he was nice enough to pretend to be adding brush strokes to it while I snapped some pictures.
Shortly after this visit, I was in the company of two comic collectors I knew. Both were around 30 years of age. Hearing that I'd been visiting Carl, one of them said, "Hey, we have to go up there and meet Barks before he dies." I winced and said I thought that was a crass way of putting it. The other fan replied, "Come on…the guy's old…he's not going to be around for much longer."
This was in 1973. Mr. Barks was 72 years old. As it turned out, he was around much longer. He died in 2000 at the age of 99, thereby outliving both those guys.