Before you dig into Part 3 below, make sure you've read Part 1 and Part 2, preferably in that order. I'll start this one with a photo taken over a half-century ago…
Another person I visited a few times when I was spending days in and around Santa Barbara in the seventies was the man they call "The Good Duck Artist," Carl Barks. In the above photo, the gent at left is my pal Dwight Decker and on the right is another pal, Dan Gheno, who is now a very important artist and art teacher…but don't take my word for it. Go look at his website and see. You can probably guess which of the two remaining people in the photo is Carl.
Since I seem to be dressed the same as I was in the photo in Part 2 about Dan Spiegle, this must have been taken on the same day. In fact, I'm pretty sure Dan G. took the photo of Dan S. and me in Part 2, whereas this one was taken by Carl's wife, Garé, who was a pretty impressive artist on her own.
The Barkses lived in Goleta, which is about ten miles north of Santa Barbara. At the time of this visit, which was my first, Carl was writing the Junior Woodchucks stories that appeared in Gold Key Comics and also doing his famous paintings of Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge and other characters he'd drawn for years for Western Publishing Company.
At one point during our visit, Carl asked to speak with me in private and we adjourned to a separate room. There, he explained to me that he wanted to stop writing scripts for the comics. The paintings were a more interesting challenge and with a bit of Uncle Scrooge in his voice, he noted that they paid waaaaay better. He'd been doing the scripts, he said, as a favor to his editor (and mine) at Western, Chase Craig. He asked if I'd go to Chase and volunteer to take over the Junior Woodchucks scripts. He said, approximately, "Every time I ask off the assignment, he practically begs me to do one more…and then one more and one more. I can't say no to him. Maybe if you asked him…"
If Carl Barks had asked me to take poison — or worse, eat cole slaw — I wouldn't have been able to say no to him. So a few days later when I was delivering scripts to Chase's office, I told him what Carl had said. He thought for a moment and said, "Well, I guess if he wants to stop, I should let him stop." But he didn't want me to take over writing Junior Woodchucks. He wanted to move someone who'd been writing Porky Pig to that book and have me write Porky Pig. That was fine with me — better, actually — and before I left the office, I heard him phone Carl and tell him, "You're free!"
And that, dear friends, is how I was responsible for ending the comic book career of the great Carl Barks. There are a few others I wish I could have gotten out of the business but for different reasons.
I did Carl and his wife one other favor. I never dragged them over to Santa Claus Lane to eat at Santa's Kitchen. Carl might not have made it to the age of 99 if I had. Hell, he might not even have made it home that day. But he and Garé told me that they'd visited Santa Claus Lane a few times and that the kitchy-ness of it all — I think that was the word she used — had either inspired one of the paintings Carl had done or given him the idea for a future one. I leave it to other Barks scholars to speculate on that.
He went on happily painting his duck paintings. He had a long wait list of fans who wanted them and to thank me, he moved my name from the end of the list to somewhere in the top third. At the time, the way it worked was that he would paint what he wanted to paint and often, it was what whoever was at the top of that list requested. When it was done, he'd send a photo of the finished painting to that person and if that person wanted to purchase it, he could…for around $500 or at the time. For a more elaborate painting, he might ask more.
I'm not sure how it worked if the person didn't want that particular painting. I'm not sure if anyone ever didn't want any painting he did. All I know is that Carl stopped doing them long before my name reached the top of the list. The last few at the time were auctioned for prices in the high four figures and one recently sold at auction for $312,500.00. It was not the one above of Uncle Scrooge diving through his money bin. I picked that one to display here though because I believe that in this painting, the bin is holding $312,500.
I visited Carl and Garé at least one, maybe two more times in Goleta before they moved to Temecula, way to the south of L.A. I don't think they did that to try and hide from me but if that was their intent, it didn't work. One very long day a few years later, a bunch of us drove down there to see them. Garé took this photo of — left to right, Scott Shaw!, Bob Foster, m.e., Carl and Sergio Aragonés. There's another photo from later in the same visit over here. They were always very charming, friendly people and once you met Carl, you could tell where all the wonderful humor in his stories had come from.
Still later, the Barkses moved up to Oregon where they became the neighbors of someone who was a neighbor when I first visited the Santa Barbara area. I'll tell you about that neighbor in the fourth and final part of this series. (Hint: He's the guy listed in The Guinness Book of World Records for the "Longest running daily cartoon strip by a single author.")
