Michael Barrier has posted an unpublished appreciation of Carl Barks and his creation, Uncle Scrooge McDuck. For those of you playing at home who are unfamiliar with Carl Barks, his Uncle Scrooge comics were eventual the basis/inspiration for the animated TV show DuckTales. Mr. Barrier goes into some detail about the creation, motivation, and evolution of this now-classic character.
Snippet:
As Barks put it in a 1974 interview, “He had lots of money, but he wasn’t a criminal about it.”Of course, a real billionaire who had made himself rich from Montana copper wouldn’t have plunged into the gold fields alone 16 years later. There may be echoes of Andrew Carnegie in Scrooge’s Scottish surname, but the real Carnegie, unlike the fictional duck, hired other people to do such work for him as soon as he could. What Barks was doing, with his young audience in mind and with remarkable thoroughness and ingenuity, was making the reasons for Scrooge’s attachment to his wealth as concrete as possible. If Scrooge carried gold out of the Klondike himself, then of course he’d care about it.
Many DuckTales episodes were almost verbatim from Barks’ comics, so most of the Uncle Scrooge insights apply to the show, too. That should make those J. Cart. Overanal. purists in the readership rest easier.
The World’s Richest Duck > Catena Ex Situ
