CityPaper has a story on the new Carl Barks exhibit at the Geppi Entertainment Museum in Baltimore and offers a rather depressing reminder of how comic creators used to be treated:
Explaining why Barks is a great cartoonist is tough, though. His stories aren’t that different in tone or execution than most children’s comics, and while he was an effective artist, he wasn’t a great or distinctive draftsman. And the story in Scrooged!–the Barks exhibit at Geppi’s Entertainment Museum, which features the 1965 Uncle Scrooge-starring “North of the Yukon”–doesn’t help.
It’s hung a bit awkwardly, on four walls. Viewers must look up, down, then maybe backtrack to recall a plot point or important detail. That’s the problem of any comic-book art in a gallery, however; it’s meant to be read, not looked at. And “Yukon” is not an example of Barks’ best work, coming as it does from very late in his career, when his art had atrophied into generic Disneyness, unlike his more idiosyncratic, Hal Foster-influenced art from the 1940s and early ’50s. Nor does it contain the satire or hard knocks of his Donald Duck stories from the ’40s-’50s, which were more stories done with kids in mind rather than kids’ stories.
Not that Scrooged‘s curators, Arnold T. Blumberg and Andrew Hershberger, had any choice. Nearly all of Barks’ original artwork is gone, tossed in the trash by his publishers–in fact, “Yukon” is the only full story known to exist, the curators say.
Well I’m feeling cheery now.
March 20th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
You left out his remark about how terrible the Barks Duck paintings are. My favorite Barks work is his paintings.