am I the only one not getting the point of this thread?
It's just a joke about Barks' attitude.
Plenty of fans see smaller details in his work and think that he has planned everything through and knows every little detail - which, in reality, is not the case. Though he is a genius, he's held to a bizarrely high standard.
There's another interview that I'm having trouble finding, in which Barks is asked about Scrooge's exact relation to Donald, which he tries to dodge multiple times. (Will link if I find it) EDIT: I've been searching for about an hour, no luck. If anyone has a link, it'd be appreciated - I remember Barks being asked how Scrooge is related to Donald and he says something to the effect of "Well, he's Donald's uncle". Everyone laughs, and the person asking presses for more - I can't remember how, but I'm pretty sure he sidesteps the question.
Basically, the point is that, while Barks is amazing, people sometimes overthink the amount of thought he puts into certain things. Which is funny
Last Edit: Apr 1, 2021 21:15:27 GMT by alquackskey
Resident autistic, diabetic duck fan.
I love hearing about bizarre/obscure Disney works - recommendations welcome!
It's supposed to poke fun at the depictions of Barks the artist. Fans were (and are) quick to frame their love for Barks in high-faluting academic terms. Hence the "typifies McDuck's aggressive, enterprising nature".
And then there's Barks himself, who portrayed himself more as a plain Middle American. So when he gets a letter from the Harvard Business school, he looks up a Latin phrase that "sounded educated".
Barks had an interesting dynamic with his work, like he never quite knew what all the fuss was about once he became famous. Fans praise him to high heaven for creating Duckburg and he'll just be like "I just needed a place where Donald would live". It's kind of enigmatic, and I can't think of any artist similar in that respect. Even in the small realm of Duck comics --- I'm sure Faraci, Angones, or Rosa would all give very different answers.
alquackskey -- that's an interesting example. Sometimes you get the feeling that Barks shield himself from being psychoanalyzed by hordes of overenthusiastic fans. But he seems like a genuine guy, maybe he really didn't put all that much thought into it and it all just came naturally.
Last Edit: Apr 1, 2021 22:25:05 GMT by That Duckfan
Post by Monkey_Feyerabend on Apr 2, 2021 10:28:27 GMT
I honestly think that it is some people writing books about Barks (sometimes making academic career out of it) vs. regular fans. I have never seen any Barks fan on the internet having that attitude on the left.
And it's not even all people writing books about Barks. Let's say it. It's mostly Thomas Andrae that writes things like that. If I am not mistaken, Geoffrey Blum (another Barks specialist) has criticised him and others for that attitude.
I honestly think that it is some people writing books about Barks (sometimes making academic career out of it) vs. regular fans. I have never seen any Barks fan on the internet having that attitude on the left.
And it's not even all people writing books about Barks. Let's say it. It's mostly Thomas Andrae that writes things like that. If I am not mistaken, Geoffrey Blum (another Barks specialist) has criticised him and others for that attitude.
Quite frankly, several of the article writers in Fantagraphics' The Carl Barks Library read things into Barks' stories that simply aren't there. I don't think I'm thinking about Thomas Andrae specifically, but of some of the others, who in some cases even directly misunderstand Barks' creative intent.
Speaking of Thomas Andrae, I have generally enjoyed his thorough introductions to The Floyd Gottfredson Library. But in some of the volumes (particularly after Bill Walsh took over the scripting), I think he struggles a bit too much with finding deeper meaning and symbolism in the stories. I can't imagine Walsh thought as deeply about the themes of most of his storylines as Andrae sometimes would have you believe; for much of the time he just wrote jokes. (It's also problematic when Andrae talks about Gottfredson as an author in the later years of the strip, and for example says that a sequence mocking modern art voices Gottfredson's disdain for it. That kind of cynical humor is Bill Walsh through and through.)
Post by Monkey_Feyerabend on Apr 2, 2021 11:12:05 GMT
That's the problem of a generation that grew up learning how to appreciate and evaluate fictional prose literature (novels), and then went on applying the same social-academic paradigms to the medium of comics, which should be regarded quite differently. Unfortunately, it is still a very common problem, especially when people unfamiliar with the language get into the thing they call 'graphic novels'.
I stopped taking Andrae seriously when he confidently asserted in his commentary on Gottfredson's "Land of Long Ago" that the distinctions drawn by Professor Dustibones between dangerous carnivore dinosaurs and peaceful herbivore dinosaurs was obviously a reference to the warring and peaceful powers in Europe at the time--never mind that the distinctions come from nature itself, and are an obvious bit of exposition to deliver in a dinosaur story. Talk about stretching to find symbolism where it ain't!
Honestly, even the supplementary material in the Another Rainbow Barks Library is hit or miss. There's some good stuff on Klondike '98 for instance (the book that served as inspiration for Back to the Klondike), and a decent article about the use of splash panels, but there are also cases where authors are clearly seeing things, and that's something I do recognize from literature classes. Fanciful interpretations are sometimes encouraged, even if the evidence (comments outside of the text) suggests otherwise.
In my Doctor Who review days, I came to distinguish between artists and craftsmen. Artists have visions and big conceptual ideas, whereas craftsmen are more focused on the nuts and bolts. Art criticism used to focus on "high art", art by people who were 'in' on some kind of academic narrative and challenged it. I agree, I think the move to apply those methods to popular culture leads to some confused readings.
I think, in the area of popular culture, the best artists tend to be nuts-and-bolts craftsmen. Barks certainly bears that out, but somebody like Walt Disney was very good at that as well. You'll notice that I rarely mention themes and deeper meanings in my movie reviews, because those tend not to be what makes those movies so great. I prefer to discuss the plot and the characters and the songs and the jokes, because that's what most people look for.
I encourage discussion about Disney comics in the same direction. There's so much great material to take inspiration from, but it's so easy to lose track.
And then there's Donald Ault, who claims to have met William Blake in a dream. Why do they always turn to Blake?
I would also place Shakespeare among those nuts-and-bolts craftsmen; he was a working playwright for a group of working players that performed for the masses of London and relied on broad popular appeal for their bread-and-butter, something many academics tend to forget when they set out to dissect his work as intentional High Art. This may sound bizarre, but I've spent a lot of the past year re-reading the complete works of Shakespeare, and this Christmas sprung for a complete set of the Another Rainbow Barks library; revisiting Barks on top of Shakespeare has made me realize that, despite haling from different times and writing in very different forms, they have much in common--they wrote to entertain the general public and not for the intelligentsia, but wrote at such a high level of craft that the critics embraced them as well, although as a result of that embrace schools of criticism were born which spend way too much time in finding and analyzing themes and meanings that were almost certainly not intentionally placed in Shakespeare's or Barks' work.
How Barks thinks: 
