Do you think the Duck Universe will be still popular if...

[RobbK1]

Yes, I agree with MacDuck very much. Much of the gap would have been filled by Gottfredson popularity, and more continuities longer in the strip, and more strip stories printed in the comic books, and, perhaps Floyd having the basic hand in more simultaneous projects, but farming out more finishing work. But, overall, unless a super-talented artist/writer combination would have been there in Barks' place, Disney Comics would likely have been less popular, and their popularity would have lasted less long.

Paul Murry DID draw a pretty fair amount of Duck stories. Sadly, I didn't like his art style for The Ducks. And, he wasn't creative at all in terms of creating a "Duck (Duckburg) World, or creating new characters (because his writers didn't do that).

At least, throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, comic books, in general, would have likely been just as popular, mainly because we didn't have TV in our homes. Any less popularity of Disney Comics would have likely been equaled by more sales of the competing "funny animal" comics produced by Warner Brothers, MGM, Walter Lantz, and others like Animal Comics, Walt Kelly, Paul Terry, and the non-studio-affiliated lines out of New York (Happy, Goofy, Barnyard, Coo Coo, Ha Ha, Giggle, etc.). After THAT, the point could be made, that possibly, total sales of comic books in USA (and, perhaps Western Europe and Latin America) might have been less than with Barks' stories helping Disney comics being the best sellers.

[Hector]

I read the OP and, without bothering reading all the lengthy answers (sorry i'm lazy), my opinion is that, yes,
without Carl Barks, Donald would nowadays be a dead franchise. Before Barks, Donald was just a series of gags.
Such a recipe can't last forever. It was because of Barks expanding the universe that a creator can tangle
those heroes into practically any kind of story he can imagine.

[Scrooge MacDuck]

It wouldn't be dead… Remember the cartoons remained popular while taking a totally different approach from Barks. But maybe it wouldn't be a comic franchise, maybe he'd have remained a cartoon character, possibly getting the same kind of controverted revival as Tom and Jerry or the Looney Tunes.

[drakeborough]

May 3, 2016 15:55:05 GMT Scrooge MacDuck said:

But in real life, the reason it was stopped (or, rather, replaced by one-strip gags instead of serials) was that the books were getting popular. What the powers that be would have thought would be "cancel the book", and since there was no book to transfer the long stories, they wouldn't have had a reason to stop the strip.

Actually, the reason Gottfredson stopped doing serials in 1955 and turned the strip into a gag-a-day format is that newspapers were losing readers because of tv, so the powers that be decided that gag-a-day was the best format for humor comics in newspapers, since television had become the best medium for adventure stories.