Carl Barks - Barks' Influence

Barks' Influence

Barks' Donald Duck stories were rated #7 on Comic's Journal list of 100 top comics; his Uncle Scrooge stories were rated #20.

Steven Spielberg and George Lucas have acknowledged that the rolling-boulder booby trap in the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark was inspired by the 1954 Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge adventure "The Seven Cities of Cibola" (Uncle Scrooge #7). Lucas and Spielberg have also said that some of Barks's stories about space travel and the depiction of aliens had an influence on them. Lucas wrote the foreword to the 1982 Uncle Scrooge McDuck: His Life and Times. In it he calls Barks’s stories "cinematic" and "a priceless part of our literary heritage".

The Walt Disney Treasures DVD set Chronological Donald, Volume 2 includes a salute to Barks.

Carl Barks has an asteroid named after him, 2730 Barks. A Cornell scientist was inspired by Barks' tale "Island in the Sky".

In Almere, Netherlands a street was named after him: Carl Barksweg. The same neighborhood also includes a Donald Ducklaan and a Goofystraat.

Osamu Tezuka, who invented manga after World War II with "Astro Boy" and whose artistic style set the standard and defining aspects for all ensuing manga and anime, said he owed it all to Barks' Scrooge McDuck.

A 1949 Donald Duck ten-pager features Donald raising a yacht from the ocean floor by filling it with ping pong balls. In December 1965 Karl Krøyer, a Dane, lifted the sunken freight vessel Al Kuwait in the Kuwait Harbor by filling the hull with 27 million tiny inflatable balls of polystyrene. Although the suggestion is often made, Krøyer denies having been inspired by this Barks story. Some sources claim Krøyer was denied a Dutch patent registration (application number NL 6514306) for his invention on the grounds that the Barks story was a prior publication of the invention. However no definite proof of this story is available. Krøyer later successfully raised another ship off Greenland using the same method, and several other sunken vessels worldwide have since been raised by modified versions of this concept. The television show MythBusters also tested this method and was able to raise a small boat.

For those currently drawing Disney Duck comics, the influence of Barks cannot be overstated. For artists such as Daan Jippes and Freddy Milton, Barks' comics have made a great impact. Don Rosa, one of the most popular living Disney artists, and possibly the one who has been most keen on connecting the various stories into a coherent universe and chronology, considers (with few exceptions) all Barks' duck stories as canon, and all others as apocryphal. Rosa has said that a number of novelists and movie-makers cite Carl Barks as their 'major influence and inspiration'.

The popularity of Barks' work in Europe is high, and has been that way for years. When the news of Barks' passing was hardly covered by the press in America, "in Europe the sad news was flashed instantly across the airwaves and every newspaper — they realized the world had lost one of the most beloved, influential and well-known creators in international culture."

Dozens of noted comic book artists have taken up elements of Barks' style, especially his ink and pen work. In the US elements of Barks' oil painting style of the ducks were evident in the computer animated, 3-D look Mickey's Twice Upon a Christmas released to video in 2005.

The video game Donald Duck: Goin' Quackers is dedicated to the memory of Carl Barks.

Carl Barks drew an early Andy Panda comic book story published in New Funnies #76, 1943. It is one of his few stories to feature humans interacting with funny animal characters (another is Dangerous Disguise, Four Color #308, 1951). See List of Fictional Pandas.

The life story of Carl Barks, largely drawing upon his relationship with Disney and the phonetic similarity of his name to Karl Marx, serves as a loose inspiration to one of the subplots in The Last Song of Manuel Sendero by Ariel Dorfman, though his biography in this novel veers sharply into science fiction fantasy and symbolism.

The first image ever to be displayed on an Apple Macintosh was a scan of Carl Barks' Scrooge McDuck.