The Duck with the Bucks

By JAY COCKS

UNCLE SCROOGE MCDUCK: HIS LIFE AND TIMES

by Carl Barks; Celestial Arts; 374 pages; $159.95

Estimates of his fortune vary. The last count was one multiplujillion, nine obsquatumatillion, six hundred twenty-three dollars and sixty-two cents. He may or may not have more money than anybody else, but one thing is certain: he is the richest duck in the world. Donald, his nephew, has more marquee value, but, much in the manner of movie stars, he has squandered his earnings. Uncle Scrooge McDuck, of Scots ancestry and American pioneer tradition, has never let go of a dime--not even the first one he ever earned, which he often carries, tied to a string and stashed in an inside pocket of his moleskin-collared coat.

The getting, preserving and enjoying of all this cash between 1952 and 1967 provided comic books with some of their greatest characters and grandest adventures. The eleven vintage stories collected in this sumptuous volume, along with a new yarn and a signed, numbered lithograph, are strong evidence that Scrooge and his creator Carl Barks belong in the great mainstream of American folklore.

Uncle Scrooge never had the high-style sizzle of Superman or Prince Valiant, or the cockeyed melodrama of Dick Tracy, but the mock-heroic sweep of Barks' stories and the whimsical clarity of his drawing made a heavy mark on a generation of children for whom comic books offered a powerful mythology. That mark shows up in some unlikely places. Barks' stories, as Film Director George Lucas points out in his affectionate Appreciation, are "very cinematic. They...don't just move from panel to panel, but flow in sequences--sometimes several pages long." Fans of the Lucas-Steven Spielberg adventure lark Raiders of the Lost Ark will discover a progenitor in The Seven Cities of Cibola. Indeed, Barks' stories and Lucas' Star Wars sagas share not only a gentle satiric edge but a kind of giddy imagination that leads into territory that is, in all senses of the word, fabulous.

"I'm certainly no expert on fables," Barks says, but his sagas of feathered heroes traveling the world, from Duckburg to outer space, all for the purpose of shoring up wealth, are each laced with a little lesson. In Tralla La, Scrooge suffers a nervous breakdown and, with Donald and nephews at his side, goes in search of a place "where there is no money, and wealth means nothing." They find a valley James Hilton might recognize, hidden behind the highest Himalayas. There Scrooge settles happily until a tin cap from a bottle of his nerve medicine is converted into a piece of coveted currency. Scrooge brings corruption to Utopia, just as, in another story, he almost brings industrial pollution to "the smokeless northern wilds." The miser skips out of Duckburg to escape the smog his own heavy industries have created, but the first glimpse of placid lakes and tall timber sets him to thinking about natural gas and paper mills.

Scrooge is the embodiment of home-grown pluck and made-in-U.S.A. materialism, but Barks' stories always come up with someone even greedier, or some force of history that the duck cannot best. In the end, Scrooge's enjoyment of wealth remains essentially benign, childish in its selfishness, but childlike in its spirit. Whether the old miser would acquire this volume is a moot point. It is pricey; on the other wing, it is an investment. An entire genre of clothbound comic strips from Little Nemo to Doonesbury has flourished in the post-Pop era, but seldom has such loving care been lavished on a volume of bygone entertainment. Collectors would have to pay close to $2,000 for the original comics containing these stories, and even in those, the panels would not be so brightly colored, the backgrounds so vivid. Hand-bound on luxurious stock, this volume has been produced with the care and cost usually reserved for reprints of Shakespeare folios.

"I thought everybody just read comic books once and threw them in the garbage can," Carl Barks remarks. "I never knew they'd amount to anything. If I did, I'd have kept a lot more of 'em." Barks, 81, was raised on a farm in Oregon, had a total of eight years of school and worked at every kind of job from mule skinning to lumberjacking. He was 26 and heating rivets on a construction gang when he mailed off some cartoons to "a little gutter magazine." The cartoons led to a series of magazine jobs that eventually landed him at the Disney Studios story department, which he quit ("I didn't feel free") after six years. "I was going to raise chickens in the San Jacinto Mountains," he recalls, but a comic-book publisher with rights to Disney characters asked him to work on some ducks.

With no royalties, no fringe benefits and no credit--not even a byline --Barks drew something like 500 duck sto ries. He modified Donald's splenetic film characterization and, in 1947, created Scrooge for a special Christmas issue. The old geezer proved so popular that he began to star in his own stories in 1952, each one billed "Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge." It was collectors who first discovered Barks himself. The artist's narrative skills would have made him a stand out, but the detail of his drawing was what elevated him to the status of pop father figure. All his early jobs gave him a Rube Goldbergian fascination with mechanical comedy; his plots were researched the way a schoolboy would do a term paper--by turning to the National Geographic and Scientific American. "If you're going to be in the Andes, it had to look like the Andes," he insists. "Some of those other artists put their characters in China, but they drew it as if it were Iowa."

Barks and his wife Gare, who assisted him with the drawing, live in a house trailer in Temecula, Calif., in the high desert 60 miles north of San Diego. Barks once painted oils of the ducks to order (for as much as $6,400) but abandoned that pursuit when the Disney Studios started muttering about copyrights. Now Barks paints Western scenes with nary a duck in view and muses that "I'd like to become the Charles Russell of my generation. But I guess I'm a little too old to start that." It may come as some consolation, however, that years hence, some other American fabulist will yearn to be the Carl Barks of his generation and will know that that spot has been taken, for good. Lord love a duck. --By Jay Cocks

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