Donald Duck Comics - Barks's Comments On Donald and His Stories

Barks's Comments On Donald and His Stories

• "The thing that I consider most important about my work is this: I told it like it is. I told my readers that the bad guys have a little of good in them, and the good guys have a lot of bad in them, and that you can't depend on anything much; nothing is always going to turn out roses." — May 29, 1973.
• "In fact I laid it right on the line. There was no difference between my characters and the life my readers were going to have to face. When the Ducks went out in the desert, so did Joe Blow down the street with his kids. When Donald got buffeted around, I tried to put it over in such a way that kids would see it could happen to them. Unlike the superhero comics, my comics had parallels in human experience."
• "I always felt myself to be an unlucky person like Donald, who is a victim of so many circumstances. But there isn't a person in the United States who couldn't identify with him. He is everything, he is everybody; he makes the same mistakes that we all make."
• "I carried in my head the idea that there was a whole town and a whole family of characters around these ducks at all times, he recalls. There were cousins and nephews and nieces, and villains and bankers and all kinds of people that they dealt with in everyday life. So whenever I needed a character, I would create one that apparently had been around but just hadn't been used yet. The way I presented these characters was the way they were in my head: they had been there all the time". — August 4, 1975.
• "I've always looked upon the Ducks as caricature human beings. Perhaps I've been years writing in that middle world that J. R. R. Tolkien describes, and never knew it." (After his retirement Barks started reading Tolkien, and discovered similarities between their stories. At this point he was comparing his Ducks to Tolkien's hobbits of Middle-earth.)
• "I broadened his character out very much. Instead of making just a quarrelsome little guy out of him, I made a sympathetic character. He was sometimes a villain, and he was often a real good guy and at all times he was just a blundering person like the average human being, and I think that is one of the reasons people like the duck." — Spring, 1981.
• "I didn't expect any great rosy things out of life for my characters and it's a good way to be, I think. If you get too darned optimistic, your stuff gets sweet like Pollyanna."
• "I even tried to tone down the malicious streak in Donald's character. I resented it in Bugs Bunny; it just turned me off. I thought: why put that same character into Donald and turn off millions of readers? It was okay for the Ducks from time to time, provided there were reasons for it."

A famous quote from Donald Duck himself:

• "I've still got to raise four dollars! That ain't much when you've got it, but an awful lot when you ain't!" (From the Carl Barks story "A Christmas for Shacktown".)