Carl Barks was born on March 27 in 1901 near Merril, Oregon. He grew up on the farm of his parents. 1910 the family moved for two years to California. With ten years he started to draw, inspirated by the drawings of a class-mate. When Carl was 15 his mother died. As a result of this he left school to help his father on the farm. He used every free time to work on other farms. As it was the time of WW1 boys like him could earn five Dollars a day, which was a lot for that time. Nevertheless he continued drawing. For a short time he took a correspndence course at the "London School of Cartooning". In December 1918 he went with 100 Dollar to San Francisco, where he tried to get a job as an artist.

After two disappointing years Barks returned to Oregon, where he married 1923 for the first time. As the farm was going badly, he moved together with his wife to Roseville, eastern of Sacramento. Barks was working there for five and a half years as a coach builder for the "Pacific Fruit Express". But he didn't give up his dream to become cartoonist. 1928 he started to sell funny drawing to the "Calgary Eye-Opener" in Minneapolis.

After the separation of his wife, Barks returned to Oregon in 1930. Getting unemployed, because of the world economic crisis, he finall decided to make drawing to his occupation. After another year as freelance at the "Calgary Eye-Opener" he moved to Minneaplois to get a regular job as joke writer and illustrator.

In 1935 Barks got a job at Disney, where he wanted to find a safe workplace. First he worked there on animations, but he started early to sell jokes and scripts to the comicstrip-department. Then Disney got the idea that it would be better when Barks work on the story and not on the animation. Barks worked the next years on about 35 short films. But Barks didn't like his job, because the cartoons should show good animation and Barks wanted to tell good stories. So he left on November 6 in 1942 the Disney studios and moved with his second wife to San Jacinto, eastern of Los Angeles. The couple conducted there a chicken farm. Additional Barks continued to sell comic strips. While Barks was at Disney he had drawn his first comic-story ("Donald Duck finds Pirate Gold", Four Color Cimics 9, 1942) for Disney's licensee Western Publishing. Now he asked there for other tasks. For the april-issue of "Walt Disney's Comics & Stories" in 1943 Barks drew a ten page long Donald-Duck-storie. For each page he got 12 Dollars and 50 Cents. For the mai-issue he started to do in addition to the drawing to write also the story. 1947 Barks began to create supporting characters which returned in his stories. One of these characters became world-famous: $crooge McDuck. Uncle Scrroge got soon his own comic serie ("Uncle Scrooge", 1952). In its first issue it was the first time that the Beagle Boys appeared.

In 1952, Barks got to know his third wife Gare, two years later the couple married. Gare helped Barks for a long time (lettring, background drawings).

On June 30 in 1966 Barks retired from Western Publishing. But his career wasn't finished. For his fans he painted from 1971 'til 1976 122 oil paintings with Disney-ducks. When the speculkation with these paintings started Disney forbid the production. Then Barks painted watercolor paintings with own motives. The last years Barks painted for Disney licensee Another Rainbow oil paintings with ducks, which were successfully printed and selled as lithographs.

Barks drew 6.215 pages, 190 covers and wrote 396 scripts for Disney comics. This work was tributed by a complete edition with 30 volumes which was published by Another Rainbow in the last decade.

Scrooge Links: http://brucehamilton.com/index.html

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