The bad sides of Carl Barks' work

creator of Duckburg and Scrooge McDuck

Postby Egg » Mon May 29, 2006 2:53 pm

Robb_K wrote:You are very perceptive noticing that his bitterness towards his recent wife may have been the cause of Daisy's violent actions towards Donald, and Scrooge's maltreatment of Goldie. I had never considered that.

You just suggest the golden apples story yourself. I didn't think of that one. But now you mention it, there might be some pattern of woman-unfriendly stories up to 1952. Could Barks's time with third wife Garé have meant a nicer, warmer Barks? Is there a connection?

In Donald Ault's book 'Carl Barks Conversations', Barks remembers that his second wife Clara threw comic book work out of the window. Something which remminds me of a scene in the story about Gladstone's first dime. (WDC 140) There a young married couple is quarreling, and the woman throws the dinner out of the window.

Glittering Goldie is an iron heartless woman, as Barks shows her. She's as cold as ice. Despite her later sympathy for charity. Her charity ironically is another big difference with stingy Scrooge. As if to emphasize how divided Scrooge and Goldie are. As if Scrooge was honest in the past, and the the situation has turned around, making Goldie the person who learns how to live a good life.

Goldie might just be faking her sympathy for Scrooge, knowing it's her last chance. There's much distance between Barks's Goldie and Scrooge. The way I get it, Goldie had a profession in seducing men for payment, like a prostitute, as can be seen in the flashback. People who think this is love, should learn what love is.
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Postby Robb_K » Mon May 29, 2006 5:42 pm

I don't think Barks was jaded in his view of women other than during his difficult period (several months of 1952) during the breakup of his 2nd marriage. His use of Daisy's character in a not-so-endearing manner throughout his career was more because of the limitations he had in developing Donald's relationship with her on an adult level, and lack of fan interest in having Daisy act like "bland" Minnie Mouse. Barks poked fun at the relationship of women and men, just as he poked fun at all involved with human nature.
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Postby Rockerduck » Mon May 29, 2006 11:53 pm

Egg wrote:What is it you want this time, Rockerduck? When are you going to put yourself into some self-criticism, instead of always pointing at others? Don't make such a fool out of yourself. Egg is much better in being a fool. So just don't even try to be my competitor. You'd loose.

Well, this place was rather dead. It still almost is. Apparantly, very little people are interested in discussing Ducks, so I wanted to spice things up a bit. I thought maybe a new topic would help bring the forum back to live. So I remembered you saying you wanted to discuss Barks' bad sides someday. So that's why I opened this topic. But you don't want to answer any of my questions seriously. Instead, you begin about Rosa- again!! Please, just answer my questions and otherwise-- don't complain nobody's responding to the forum.
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Postby Rockerduck » Tue May 30, 2006 12:04 am

Egg wrote:'Back to the Klondike' is a dark, shady, sick story.

Nonsense.

It's a humorous, adventurous story where we get to see another side of Scrooge: an honest side, which shows he cares about people, while still wanting to pretend he doesn't. It's a great story about an important part of his past.

You're only shooting this story down because of what Rosa did with it.
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Postby Doctor Witchie Britchie » Tue May 30, 2006 12:47 am

I like Back to the Klondike a lot; so did Barks himself, I believe. I still esteem Egg greatly, but I think that his view of Klondike has been soured by the enormously exagerrated prominence given to the "love" of Scrooge and Goldie by Rosa (and by the DuckTales show, too, if it comes to that).

Back to the Klondike does not involve love, romance, or sex, as far as I see it. Scrooge is embarrassed on his initial meeting with Goldie, but that's the limit to any hint of a romantic relationship between the characters. The heart of the story is Scrooge's understandable desire for revenge on Goldie, after she drugged and robbed him. And the story's ending is wonderful, as Scrooge realizes that Goldie has suffered much and, in her own way, repented. He not only forgives her, but allows her to find his long-sought cache of gold. This story, King of the Golden River, and North of the Yukon are perhaps the three Barks stories that invariably move me almost to tears when I read them.

As Barks himself put it in reference to Back to the Klondike: "The fact that I let him (Scrooge) crack his armour made for a better story." Klondike is about greed, hate, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice. Rosa and others have tried to transform it into a "love" story, but their clumsy soap-opera debasements of the tale shouldn't take away from the power of the original story.

Many pseudo-"scholars" have coupled Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler as lovers (even giving them an illegitimate son in one screen version!), despite the fact that no romantic relationship exists between the characters in the actual Arthur Conan Doyle story in which Adler appears ("A Scandal in Bohemia"). This latter-day revisionism has never affected my fondness for "Bohemia," and I feel the same way about Klondike.
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Postby Rockerduck » Mon Jul 10, 2006 12:57 pm

Egg wrote:The way I get it, Goldie had a profession in seducing men for payment, like a prostitute, as can be seen in the flashback. People who think this is love, should learn what love is.

I certainly don't believe Goldie was a prostitute. There's no way Barks would've put that in a children's story, or the editors approving that. Goldie is there to entertain the golddiggers, that's for sure, but not by sleeping with them, I suppose. Think about it: Scrooge would have nothing but disdain for Goldie if she was a prostitute, but at the end of 'Back to the Klondike', we see affection, and not disdain. I think Goldie was a singer and danser in the Black Jack Saloon.
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Postby WB » Sat Jul 15, 2006 3:50 pm

Goldie was not a prostitute. She was a spangly saloon proprietor and an equally powerful woman in the era when she was at her prime. In that kind of day and age (and in an area like that) while it wasn't unusual for prostitutes to be around, it was equally not unusual for women to be extremely headstrong and commanding considering the rough environment. In that sense you might say Goldie had somewhat of a similarity with Miss Kitty from the classic Gunsmoke series who was also a ballroom/saloon proprietor. But thats pretty much where the similarities end in that regard I think. I think that there was some hint of strained/lost romance in the original story but not enough to be as embelished and as pronounced as many tend to make it out to be.

Thats not to say that stories that do such are bad by any reason. It's just another different interpretation on it and your mileage may vary.
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Postby Robb_K » Sun Jul 16, 2006 1:31 pm

I agree with WB, the other WB and Rockerduck here. Egg is just trying to stir up controversy.
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Postby Rockerduck » Sun Jul 16, 2006 4:49 pm

I just discovered something, and I think it's fitting to put it in this topic.

I was just re-reading 'Return to Plain Awful' (by Don Rosa) and I noticed that the Ducks take of all the round buttons on their clothes before they enter Plain Awful. They do that, because they know that everything that's round is forbidden there. But then I went back to the original 'Lost in the Andes' by Barks, and saw nobody in Plain Awful was angry because of Donald's round buttons on his jacket, but they DID get upset when HD&L blew round bubble gum bells. Why are they okay with ROUND buttons, when a few pages later they say that EVRYTHING that's round is forbidden?
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Postby WB » Sun Jul 16, 2006 7:33 pm

Its ironic that you bring that up because *I* just read "Return to Plain Awful" like a day or so ago and I remember that finally reading "Lost in ther Andes" for the first time that was the *very* thing I thought of also..

I suppose you can just chalk that up to Rosa's penchant for wanting to explain things and having to employ your own "suspension of disbelief" in those regards with Barks' story. You have to remember also that Barks wasnt as concerned with all the teeny details of the story in that sense which I suppose is the largest part of how both he and Rosa differ.
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Postby Rockerduck » Tue Jul 18, 2006 1:15 am

But still: round is round. If round balloons are forbidden, then why not round buttons? It raises questions.
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Postby Egg » Sat Jul 22, 2006 7:34 pm

Rockerduck wrote:[Barks's 'Lost in the Andes'] But still: round is round. If round balloons are forbidden, then why not round buttons? It raises questions.

The compass is round, too. Both the round buttons and the compass come from outside of Plain Awful. The nephews are making new round things, inside of Plain Awful, obviously for all to see. That's a huge difference.
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Postby Rockerduck » Sun Jul 23, 2006 1:57 am

It's not a 'logic' difference. It's an explanation you come up with, but that's not explained within the story.
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Postby Egg » Sun Jul 23, 2006 11:33 am

Rockerduck wrote:It's not a 'logic' difference. It's an explanation you come up with, but that's not explained within the story.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's a logic explanation anyone can come up with. And here's some dialogue as taken from the Carl Barks Library. In panel 26.7, the Plain Awful president says: "It is chiseled in th' statutes that whoevah projuces a ROUND object mus' spend the rest of his life in th' STONE QUARRIES!"
So, it is explained in the story.
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Postby Rockerduck » Sun Jul 23, 2006 4:55 pm

That quote means it's forbidden to *produce* anything that's round. Does that mean Don Rosa is wrong when Scrooge is prosecuted in Plain Awful for showing his (round!) dime?
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