Uncle Carl - His Life and Times

It all began in late 1918, when Barks left home to find a job for himself. After several heavy jobs varying from logger to working in a riveting gang, he finally got a job as cartoonist for a magazine called Calgary Eye-Opener. A few years later, in 1935, he heard the Disney Studio were looking for cartoonists, and that's when he decided to apply.
Shortly after he was contracted, Barks submitted a gag about a mechanized barber chair. This gag meant a promotion to the story department where Barks finished the script for "Modern Inventions" (1937), in which the gag was used. During his years at the Disney studio, Barks worked as a storyboard artist, gag man and writer, and he helped 35 Donald Duck cartoons as well as the animated features "Fantasia" and "Bambi" to the theatres. Among the more famous cartoons of his you'll find "Donald's Nephews" (1938), "Hockey Champ" (1939), "Donald's Cousin Gus" (1939) and "The Plastics Inventor" (1944).
In the early 1940s, Barks was tired of working in collaboration. In addition, the Studio was rapidly being converted into a war plant which produced lots of propaganda films for the military. Getting sick of the air conditioning each day was the final straw and on November 6, 1942, he decided to leave the Studio to set up a chicken farm.
To earn a living, Barks wrote to Western Publishing saying that he was able to draw Disney comic books for them. Although he hoped to develop his own set of characters to create his own independent comic-strip later on, he never got the chance to do so. Western hired him immediately to the art form which was to make him world famous later in his life: doing Donald Duck comic book stories and illustrations. Not only this, but they also managed to keep him at it for the next 25 years - and even far into his retirement.

For many years Barks was the preeminent Disney comic book artist. His numbers had great popularity, and his contributions to the Duck family are everything from several of our favorite characters to their ingenious personalities which keeps the Duck Universe moving. He is the "father" of the miserly Uncle Scrooge and is generally credited for giving Donald as well as his nephews their distinctive personalities. Duckburg and most of the Duck clan owe their existence to his pen and paintbrush.