Thread by @dimmerwahr

Comic books were extremely popular after WWII, and a bestselling title was Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. It sold 3 million copies per issue by the mid 1950s. That was more than any other comic, the NYer, NatGeo, Time, or Newsweek. 1/

Plus, comics got passed along and reread at rates that easily outstripped other periodicals. 2/

Also unlike the other magazines, the comics were written by relatively few artists. WDC&S was dominated by an anonymous artist who chronicled adventures of Donald Duck and his family. Fans dubbed him the “Good Duck Artist.” 3/

The Good Duck Artist created the character of Uncle Scrooge and drew for that comic, too. As the main writer for both titles, which sold in millions, got passed along, and sustained frequent rereadings, he was arguably the most-read periodical writer of the 1950s. 4/

Many of the GDA’s stories, follow the ducks as they quest for treasure in the non-European world and take it back to Duckburg. These are like Horatio Alger stories for the postwar world, offering monthly parables explaining why Duckburg is rich and other places aren’t. 5/

In an age of decolonization, when anti-imperialists (many reading Karl Marx) sought a redistribution of global spoils, the Good Duck Artist was the one who stood firm, teaching children that the ducks deserved their treasure. 6/

If you had to *invent* a name for a guy like that, for a Disney-sponsored, funny-animal-drawing, ideological counter to Karl Marx, I submit you could not do better than his shit-you-not actual name:

Carl Barks

7/

Barks’s comics sold massively abroad. Here’s a card from Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy and pioneer of manga, to Carl Barks. Tezuka was deeply influenced by the comics that arrived in occupied Japan “by the bushelful” from the US. 8/

The comics were all over Latin America, too. When Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart wrote their trail-blazing critique of cultural imperialism, it targeted Donald Duck, whom Dorfman called “the most imperialist of all creatures.” 9/

Barks got paid by the story, so though he wrote tales of travel and wealth accumulation, he never earned enough to take a vacation or leave the country during his long career. In retirement, he supported himself by painting oils of the ducks. 10/

It helped that two wealthy buyers snapped up some of his paintings: George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. They were, it turns out, serious Barks fans. Lucas: “These comics are one of the few things you can point to that say: Like it or not, this is what America is.” 11/

You can see Barks’s influence on many of their films, such as this scene from Return of the Jedi, just with Barks’s “Gneezles” replaced by “Ewoks.” (When Gary Kurtz, producer of Star Wars, published an anthology of Barks comics, Lucas wrote the foreword.) 12/

The most Barksist of their films are the 1980s Indiana Jones films, directed by Spielberg, written by Lucas. 13/

The first film, Raiders, starts with the famous boulder sequence. That’s straight out of “Seven Cities of Cibola” (1954). 14/

The last 1980s film ends with Jones meeting a man in medieval armor who’s stayed alive for centuries drinking from the Holy Grail. It’s “That’s No Fable” (1960), where Scrooge meets two centuries-old men in armor who’ve kept alive by drinking the fountain of youth. 15/

Beyond individual borrowings, the films are stuffed with Barks tropes: multigenerational all-male families on archeological quests, precocious child sidekicks in baseball caps, cursed objects, hidden jungle temples, irate natives, globe-trotting heroes with distinctive hats. 16/

Great books on Barks are Thomas Andrae’s Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book and Donald Ault’s Carl Barks: Conversations. Fantagraphics is reprinting the whole Carl Barks Library right now. On Tezuka: comicscube.com/2016/01/the-ca…