Carl Barks Esterbrook Pen 356.

I recently noticed that one of the earliest posts on my blog wasn't working anymore, as I had uploaded much of the source material on my own server over at Badboycomics.com back in 2010. As I had changed that site many times since, the links were dead. I could have simply deleted the post, but I decided to repost the entire story on Barks' Esterbrook pens here today, including all images, as I think it's something worth keeping!

While the creation of many a Disney story is a team effort, the most famous Disney artist of all, Carl Barks, who invented Duckburg and all of it’s famous citizens, wrote, drew and hand lettered almost every story by himself. He also inked his own comics, and he did so, with his Esterbrook 356 art and drafting pen.

Esterbrook pens were made of superior quality ore, purified and refined. The manufacturing process  made the company one of the greatest pen producers of the world. Esterbrook & Co. was founded in 1858 as the “United States Steel Pen Manufacturing Company” by Richard Esterbrook (1812-1895), who had just emigrated to the United States two years earlier. His company was the first and only manufacturer of Steel Pens in the United States.

Since there were no men capable of producing the tools Esterbrook needed for his pens, he invented all necessary machinery himself and started building his factory in 1858 in Camden, New Yersey, using only five English craftsmen he had taken with him from the John Mitchell firm in Birmingham, England. Mitchell was the pioneer of mass produced steel pens and Birmingham became the world’s centre for steel pen and nib manufacture. More than half the steel nib pens made in the world came from Birmingham. Before Mitchell, steel pens were handmade, which was a very laborious process and therefore extremely expensive, costing as much as a laborer earned in two days time, leaving most people to use a goose-quill.

Above: Carl Barks in 1947, inking the upper half of page 5 of his famous story "The Old Castle' s Secret", first published in June 1948. Next to his artwork lays the latest issue of 'Walt Disney's Comics & Stories' #87, (see cover left) which included Barks' tenpager 'Wild Turkey hunting' aka 'The Terrible Turkey'.
Below: Dell 's Four color comic's #189 with 'The Old Castle's Secret' on the cover. Left: the upper half of page 5 as it was published in the issue.

In 1895, Esterbrook passed away. Starting out with merely 15 workers, his company had grown to 400 employees. The year after, the company branched out to England. Around that same time, the first fountain pens started appearing. Meeting their growing popularity, Esterbrook manufactured their first fountain pen in 1920 and changed it’s name to 'Esterbrook Hazel Pens Ltd.' During the war, the company suffered as their production facility in England was bombed by the Nazi’s. In 1947 Esterbrook bought the Hazel Pen company and John Mitchell’s firm thus creating the 'Esterbrook Pen Company'. Soon after, they ceased the production of Pen nibs permanently. So even for Barks, they must have been hard to come by at some point. In 1967, after sales had started to fall, the company was bought out worldwide by the Venus Pencil corporation, changing the name to 'Venus Esterbrook'.

Above: An Esterbrook Steel Pens tradecard from 1876 and a photo of the Esterbrook plant on Cooperstreet in Camden, New Yersey somewhere in the 1920's.

Above: Authentic Esterbrook display, showing the 'different stages of the manufacture of Steel Pens'.

Venus Esterbrook.

Venus pencils were made by the 'American Lead Pencil company' as of 1905. The company profited from the first World War when Germany lost it’s US market. Before acquiring Esterbrook, they had already changed the company name in 1956 to the 'Venus pen and pencil Corporation'. After five years, production came to a halt in 1972. A year later, the company was bought out by the Faber-Castell corporation, the pencil company originally founded by Caspar Faber in 1761. It is the oldest, continuously operating manufacturer of pencils in the world, having set the standard for the length, diameter and hardness of modern pencils used today.

Above: A vintage ad from the 1920's for Venus Pencils. The company had to pull all strings to have their logo, as the Louvre usually forbade Michelangelo's work to be used in such manner.

Though many artists and admirers of Barks work still like to create their comics with a pen equal to that of the Duck master, the Esterbrook 356 pens and nibs have become a classic rarity today. (Top photo with this article is by Argentine Duck artist Wanda Gattino, who managed to buy some Esterbrook 356 nibs on Ebay several years ago).

Barks on Paper.

Drawing his comics for Western publishing since 1942, Barks used Strathmore paper, which was first produced in 1893 after it’s founder Horace Moses had visited the valley of Strathmore in Scotland. The thistle, growing there in abundance,  would become his symbol and the name of the site would be the brand of his highest quality papers. The Mittineague Paper Mill, his Massachusetts based company, was opened the year before and in 1905 Moses acquired the Woronoco Paper Company. In 1911 both companies were  consolidated and became the Strathmore Paper Company.

About his paper, Barks would say the following: "Western Publishing used very large sheets of drawing paper. I don’t know how the other artists could draw detailed stuff on those big sheets. I cut them in half so that I could reach the top panels and still keep my paper flat. Otherwise, you’ve got to tuck the lower end down under the edge of the drawing board and work on the upper half. That paper always had a flex to it, so it was hard to bend. "

Below: Carl Barks at his drawing table with the original art for page 21 of 'House of Haunts', which was published in Goldkey's 'Uncle Scrooge' #63 in 1966.  The combined size of both halves is 26x18 inches, or 66x46 cm, which is pretty huge! (All characters/artwork © Disney).

Barks: "Sometimes there was a difficulty in keeping the ducks consistent when there was a time lag between publication of stories. One time Western Publishing changed the drawing paper on me. I had been drawing on a real good quality of Strathmore drawing paper. Whenever I made my pencil drawing, the pencil didn’t dig into the paper and leave a trench, When I inked, it was over the top of nice, smooth paper. They changed to cheap paper with a kind of chalk face on it. I discovered that whenever I made a drawing of a Duck, my pencil made a little groove in this stuff, and when I started to ink it, the pen would follow this groove, even though I had erased and redrawn it and cut another groove. I was making my Ducks so that they were too tall for several months before I suddenly realized that I had gotten away from the way I used to draw the ducks on the old paper."

Above (Click to enlarge): A modelsheet Carl Barks created for other artists, showing them his way of drawing Donald for comic book stories. Notice that, in the top left corner, Barks specifically mentions his inking pen from Esterbrook.

"Maybe it’s because I’m tall, but I wanted to draw them taller than they were in the model sheet. Also, the model sheet for the newspaper duck had him standing up more straight than my duck, which was the animation duck that I’d drawn in the story department. I would sort of subconsciously try to make my duck look a little bit more like the animation ducks.I would draw the ducks in roughly and then I’d erase them and draw them over again to shorten them up. I drew every duck twice before I got him right. But on this paper I would draw them over and still wouldn’t get them right because my pencil would be inclined to go back into the old grooves again. The company that made this new paper was in West Germany. They themselves discovered that paper was too soft on the surface and started turning out a good product. So all of a sudden my paper was nice  and firm again. And I was able to draw like I wanted to.“ (from Donald Ault's "Carl Barks: Conversations").

Above: One half of the three original pages of an unfinished Gyro Gearloose story by Barks. 'The Pied Piper of Duckburg' created in 1958/59, was meant for Dell Comic's Gyro Gearloose One Shot #1047, in November 1960. Check out the logo of his paper in the lower-left corner, the paper Barks was talking about is called Schoellershammer Durex (click to enlarge). Maybe, back then there were temporary problems with the production of their paper, but today, it's still one of the greatest art papers out there, although store retail seems to have dwindled due to higher costs.

Barks explained why he never finished the story: "I shelved the 'Pied Piper' story because I felt I was getting into something too involved for such a short story. Also I would have to draw whole swarms of kids and rats and people, and the page rates weren't worth it". In 1989 Don Rosa inked and finished this story, turning it into an eight page story, published in Walt Disney's Comics & Stories #621 in 1998.

Above: Barks at his drawing table in his studio at the end of 1962, or beginning 1963. If you're guessing which issue is beside him, it's Goldkey comics' 'Uncle Scrooge' #40 from January 1963 (cover below). It was the first Scrooge issue under the Goldkey imprint after Western had decided to part ways with Dell Comics. The issue contains a.o. Barks 19 page story 'Oddball Odyssey'.

About Strathmore: In 1962, it was purchased by the Hammerhill Paper company. In may 1966, Barks drew his last story for Western, a 24 page Scrooge called "The Cattle King". In 1986 Hammerhill was purchased by International Paper and in 2005, Mohawk Fine Papers purchased the Fine papers brands from International Paper, including Strathmore. The next year would see the first Strathmore under the Mohawk name.