Carl Barks in Photoplay Magazine April 1938.

Before Carl Barks became an artist for Western/Dell publishing and started to write and draw comics in 1942, he worked for the story department at Disney animation. As a Story Editor, and later Story Director, he worked on no less than 36 Donald Duck cartoon shorts that Disney released between 1937 and 1944. But, unlike others, he never worked on a feature, like 'Snow White'.

Mike Barrier's acclaimed book on Barks shows two photo's of him with Harry Reeves and the other guys, goofing around while presenting the storyboards for 'Good Scouts', the Donald short that released in July 1938, just a few months after 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'. According to Mike's book, the photo's were used for an article on 'Snow White' in 1938, which is of course very strange, as Barks never worked on Disney's first animated feature (though he did create some gags for 'Bambi'). So I tracked it down and here it is, you can read the full article below. It's called 'How they made Snow White' and was written by Kirtley Baskette, published in the April issue of Photoplay magazine. Make sure to click any image to enlarge them!

These scans are pretty high res, so it should be easy to read. However, you could be having some trouble as the sentences on the final pages seem to drop off in the side columns. I have therefore added some extra pages from a different copy at the bottom, that I got from Devyn Samara. They aren't as High res and have some glare because they were photographed instead of scanned, but you can at least follow along better if you are having trouble reading it.

Below: the first piece of the article with the 'Good Scouts' photo as a header! I think the editors must have been impressed with the all the action going on surrounding the storyboard drawings. Barks is of course on the left, Harry Reeves in the middle.

As mentioned, the article continued on page 68, and then again on page 70:

The cover to the magazine starred actress Carole Lombard who happily married Clark Gable in 1939 but died tragically in 1942. After attending a rally for war bonds she favored a plane trip home instead of the

planned train ride. It crashed near the Potosi Mountains in Las Vegas, killing 22 aboard, including 15 army men, Lombard, her mother and her agent.

Above: A full page add for 'Snow White' that I found in the February issue of Photoplay. Below are the pages from Devyn's copy, that aren't cropped at the sides. Click to enlarge them:

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.

Carl Barks' 'Somewhere Beyond Nowhere' finally published.

This week, the Dutch Donald Duck magazine finally featured 'Somewhere beyond Nowhere', the last twelve page comic plotted by none other then Carl Barks himself in 1996!

The story was originally called 'Somewhere in Nowhere', with a script by John Lustig and art/inks done by Pat Block. Intended as a ten-pager it was turned into a longer story (two times 14 pages, so 28 in total) which was first published in Italian in November 2000. Artwork for this reworked version (with a slightly different title) was of course done by Dutch Disney artist Daan Jippes (left), based on a new script by Lustig, which keeps closer to Barks' original outline.

This is the first time ever this story features in the Dutch DD Weekly magazine, the original version was only published in the so-called 'Winterbook' in 2002, a special compilation of stories and little puzzles, published yearly during the holiday season in The Netherlands and Belgium since 1980.
Jippes has already recreated many of the later Duck stories Barks wrote, as he's really the only one who's perfected his way of drawing to emulate Barks own comic style.

The Jippes Version (2008).

Jippes' version, created in 2008 for Danish publisher Egmont was first published in Finland (Aku Ankka 11) in March last year, followed by Denmark (Anders And & Co. 15) and Sweden (Kalle Anka & Co. 15) in April. (Swedish translation was done by Reine Mårtensson, Danish version by Thomas Harder and the Dutch version by Jos Beekman.) The story was published in the USA last february by Boom Kids in 'Donald Duck' issue 363!

Check out this weeks great cover:

Barks final Duck Story.

The original story for 'Somewhere in Nowhere' was plotted by Barks in 1996 on his way to Orlando, Florida. (Barks was at the age of 95 then!)  John Lustig was hired as a freelancer by the Carl Barks Studio to write up the script, while Pat Block created the artwork, which he finished in April 1997.

Carl Barks (left) and John Lustig (middle) with Pat Block (right) in 1997 at Barks' birthday celebration at Disney World. Block shows his finished artwork for 'Somewhere in Nowhere'.
According to Block, Daan Jippes was already involved back then. Bill Grandey, Barks' manager had first asked Jippes to do the artwork and layout as well as flesh out the story, which grew from an initial tenpager into a more voluminous story, but he never got to make the final artwork. Having other commitments (apparently working on Disney's 'Tarzan' feature animation) Block was called in to do the job, which he gladly took upon him.

Although the story was finished in 1997, It wasn't published until Disney Italia aquired it and published it in a numbered, limited hardcover book in November 2000 (after Barks had passed away on August 25 at the age of nearly 100 years).

Beneath: cover of the orginal 28 page version, as published in the US in 2005 (Gemstone's Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge no.1). It features original concept art by Barks with final artwork done by Pat Block with colors by Gemstone's assistant editor Sue Kolberg:

Carl Barks' original plot for the story, as set up by himself back then:

Here's the original concept art sketch for the US cover from the master himself, and some preliminary artwork for page 13B (by Block) with notes. Underneath that the resulting colored page:

John Lustig wrote a lot of Disney stories and cooperated on  many of them with American Disney artist William van Horn. Beside scripts for Disney, he also writes for his own comic 'Last Kiss', based on artwork from old romance comics. Make sure to check out his official Last Kiss homepage or the entry on his blog on the rewrite with Daan here (with some Black/White original artwork too!)

Disney artist Pat Block continues to draw comics and is married to Egmont script writer Shelly Block. They always work together on their Disney stories. Check out her twitter page.