A short documentary in two parts about the career of the late Carl Barks, a shy, lonely boy who found his life's calling in drawing the Scrooge McDuck comics, which were among my special favorites. By the time I was 12 or so, I had amassed over 1200 comic books of all kinds, which I kept neatly filed and organized by brand, title, and date - if I had them now, I would be a rich man, but alas, all but a handful were lost to the vicissitudes of life.
Mickey Mouse never interested me much - by the early 1960's, he had become a rather bland, Ward Cleaver kind of character without any charisma, to my way of thinking. But Donald Duck was always getting into hilarious trouble, usually through his own hubris. And Uncle Scrooge stories were the most fascinating - partly because of the thought of those uncountable fantasticatillions in his Money Bin, and partly because of the rather ingenious storylines that took the reader from the Lost Cities of the Incas to the Arabian Desert to the center of the earth, and so on. Somewhere years ago I read that Barks often drew inspiration for his stories from current National Geographic articles, and that certainly gave them an exotic, intriguing atmosphere.
And no, don't even talk to me about Duck Tales - tedious juvenile pabulum. The Barks stories had an adult sophistication to them that none of his successors ever achieved.
