Ilustraciones para tapas

Dibujando acorde a la temática

                           Aquí pongo dos ejemplos radicalmente opuestos que muestran que en cada tapa debí emplear una forma diferente de dibujo y pintura acorde a la revista en que iba a ser publicada.
Tapa para Quimera
Quimera fue un suplemento de historietas del diario La República donde se publicaba variados temas. 
En las reuniones que hacíamos para confeccionar cada número, se encargaba a alguno de los integrantes el dibujo de tapa. Esa vez me tocó a mí por lo que pensé en variar mi estilo ; había publicado temas gauchescos y uno de detectives y ya tenía otra historieta en producción de un fotógrafo con tintes dramáticos.
Todos teníamos amplia libertad en la elección de los temas de tapa, por lo que se me ocurrió hacer algo diferente y creí que un tema de ficción sería justo.
Boceté varias miniaturas hasta que me gustó una y la amplié ligeramente, buscando más la composición que el resultado final.


Luego comencé por el personaje principal y los secundarios que se me ocurrieron antropomórficos, una mezcla de humanos y animal, pero en estado semisalvaje, pero en algún mundo lejano, por eso puse una especie de luna o planeta en el fondo.
Par darle más ilusión de belicismo, unas imágenes como de un ejército entre sombras, se divisa sobre el pico de una montaña cercana.

Elaboré los dibujos por separado y los pinté en photoshop, luego armé todo en la medida de la tapa, previendo el espacio superior para el título que lo pondría el diseñador de la revista.
En tonalidades calientes de los rojos y violetas pinté todo. Luego le apliqué un efecto radiante al fondo que luce como una explosión . Los rayos sirven para centrar la visión del lector en las imágenes principales, completando una composición asimétrica.

Y al final quedó pronta y enviada para la revista.

Otro tema...
Tapa para El Escolar
Esta otra tapa es completamente apuesta, ya que era para un suplemento infantil y el motivo a ilustrar era "niños jugando con globos". Pensé en un enfoque desde abajo, como si un niño presente estuviese viendo la escena. 
Al suelo le hice una curvatura exagerada, eso da la ilusión de perspectiva, bastante falseada por cierto, pero funcional en este caso. Lo del perro y el gordito sobre los globos es una humorada, que en este tipo de dibujo es conveniente utilizar.
La composición asemeja un triángulo truncado, compensado por los globos que aunque están volando también tienen su propia estructura pensada previamente, como lo muestro en el boceto.
Hice un dibujo lineal, lo más cerrado posible y luego lo pinté en photoshop, evitando el exceso de efectos, porque en esta tapa no creí conveniente usarlos.
Luego la envié a la redacción de la revista donde le aplicaron el logo y los textos, ¡los textos! Nunca entendí porqué los diseñadores que me tocaron "en suerte" insistieron en taparme partes de mi dibujo con grotescas tipografías...
En este caso -ya me había quejado- apenas tocaron la cara del "gordito volador". 

lineal en tinta

Copia que imprimí para ver cómo quedaría la impresión final y hacer algunos ajustes, 

ya que la pantalla de la computadora "engaña" un poco.

Resultado final

Ilustración

Publicada en revista Charoná, ilustrando la juventud de Artigas.

Maestros de la Ilustración

Norman Rockwell

Sin ningun lugar a dudas, Rockwell fue mi maestro inspirador cuando ví su obra, un poco tarde ya, porque yo venía de hacer un estilo de ilustración poco elaborada y a pesar que tenía la teoría, me faltaba mucho por aprender. Y encontrar las ilustraciones de este maestro, su forma de dibujar y pintar fue todo un descubrimiento y un gran desafío. Le debo mucho a su técnica y a su manera de encarar la ilustración, y si en algo he podido acercarme a su nivel, cosa casi imposible por mis propias limitaciones, me siento muy reconfortado.

About Norman Rockwell

Picture a nation of patriotic citizens unencumbered by want or fear, free to speak their minds and worship as they chose. In a simple room, generations gather for a bountiful Thanksgiving feast. In a dimly lit bedroom, a mother and father tuck their child safely into bed. At a town meeting, a man stands tall and proud among his neighbors. In a crowd, every head is bent in fervent prayer. This is Norman Rockwell’s America as depicted in his famous “Four Freedoms” series. Although his vast body of work has often been dismissed or stereotyped, Rockwell remains one of 20th-century America’s most enduring and popular artists. Now, more than one hundred years after his birth, he is achieving a new level of recognition and respect around the world.

Norman Rockwell thought of himself first and foremost a commercial illustrator. Hesitant to consider it art, he harbored deep insecurities about his work. What is unmistakable, however, is that Rockwell tapped into the nostalgia of a people for a time that was kinder and simpler. His ability to create visual stories that expressed the wants of a nation helped to clarify and, in a sense, create that nation’s vision. His prolific career spanned the days of horse-drawn carriages to the momentous leap that landed mankind on the moon. While history was in the making all around him, Rockwell chose to fill his canvases with the small details and nuances of ordinary people in everyday life. Taken together, his many paintings capture something much more elusive and transcendent — the essence of the American spirit. “I paint life as I would like it to be,” Rockwell once said. Mythical, idealistic, innocent, his paintings evoke a longing for a time and place that existed only in the rarefied realm of his rich imagination and in the hopes and aspirations of the nation. According to filmmaker Steven Spielberg, “Rockwell painted the American dream — better than anyone.”

Born in New York in 1894, Rockwell had early hopes of becoming an artist. As a young man he left high school to attend art school. A diligent student at the Art Student’s League in New York, he graduated to find immediate work as an illustrator for BOY’S LIFE magazine. By 1916 Rockwell had created his first of many SATURDAY EVENING POST covers. He would continue to create memorable covers for them for nearly fifty years — making three hundred and seventeen in all. By the early 1920s, Rockwell had worked illustrating advertisements for many businesses, including Jell-O and Orange Crush. His work for magazines was growing in popularity and bringing in numerous requests. In 1920 he made a painting for the Boy Scouts of America calendar. Clearly one of the more well-known projects, he continued to work on their calendars until just before his death.

In 1942, Rockwell painted one of his most overtly political and important pieces. In response to a speech given by President Franklin Roosevelt, Rockwell made a series of paintings that dealt with the Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. Throughout the mid-1940s these paintings traveled around the country being shown in conjunction with the sale of bonds. Viewed by more than a million people, their popularity was considered an important part of the war effort at home. During the late 1940s and 1950s Rockwell continued as one of the most prolific and recognized illustrators in the country. While his allegiance to the SATURDAY EVENING POST remained, he produced work for other magazines INCLUDING LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL, MCCALL’S, LITERARY DIGEST, and LOOK.

In the 1960s, prompted by his third wife, new markets, and by the times, Rockwell began to exhibit a strong sense of social consciousness. His images, which had primarily dealt with a utopian vision of the country, began to address realistic concerns. “The Problem We All Live With,” shows an African-American schoolgirl, escorted by safety officers, walking past a wall smeared with the juices of a thrown tomato. In addition to civil rights, Rockwell’s later subjects ranged from poverty to the Space Age, from the Peace Corps to the presidents.

Today, more than twenty years after his death in 1978, Norman Rockwell’s star is once again rising. “Freedom From Want,” that inviting portrait of a New England Thanksgiving dinner, was recently the centerpiece of an exhibit at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. In an era of Abstract Expressionism, Rockwell never achieved the critical stature of contemporaries like Jackson Pollock, but his familiar images have found a permanent place in the American psyche.

Extraído de "Maestros Americanos" http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/norman-rockwell/about-norman-rockwell/689/

Caniff dibujando Dragon Lady

Part 1 of 5: Milton Caniff draws the Dragon Lady for fan Charlie Roberts while talking to Shel Dorf ( see
http://www.ShelDorfTribute.com ) on May 11, 1983. This segment's highlights include the following: Mort Walker's military service, lays out sketch with pencil and then switches to ink brush, how 

Caniff felt about art requests from fans, the secret of drawing women, signs Charlie Robert's check for the drawing over to the National Cartoonist Society's Milt Gross Fund for indigent cartoonists.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLPZTrWrc5E&feature=colike

Maestros del comic

 Milton Caniff creó un estilo en las tiras diarias que impuso su impronta en cientos de dibujantes y aun hoy, cuando la comic strip casi es una cosa del pasado, hay seguidores fervientes de su línea y del claro oscuro; de su especial forma de dibujar.
Yo soy uno de ellos.

Caniff dibujando a Burma, utilizando modelos en vivo, aunque usó mucho 

la fotografía que tomaba él mismo.

April Kane.

Nedra Harrison y Bud Davi son Pat y la DragonLady

The King of the Comic Strips,

Milton Caniff

por Steve Stiles

 From The Early Years To Terry and the Pirates Milton Caniff, to most comics fans, will always be regarded as the major leading light of the syndicated comic strip. He was a pioneer of a visual style of story telling that's widely imitated but seldom achieved, establishing innovations that would become a yardstick for all that followed in his footsteps. No major comics artists today remain untouched by his influences.
Milton Caniff was born on February 28, 1907 in Hillsboro, Ohio. His art career began in a significant way when, as a young boy, he discovered a trunk containing drawings by the early newspaper cartoonist, John T. McCutchen. "This was my first inspiration as an artist in wanting to draw pictures at all, " Caniff would recall. The trunk discovery was significant in another way, in the kind of coincidence that usually only happens in fiction, because years later McCutchen helped to launch the famous Terry and the Pirates!
It's likely that Caniff would have become a cartoonist without the trunk. From the very beginning he displayed a talent for art that was amply displayed in school journals and by the eighth grade he had already had a cartoon published in a local paper. By high school he was already freelancing for a newspaper art department, and by the time he reached college Caniff was providing art on the side for the Dayton Journal, the Miami Daily News, and the Columbus Dispatch, while still finding time to attend classes and participate in theatrical productions.
After graduating college Caniff found full time work at the Dispatch, spending nights working on a few abortive comic strip attempts. The new job only lasted a short time when the Depression struck, forcing the Dispatch to downsize.
Caniff's unemployment only lasted a short while; fortunately the Associated Press of New York had noticed clippings of the young artist's work and offered him a job. The timing was right; Caniff arrived in the Big Apple just in time for 1932's Presidential campaign, and his published portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt appeared in papers all across the country, his first national exposure. While at AP the artist met a fellow worker who would equal his own success as a cartoonist, Al Capp. (Appropriately enough it was on April Fool's Day.) The two men became life-long friends and when Capp left the unfunny strip he had been assigned, Mr. Gilfeather, Caniff inherited the feature, turning it into the more palatable The Gay Thirties.
In addition to the single panel feature on life in America, Caniff was given a multi-paneled adventure strip to work on, Dickie Dare. The strip began in July 1933 and featured Dickie's daydreams of fighting along side Robin Hood and his Merry Men, hunting treasure with Long John Silver, and adventuring with Robinson Crusoe. Caniff lasted a year on the strip, which was to continue on until the late fifties, capably handled by Coulton Waugh and his wife, Mabel "Odin" Burvik.
Caniff had gotten a better offer from Colonel Patterson of the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate in the fall of 1934. The new job offer came about thanks to another cartoonist who had noticed Caniff's clippings, John McCutchen, the same artist who drew the inspirational cartoons that Caniff had discovered in his mother's trunk!
Patterson had been looking for something similar to Dickie Dare, and exotic adventure strip that featured a leading adult and a youthful sidekick. Caniff filled that bill with Terry and the Pirates, which first appeared on October 22, 1934. The continuity opened with the story of Terry Lee, an American boy, his adult pal Pat Ryan, and a clever Chinese servant named Connie, "chief cook and philosopher." The three set out for an abandoned treasure mine but soon find themselves stranded and penniless in a China swarming with brigands, warlords, and hostile Japanese troops.
Caniff's early work on the strip was good enough for the times but crude in comparison to what would come later. A big boost in his evolution as an artist came from teaming up with another young comics legend, Noel Sickles, the artist on the AP Scorchy Smith strip.
The two men, who had once shared a studio in Ohio, worked in tandem, writing and drawing for each other's strips, in the process developing a novel and time saving method for indicating detail, using a impressionistic brushwork technique known as "chiaroscuro." The technique became Caniff's trademark. As Jules Fieffer once said, "Black is Milton Caniff's primary color."
 
Caniff's mastery of light and dark, his talent for action scenes and camera angles, and his flair for dramatic storytelling all contributed to the popularity of Terry and the Pirates. Another strength of the strip has been its reliance on realism.
Caniff realized that potential fan interest must be immediately captured in a strip's first year. "Since a person must read the balloons to get the story," Caniff once said, "I thought I could catch them with vivid color and illustrations rather than straight cartoons. This meant that there'd have to be absolute authenticity."
Caniff worked long hours to achieve his goal, consulting with experts in every field. In one sequence involving an amphibious invasion, Caniff dug into thirty-eight books in order to nail down such details as to what military hospitals looked like and whether or not Japanese bombers veered to the right or left when launched from aircraft carriers.
Caniff read every book he could find the Orient, becoming more concerned with the problems China faced from the Japanese invaders, predicting in his strip that an inevitable conflict would break out between the U.S. and Hirohito's Imperial forces.
Pat and Terry shared the strip with an intriguing cast of supporting characters. To name just a few, there was Captain Judas, Burma, Big Stoop, Chopstick Joe, Dude Hennick, Cherry Blaze, Cue Ball, and one of the greatest of femme fatales, The Dragon Lady, who often played both sides of the fence. Caniff was a master of characterization; readers really got to know and care about many of his cast.
This point was amply illustrated in a famous 1941 episode, the death of Raven Sherman. A full week of continuity passed as Raven, wounded by the treacherous Captain Judas, slowly ebbs away on a lonely trail in China until finally, "as it must to every one," she dies. And then, as Caniff says, "The roof fell in!" Caniff was flooded with flower deliveries, mock memorial services, petitions of condolence signed by disparate groups as factory workers and entire colleges, as well as a lot of irate letters. For years afterwards the cartoonist would continue to get black-edged cards on the anniversary of Raven's death. Proving that perhaps, as Caniff put it, "the impacts of both picture and words drives more deeply into human awareness than any anthropologist has yet cared to note."
Perhaps so. But Caniff also noted that Raven was killed in October 1941. "If it had happened two months later, nobody would even remember her name today."




The death of Raven  



From Terry and the Pirates to Steve Canyon Milton Caniff, to most comics fans, will always be regarded as the major leading light of the syndicated comic strip. He was a pioneer of a visual style of story telling that's widely imitated but seldom achieved, establishing innovations that would become a yardstick for all that followed in his footsteps. No major comics artists today remain untouched by his influences.
Two months after Milton Caniff's famous death-of-Raven sequence, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States' role in the Second World War had begun. Caniff had depicted Japan's aggression in China (as well as Japanese-Nazi collaboration) in Terry and the Pirates years before war broke out. "There was no general realization of impending war between Japan and the United States," said Caniff, "but anyone who could read newspapers could put it together. The Sino-Japanese war just served as a beacon for future sequences. I foresaw a terrific struggle for the Allies."
Terry joined in that struggle, having finally grown to young adulthood, and got his wings, becoming a pilot in the air force in China. Pat Ryan, his buddy and mentor, was phased offstage to join the Navy, replaced by another father figure, Colonel Flip Corkin. With the change Terry Lee finally became the sole lead in the strip bearing his name, but the "Pirates," like Pat Ryan, also disappeared.
Caniff stepped up the wartime action, with Terry occasionally joining forces with his old nemesis, the Dragon Lady ("tough as a hash-heavy top sergeant"), as well as a new friend in the strip, the very hip, wise-cracking Hot-Shot Charlie.
Terry and the Pirates soared in popularity during the war years, thanks to Caniff's storytelling and his incredible attention to detail (once buying film reels from the Army Signal Corps to check on a detail about aircraft carriers). Voluntary informants, readers from around the world, aided the artist. Men and women in the armed services provided invaluable information on anything thing from logistics to military uniforms. Caniff returned the favor by designing countless logos and insignias, designing a large number of instruction manuals and posters, and winning numerous citations from the Navy, War, and Treasury Departments.
If Terry and the Pirates helped the war effort by informing and entertaining the civilians, Caniff's Male Call did wonders for the guys in uniform. The strip, which ran uncensored in service newspapers, was heavy on cheesecake and featured the voluptuous Miss Lace, a kind of volunteer Morale Officer, who did her best to cheer up the men, usually by dressing in very low-cut outfits.
The strip's popularity peaked during the war years. During that time Terry had been adapted to radio and comics, and in 1940 James W. Horne directed a movie serial version (in the 1950s there was also a Terry TV series). After the war ended Caniff ran into contractual problems with his syndicate and went over to King Features, with a hefty salary increase and the added bonus of owning whatever strip he created. On December 29, 1946, the last of Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirates appeared. George Wundar inherited the strip, which would continue on (in some years inked by E.C. artist George Evans) for another 25 years, finally folding in 1973. In 1995 Tribune Media Services resurrected Terry, which was written by Michael Uslan and illustrated by Greg and Tim Hildebrandt, later replaced by comics veteran
Dan Spiegle.
Steve Canyon, Caniff's new strip, debuted on January 7, 1946, opening simultaneously in 125 papers throughout the country, a unique distinction for a new strip, but understandable given Caniff's reputation. Steve was a compulsive hero ("the kind of guy who doesn'tlike to see people kicked around"). As Caniff described him in a Time magazine interview, Canyon was intended to be a "sort of modern Kit Carson, the strong silent Gary Cooper plainsman type. He'llhave lots of gals, one at every port."
Canyon was to be, in Caniff's words, "a picaresque novel," like Cervantes' Don Quixote; a traveler moving from one adventure to the next, accompanied by a friend the hero can talk to (and talk to the reader). In this case, Sancho Panza turned out to be a scrappy oldster, Happy Easter. Caniff also decided to bring in another Terry figure, the teenage Reed Kimberly -- after all, if Steve ever settled down to married life, Caniff needn't abandon any boy-meets-girl plot riffs.
Canyon did meet a lot of women. Many of them, like the cold-blooded Copper Calhoun (a nasty version of Daddy Warbucks), Cheetah (a totally amoral bargirl who would steal Reed's heart and then cheerfully step on it), the hapless Summer Olson (hopelessly in love with Steve and always abused by Ms. Calhoun, her employer), and cousin Poteet Canyon (a teenage version of Happy Easter). "Ninety-five percent of the interest in any fiction is what happens to the women, not what happens to the men," Caniff believed.
Like many other comic strip adventurers, Steve Canyon went on to become a Cold Warrior with the advent of the nineteen fifties, reentering the air Force after the outbreak of the Korean war. Steve found time between adventures in various Third World hotspots to finally marry Summer Olson in 1970 and after the Vietnam war became entangled in a number of marital problems that eventually resulted in a separation.
The Vietnam war also caused a number of problems for the strip itself, as the mood of the many Americans was definitely not in tune with military adventures. And as newspapers around the country began to shrink the panel size of their strips to make room for all-important advertising, Caniff's strip, like most realistic strips, began losing its effectiveness. As the aging Caniff began experiencing health problems, he was forced to drop penciling chores, which were then handled by Dick Rockwell (nephew of illustrator Norman Rockwell) and concentrate on writing and inking it.
 
Although ill heath couldn't keep the artist from the drawing board, he finally succumbed to lung cancer in 1988. Steve Canyon survived him by several weeks, after 41 years of continuity. Caniff's awards, which included two Reubens for his two strips, were numerous but the last Steve Canyon, dated June 4, was a final, wonderful tribute: it was two panels, one drawn by the legendary war cartoonist Bill Mauldin, the other signed by 78 fellow artists of the field he loved. Milton Caniff will be long remembered.

--Steve Stiles

   

Guambia 2012

Publicados en suplemento humorístico del diario Ultimas Noticias, el 28 de marzo, Guambia Nº864.

Semanario El Eco

Publicado en El Eco de Colonia el 24 de marzo.

Maestros del Comic

Cada tanto, voy a subir notas o reportajes que encuentro en la red y que me parecen de utilidad para los aficionados, profesionales y dilettantes del comic en general. Eso sí, la mayoría de los temas serán en italiano, pero a la derecha tienen un traductor que les puede resolver el lío. Hoy comienzo con un gran y maravilloso dibujante que me hizo soñar en mi niñez con las extraordinarias aventuras que había escrito y dibujado para Walt Disney, que iluso de mí, creía que lo hacía todo y tenía un ejército de dibujantes creando para su empresa. Yo veía la firma Disney en todas las historietas de Donald y demás personajes, y pensaba: "¡Qué genio, cómo dibuja, y cuántos estilos domina!"
Uno de esos dibujantes ignotos era Carl Bark, que por fin fue reconocido y logró su éxito en vida.

Rileggere Paperino Parte 1

Qualche tempo fa è stato pubblcato dalla Proglo Edizioni, un saggio di Thomas Andrae su Carl Barks: Carl Barks, il signore di Paperopoli. Zio Paperone e la critica della modernità.Un libro interessante, che si presenta come la biografia critica più importante mai realizzata sull’autore. Oggi grazie ai ragazzi della Proglo vi presentiamo (in tre parti) il primo capitolo di questo libro che ogni appassionato di fumetto dovrebbe avere nella propria biblioteca.

Leggi la seconda parte.

RILEGGERE PAPERINO¹

Prima dell’avvento della televisione, della musica rock e dei videogame, i fumetti erano il pilastro del divertimento per i bambini negli Stati Uniti. Il loro costo di soli dieci centesimi e le enormi tirature li resero un’esperienza quasi universale per i ragazzi cresciuti fra la Grande Depressione e gli anni del Baby Boom². Stampati su carta di qualità infima e racchiusi da copertine patinate, i fumetti rappresentavano in pieno l’estetica a buon mercato dei prodotti culturali di massa, e non si supponeva che dovessero sopravvivere a letture ripetute. Il pensiero che fossero degni di essere conservati, o addirittura collezionati per il loro valore artistico o economico, sarebbe sembrato assurdo agli adulti che li buttavano via a migliaia durante le raccolte di carta per beneficenza e le pulizie di primavera. Eppure i bambini che li leggevano li conservavano e li collezionavano, trattandoli come tesori inestimabili che davano voce alle loro esperienze e ai loro desideri come nessun altro fenomeno culturale faceva.

A partire dagli anni Sessanta si è verificato un cambiamento di percezione. I fumetti, così come altri fenomeni effimeri della cultura popolare, sono diventati costosi oggetti da collezione in un mercato in rapida espansione basato sulla nostalgia. Ma in ogni caso i fumetti vengono apprezzati anche per ragioni che vanno oltre il valore sentimentale o economico. Oggi sono celebrati come opere d’arte, e un pubblico di appassionati ha beatificato un vero e proprio pantheon di artisti, ritenuti i più grandi autori di fumetti di tutti i tempi. Tra loro ha una posizione preminente Carl Barks, un ex sceneggiatore della Disney che è stato acclamato come il più importante narratore a fumetti della sua era.

All’epoca, pochi avrebbero compreso il significato della scritta “Barks’ Jiffy Chicken Dinner³” che si trova sul lato di una scatola nella copertina del numero del marzo 1947 di Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. Né avrebbero potuto sapere che un barattolo con l’etichetta “Barks’ Dog Soup⁴”, presente nella credenza del protagonista in una storia di Paperino del 1946, citava il nome dell’autore. La politica dello Studio Disney e del suo licenziatario per i fumetti, la Western Publishing, prevedeva che i nomi degli autori rimanessero segreti. Questo per mantenere l’illusione che Walt Disney stesso fosse responsabile non solo dei cartoon che portavano il suo nome, ma anche della miriade di libri per bambini e di fumetti che portavano il marchio Disney. Il nome di Barks, quindi, non apparve mai nelle storie con protagonisti i paperi disneyani da lui realizzate nel periodo tra il 1942 e il 1966. Ma i ragazzi riconoscevano lo stile caratteristico di quello che chiamavano “il bravo disegnatore”, e si lamentavano prontamente quando veniva rimpiazzato da autori di minor talento.

Sfortunatamente, Barks non vide mai nessuno comprare uno dei fumetti da lui realizzati: «Mi capitava di andare nei drugstore o ovunque ci fosse un espositore di riviste, e se avevo un po’ di tempo libero gironzolavo, facendo finta di dare un’occhiata a Popular Mechanics ⁵ o a qualcos’altro, e guardavo i bambini che entravano… Speravo sempre di vederne uno comprare un numero di Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories o di Uncle Scrooge. Non accadde mai. Prendevano sempre Superman oppure un fumetto della Harvey⁶ o un numero di Oswald Rabbit⁷, ma nessuno di loro degnava mai neanche di uno sguardo gli Uncle Scrooge o i Donald Duck… Penso che sarebbe stata la più grande emozione della mia vita vedere un bambino pagare dieci centesimi per una copia di Uncle Scrooge»⁸.

Barks inventò un’intera famiglia di parenti di Paperino/Donald Duck, inclusi suo cugino, Gastone Paperone⁹, un dandy dai capelli ondulati che riusciva a vivere senza lavorare grazie alla sua incredibile fortuna; lo scienziato eccentrico, Archimede Pitagorico¹⁰; il miliardario spilorcio, Zio Paperone¹¹, e i suoi nemici, la gang di ladri inetti della Banda Bassotti¹²; la maga italiana, Amelia¹³. I nipoti di Paperino e la sua fidanzata Paperina¹⁴, già presenti nei disegni animati, completavano il cast. In genere le storie di Barks erano di due tipi. Il primo era rappresentato da una serie di storie di Paperino di dieci pagine pubblicate mensilmente su Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories. Queste storie si svolgevano nella città immaginaria di Paperopoli¹⁵, che Barks aveva creato per il suo cast pennuto, e riguardavano soprattutto la vita di tutti i giorni di Paperino. Il secondo tipo di storie di Barks consisteva nelle avventure più lunghe per la serie di Paperino pubblicata su Four Color¹⁶ e su Uncle Scrooge, e che portava i paperi in ambientazioni esotiche, in cerca di tesori nascosti e civiltà perdute. Barks scrisse e disegnò più di cinquecento storie alla velocità di una storia ogni due settimane, un record di prolificità incredibile per uno sceneggiatore o un disegnatore.

Le narrazioni fantasiose di Barks resero gli appassionati desiderosi di sapere qualcosa di più riguardo al misterioso creatore delle storie dei paperi. Nel 1960 un fan di nome John Spicer usò uno stratagemma per dissipare la cortina di silenzio, e la Western Publishing per la prima volta rivelò il nome di Barks a un lettore. Quando Barks ricevette la prima lettera da parte di un fan era così poco abituato al riconoscimento del suo lavoro che da principio pensò che si trattasse di uno scherzo del suo amico Bob Harmon, un gag writer¹⁷ che scriveva perDennis the Menace¹⁸ ed era noto per le sue burle. Solo dopo che Harmon ebbe negato ripetutamente di essere l’autore della lettera, e dopo averla «guardata con sospetto per parecchie settimane», Barks decise di rispondere vista la possibilità che potesse essere autentica. In seguito commentò: «La segreteria di redazione mi dice che ricevono molte lettere, ma negli ultimi diciassette anni ne ricordo solo tre… due delle quali erano stroncature che mi hanno causato il mal di testa per settimane»¹⁹. I critici hanno ipotizzato che la Western abbia lasciato Barks all’oscuro della reale quantità di lettere di appassionati che riceveva, per evitare che si montasse la testa e chiedesse maggior considerazione e un compenso più alto, mentre la maggior parte degli autori Western lavorava in modo anonimo sui vari personaggi su licenza che erano la base della casa editrice.

Ma da quando l’identità di Barks è stata svelata, la sua fama è cresciuta a dismisura. Il suo lavoro è stato ospitato in mostre nei musei, e Time, Newsweeke il New York Review of Books lo hanno riconosciuto come uno dei più grandi umoristi americani. Barks ha avuto anche un impatto notevole sulla cultura popolare statunitense. Decani del cinema fantastico come George Lucas e Steven Spielberg hanno citato le sue storie avventurose come fonte d’ispirazione per i film della saga di Indiana Jones. Duck Tales, serie televisiva animata che esordì negli anni Ottanta, aveva come protagonista una creatura di Barks, Zio Paperone, e presentava adattamenti di alcune delle sue storie più famose. Le opere di Barks vengono continuamente ristampate da parecchi anni negli Stati Uniti, e ciò contribuisce al riconoscimento del loro valore. Tuttavia, egli ha raggiunto una popolarità anche maggiore in Europa, dove le sue storie sono ristampate in albi settimanali che pubblicano le storie a fumetti di Paperino, e il nome di Barks è molto noto.

Leggi la seconda parte.

1 Per aumentare la scorrevolezza del testo agli occhi del lettore italiano, si è scelto di tradurre i nomi di tutti i personaggi usando il corrispettivo italiano classico; in nota vengono forniti i nomi originali. [NdT]

2 Col termine “Baby Boom” si indica il periodo successivo alla Seconda Guerra Mondiale (dal 1946 al 1964), durante il quale il numero delle nascite negli Stati Uniti ebbe un notevole incremento, passando da poco più di 250 mila all’anno a quasi 450 mila. [NdR]

3 “Cena istantanea a base di pollo Barks”. [NdT]

4 “Minestra per cani Barks”. [NdT]

5 Rivista americana dedicata alla scienza e alla tecnologia. [NdR]

6 Casa editrice statunitense fondata nel 1941. Tra i suoi personaggi più famosi si ricordano Casper e Richie Rich. [NdR]

7 Oswald the Lucky Rabbit è il coniglio antropomorfo creato nel 1927 da Walt Disney e Ub Iwerks come protagonista di alcuni dei loro primi cartoon. La sua complessa vicenda produttiva, che lo avrebbe visto passare presto nelle mani della concorrenza, farà del suo design il prototipo di quello usato per il successivo Mickey Mouse. [NdR]

8 Barks intervistato da Donald Ault e Thomas Andrae, 4 agosto 1975. Per una raccolta di interviste a Barks, vedi Donald Ault (a cura di), Carl Barks Conversations (University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2003)

9 In originale “Gladstone Gander”. [NdT]

10 In originale “Gyro Gearloose”. [NdT]

11 In originale “Uncle Scrooge”. [NdT]

12 In originale “The Beagle Boys”. [NdT]

13 In originale “Magica de Spell”. [NdT]

14 In originale “Daisy Duck”. [NdT]

15 In originale “Duckburg”. [NdT]

16 Testata antologica pubblicata dall’editore Dell tra il 1939 e il 1962 e che presentava in ogni numero un differente personaggio. Paperino apparve in almeno 25 numeri di Four Color prima di ottenere una testata a suo nome.

17 Scrittore specializzato in battute o situazioni comiche. [NdT]

18 Striscia giornaliera a fumetti creata da Hank Ketcham nel 1951. [NdR]

19 Barks intervistato da R.O. Burnett, 13 dicembre 1960.

Nota extraída de http://conversazionisulfumetto.wordpress.com