ArtWords at Troynovant:
essays & reviews on art,
palimpsests of literate drawings:
clients of a latter-day hermaphrodite Muse;
listed by Title
  

Barks: ... I have read in my fan mail that my ducks always seem to be thinking exactly what they were saying; their expressions always were fitted right to that balloon of dialogue. ... I started with a written script, and of course the dialogue was the key, the thing that hung it all together.

Question: Which do you feel to be more important, the image or the text?

Barks: When you first open the comic book, the image is the thing. If you're attracted to the image, then you're interested enough to read the script. Therefore the script would be secondary. The visual gag is more important than the dialogue gag, for which you have to depend on people's ability to read and to understand what little idioms you're using; and you've also got to figure on it being translated into foreign languages. So if you're leaning heavily on dialogue gags, it's a really flimsy prop.

Donald Ault, Thomas Andrae, & Stephen Gong
"An Interview with Carl Barks, Duckburg's True Founding Father"
  4 August 1975
in Donald Ault, editor
Carl Barks: Conversations  (2003)

I grant thou wert not married to my muse,
And therefore mayst without attaint o'erlook
The dedicated words which writers use
Of their fair subject, blessing every book.
Thou art as fair in knowledge as in hue,
Finding thy worth a limit past my praise,
And therefore art enforced to seek anew
Some fresher stamp of these time-bettering days.

William Shakespeare
Sonnets, 82
  

  
"I'm sorry," said Mr. Scogan. "I for one, without ever having had the slightest appreciation of painting, have always taken particular pleasure in Cubismus. I like to see pictures from which nature has been completely banished, pictures which are exclusively the product of the human mind. They give me the same pleasure as I derive from a good piece of reasoning or a mathematical problem or an achievement of engineering. Nature, or anything that reminds me of nature, disturbs me; it is too large, too complicated, above all too utterly pointless and incomprehensible.

"I am at home with the works of man; if I choose to set my mind to it, I can understand anything that any man has made or thought. That is why I always travel by Tube, never by bus if I can possibly help it. For, travelling by bus, one can't avoid seeing, even in London, a few stray works of God — the sky, for example, an occasional tree, the flowers in the window-boxes. But travel by Tube and you see nothing but the works of man — iron riveted into geometrical forms, straight lines of concrete, patterned expanses of tiles. All is human and the product of friendly and comprehensible minds.

"All philosophies and all religions — what are they but spiritual Tubes bored through the universe! Through these narrow tunnels, where all is recognisably human, one travels comfortable and secure, contriving to forget that all round and below and above them stretches the blind mass of earth, endless and unexplored. Yes, give me the Tube and Cubismus every time; give me ideas, so snug and neat and simple and well made. And preserve me from nature, preserve me from all that's inhumanly large and complicated and obscure. I haven't the courage, and, above all, I haven't the time to start wandering in that labyrinth."

Aldous Huxley
Chrome Yellow  (1921)