Creativity Quote by Carl Barks

Carl Barks is doing something disarmingly radical here: he’s refusing to treat Donald and the Duckburg cast as “just cartoons,” while also dodging the pretension of claiming he made capital-A Art. Calling the Ducks “caricature human beings” is his cleanest admission of method. The beaks and slapstick are a mask, not a limitation. He’s talking about social types - the hothead worker, the smug plutocrat, the luck magnet, the hustler kid - stripped down to readable shapes so their impulses pop. Caricature isn’t a downgrade; it’s compression. You exaggerate a trait until it becomes a plot engine.

The Tolkien reference sharpens the subtext: Barks cast himself, half-amused, as someone who wandered into mythmaking without the proper credentials. Tolkien’s “middle world” suggests an in-between zone: not realist fiction, not high fantasy; a place where fables can smuggle in adult anxieties under the cover of adventure. That’s Duckburg. It runs on treasure hunts, curses, and lost cities, yet it’s also about status panic, consumer desire, and the constant scramble to stay solvent. The Ducks are human enough to sting, animal enough to forgive.

Context matters: Barks worked in an era when comics were industrial product, artists often anonymous, and “serious” culture treated animation as disposable children’s stuff. This line reads like a wink at that divide. He’s admitting he built a coherent secondary world - with its own physics of luck, greed, and tenderness - then realized, retroactively, that he’d been doing world-building all along.