Thursday 29 March 2007

Barks?

I browsed the Heritage auctions website the other day.
And one of the lots that was sold last year caught my eye:

The description for lot 44042 read:
" Carl Barks - Uncle Scrooge #19 Cover Recreation Original Art (Another Rainbow, 1989). Uncle Scrooge animates a stack of coins with his golden musical touch, in this original illustration. Carl Barks recreated his original image to be used as a cover for a volume of Another Rainbow's slipcased Uncle Scrooge hardcover reprint editions. The image area measures 11" x 14". Matted and framed and in Very Good condition. From the Estate of Bruce Hamilton"

Well, I couldn't recall Barks doing any recreation of this cover for the CBL sets. And the art didn't look like Barks at all to me. So I searched Inducks, the internet database that indexes all the Disney comics in the world.
And, ta-da! This is what I found.

What was sold at Heritage wasn't a Barks drawing, but only a redrawn version (Not by Barks!) that was used as a poster in Walt Disney's Comics and stories #357. How much it went for? Some sucker paid $2629 for it!!!
Well, what can we learn from this? Don't get into colleccting original Barks art unless you can tell the difference between a real Barks and some other Disney artist.
But if you have spent all that money on it and can't tell the difference anyway... you might deserve it...

To finish this post here's Barks original cover for Uncle Scrooge #19.
(Courtesy of Inducks database.) Quite a difference between the two.

2 comments:

Alberto said...

Hello Joakin!

The poster artist, by the way, is Larry Mayer.

Keep up the good work!

Best,
Alberto

Joakim Gunnarsson said...

Thanks, Alberto! :)