Beginning in late 1942 and continuing until his retirement in June of 1966, Barks produced, anonymously, over 500 comic book stories, roughly 6,000 pages, that he wrote, lettered, penciled and inked with “virtually no editorial supervision” by the notoriously brand-conscious Walt Disney organization. It’s amazing, as is Ault’s (and many others’) assertion that at one time Carl Barks was “the most widely read but least known author in the world.” That choice of noun–”author”–is dead accurate. Bark was a technically great cartoonist–his draughtsmanship was keen, lively and organized, the flow from panel to panel as liquid, as surprising, and yet as inevitable as a melody–but he was, above all else, a fabulous storyteller. The art of narrative was encoded in the man’s genes.