How Else to Read Donald Duck
From Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity, by Thom Andrae…
In the 1940s and early 1950s, Barks had worked relatively free of editorial control. He had not received a list of specific taboos, but seven years of training at the Disney Studio and a habit of being “tooth chatteringly careful” about what he wrote gave him an idea of the limits within which he could work. However, more censorship occurred during the 1950s than in any other period: three of Barks’s complete stories were banned, and others were significantly altered. The new mood of restrictiveness surfaced with a vengence when “The Golden Apples”, a ten page Donald Duck story that was to appear in September 1952, was scrapped. Although the art for the story has vanished, Barks remembered it being a modern version of the myth of Atlanta and the golden apples. Barks explained, “I can only recall that I had Daisy quite angry with Donald because he was trying to win the hand, I guess, of this queen of the apples festival. Daisy was so jealous that she was throwing things at Donald and was not acting lady-like. The was the only excuse they ever gave me for cutting it.” Since Barks cast her as a volatile termagant, Daisy had often before acted unladylike, throwing things at Donald in fits of rage, but the idealogy of domesticity imposed on women in the 1950s demanded a more sedate image.
Anything with a hint of sexuality, however arcane, was taboo. In the “The Golden Fleecing” (US #12, 1956), Scrooge searches for the legendary golden fleece but is kidnapped by two Arab-looking traders who turn out to be Harpies in disguise. “I almost had to eat those 32 pages of drawing,” Barks complained. “It seems that Harpy or Harpie is an obscure nickname for a streetwalker. I managed to save the story by renaming the old girls “LARKIES.” […]
The more timorous atmosphere of the 1950s made a return to earlier motifs difficult. When he attempted to recapture some of the Gothic aura of earlier stories in “Trick or Treat” (1952), Barks again experienced censorship problems. Likewise, Barks’s return to stories featuring clashes between Donald and the nephews that had been de rigueur in the 1940s were now considered impermissible. In February 1955 he recycled a plot from the preceeding decade involving rivalry between Donald and his nephews. When he wrote a conflict plog for the the third time in the July 1956 issue, Barks’s editor, Alice Cobb, sent him a letter from a mother “which we feel is fair criticism”. In addition, “we usually use ‘quiet’instead of ‘shut up!'” Barks sent back a vitrolic reply.
[Long angry and sarcastic letter, key paragraph being:]
From now on you will see changed stories coming from this former breeding place of vice. You will see stories that will cause Ruth Downing to write another letter to say that she just lvoes the Donald Ducks. For every time she reads one to her little nose-picking crybaby, he goes to sleep in the middle of the second page.