In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, we unravel the origins of Donald Duck's famous nephews, Huey, Dewey and Louie

Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and sixty-third installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for the first legend in this installment.

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COMIC LEGEND:

Huey, Dewey and Louie were created by Ted Osborne and Al Talliaferro for the Donald Duck comic strip.

STATUS:

False Enough for a False, but probably more of a half-truth than anything

As any fan of either version of the awesome animated series, DuckTales, should know, probably the single most important creator when it comes to those stories is Carl Barks, the former Disney animator who then became a longtime Disney comic book writer and artist. While Barks was amazing during his long career as the main comic book artist/writer for Walt Disney's world-famous comic book series (published by Dell Comics in the United States and then translated all over the world by various other publishers), Dell (and Western Publishing, the company that actually produced the comic books that Dell would then publish and distribute) made it a point to not only not list the names of the people who drew their comics, but actively HIDE their names from the rest of the world (thus maintaining a conceit that Walt Disney was writing and drawing the comics).

Thus, it was left to the fans of the world to identify Barks simply by noting that, hey, this one artist was a lot better than the other artists on these comic book anthologies and thus, Barks became known just as "The Good Duck Artist" (which is a shame, by the way, as there were other excellent artists working on Disney Comics at the time. They just weren't Carl Barks, ya know?).

Barks famously created Scrooge McDuck, and greatly developed the characters of Huey, Dewey and Louie, Donald Duck's nephews who were Scrooge's grandnephews. However, did he actually CREATE the famous duck triplets?

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WHAT IS THE CLAIM REGARDING BARKS AND HUEY, DEWEY AND LOUIE?

I've seen this in a few different places, but I'll quote just one (without a link, as I'm not trying to single anyone out. This is a common thing):

Carl Barks was an Eisner Awards Hall of Fame cartoonist who was well known for his work on Disney comics involving Scrooge McDuck and Donald Duck. He was a story director for many animated shorts involving Donald. He was also responsible for the creation of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, who debuted in 1937 within the Donald Duck newspaper strip. His extensive work on Disney comics did not simply involve providing popular characters with new adventures in familiar settings. In fact, he created Duckburg in 1944, the world that DuckTales would eventually be set in and created many of its citizens who would go on to star in the show—including Scrooge McDuck's nemeses named Magica De Spell and Flintheart Glomgold.

That's mostly right, but the Huey, Dewey and Louie claim stands out as being a bit on the controversial side of things.

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WHO CREATED HUEY, DEWEY AND LOUIE?

The main thing that is clear is that Al Talliaferro, the longtime artist on the Donald Duck comic strip, wrote to the Disney Animation Studio (at the time, both the comic strips and the animation studio were both under a larger umbrella of "Disney," more so than say, today, but also not as if they were all sharing an office or anything like that) and suggested that Donald Duck should have nephews like the previously invented Morty and Ferdie Fieldmouse (the nephews of Mickey Mouse).

Tallafiaro then received the following message from the Disney Story Department, "Inasmuch as we have decided to actually put a story crew to work on [the animated short] Donald’s Nephews, we would like to recognize the source from which the original idea of these new characters sprang… Thanks.”

The cartoon "Donald's Nephews," debuted in April 1938...

In October of 1937, Ted Osborne and Taliaferro introduced the nephews into the Donald Duck comic strip...

donalds-nephews

Disney Studios writer Dana Coty came up with the names of the triplets, naming them after Huey Long, Thomas Dewey, and Louis Schmitt, a Disney Studio animator.

Carl Barks and Jack Hannah then wrote "Donald's Nephews" and Barks storyboarded the cartoon. Sooo....who created Huey, Dewey and Louie? The comic strip artist who came up with the idea of Donald Duck having nephews and who had a comic strip featuring them five months before a cartoon featuring Huey, Dewey and Loiue debuted? Or the cartoon writer/animator who drew the model sheets for "Donald's Nephews" that presumably the comic strip artist used as his model sheet for the actual comic strip (as obviously, we know that the studio began work on the cartoon in early 1937, months before the comic strip came out)?

The official Disney position is that Osborne and Talliaferro are the creators of Huey, Dewey and Louie (of course, it is academic from Disney's perspective, as the company owns the characters no matter what, as all the work done in creating Huey, Dewey and Louie was done as work for hire), but I know that Barks thought that he was the true creator, and, when all is said and done, I think it's most fairly attributed as a joint creation between Talliaferro and Barks.

So it's a sort of false, sort of true legend.

CHECK OUT A TV LEGENDS REVEALED!

In the latest TV Legends Revealed - Was a Mickey Mouse cartoon the last thing aired on BBC-TV before World War II started and then the first thing that aired on BBC-TV when service started up again after the war ended?

PART THREE SOON!

Check back soon for part 3 of this installment's legends!

Feel free to send suggestions for future comic legends to me at either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com