"Barks's stories were so popular, and so good, because he took pains where most writers and cartoonists for "funny animal" comic books did not. He used the ducks in everything from purest slapstick to hair-raising adventures that had only a light flavoring of comedy—but always, he worked to give his stories plausibility. Plausibility in the way the plots and gags were constructed, in the detailed and accurately drawn settings (he made sure that an ancient Persian city looked like an ancient Persian city), and above all, in the way his characters talked and behaved. Barks's characters were never puppets; the ducks were always propelled by passions so comically powerful that they could scarcely be contained even within exaggerated faces and bodies. In Barks's stories, the world is very different from the one we know—it is a world of talking ducks, and of huge "money bins" filled with Scrooge's coins and greenbacks—but "duck nature" is really human nature, and very much the same as in our own world. It was by making his characters so completely recognizable as people, despite their orange beaks and webbed feet, that Barks won the devotion of so many readers."
—Historian Michael Barrier on Carl Barks, in the introduction to "Letter to Santa" in A Smithsonian Book Of Comic-Book Comics
