Carl Barks (March 27, 1901 – August 25, 2000) was an American Disney Studio illustrator and comic book creator, who invented Duckburg and many of its inhabitants, such as Scrooge McDuck (1947), Gladstone Gander (1948), the Beagle Boys (1951), The Junior Woodchucks (1951), Gyro Gearloose (1952), Cornelius Coot (1952), Flintheart Glomgold (1956), John D. Rockerduck (1961) and Magica De Spell (1961). The quality of his scripts and drawings earned him the nicknames The Duck Man and The Good Duck Artist. Writer-artist Will Eisner called him "the Hans Christian Andersen of comic books."
In 1987, Barks was one of the three inaugural inductees of the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.
Barks was born in Merrill, Oregon to William Barks and his wife Arminta Johnson. He had an older brother named Clyde. Barks once stated that his paternal ancestors were Dutch and his maternal ancestors were Scottish. His paternal grandparents were David Barks and his wife Ruth Shrum. His maternal grandparents were Carl Johnson and his wife Suzanna Massey, but little else is known about his ancestors. Barks was the descendant of Jacob Barks who came to Missouri from North Carolina around 1800. They lived in Marble Hill in Bollinger County. Jacob Barks' son Isaac was the father of the David Barks noted above. Source 1850 census, Goodspeed's History of Southeast Missouri, 1888. Find a Grave.
Basil Wolverton (July 9, 1909 – December 31, 1978) was an American cartoonist, illustrator, comic book writer-artist and professed "Producer of Preposterous Pictures of Peculiar People who Prowl this Perplexing Planet", whose many publishers included Marvel Comics and Mad.
His unique, humorously grotesque drawings have elicited a wide range of reactions. Cartoonist Will Elder said he found Wolverton's technique "outrageously inventive, defying every conventional standard yet upholding a very unusual sense of humor. He was a refreshing original," while Jules Feiffer stated, "I don't like his work. I think it's ugly".
He was posthumously inducted into the comic book industry's Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1991.
Born in Central Point, Oregon, he later moved to Vancouver, Washington, and worked as a vaudeville performer and a cartoonist and reporter for the Portland News. At age 16 he sold his first nationally published work and began pitching comic strips to newspaper syndicates. His comic strip, Marco of Mars, was accepted by the Independent Syndicate of New York in 1929 but never distributed because it was deemed too similar to Buck Rogers, which debuted that year.
Melissa Mars (born 3 September 1981) is a French singer and actress.
Born in Marseilles, France, Melissa Mars began acting at the age of thirteen, at the Chocolat theater. Two years later, she began taking singing lessons.
At age of sixteen, she moved to Paris, and earned a baccalauréat in sciences at the Louis-Le-Grand high school twelve months later. Despite this accomplishment, she ended her studies, but continued to study Spanish, English, piano, and harmonica. She wrote short scripts and read modern theatrical works (Anouilh, Obaldia, Sartre, Cocteau, Miller, and others).
In 1998, her agent arranged for her to dine with André Téchiné and François Bernheim. However, the dinner didn't work out as planned: According to Mars, "the meal progressed, but the interaction did not." François Bernheim asked to hear her sing. With her mother's help, she wrote her first song, "Papa m'aime pas." Five others followed. Having performed under the stage names Melissa Sefrani and Melissa Maylee, she ultimately adopted the last name Mars, a reference to the planet Mars and her penchant for dreams.