A history of Donald Duck by Carl Barks, the best cartoonist in the world. Or one of the best.
What’s the first thing you do when you get home after a long day at work?
[He laughs.] It’s cliché, but it’s a very important thing: I love to spend time with my family watching Netflix or Prime or whatever.
What charity or cause are you passionate about?
Anything to do with kids… I hate when kids get bullied… If I had a charity where I could beat up bullies… [he laughs].
What vacation spot is on your bucket list?
Later in life, if I was offered a one-way ticket to Mars, I’d take it.
If you could domesticate a wild animal, what animal would it be?
Easy: the capybara.
A history of Donald Duck by Carl Barks, the best cartoonist in the world. Or one of the best.
What’s the first thing you do when you get home after a long day at work?
[He laughs.] It’s cliché, but it’s a very important thing: I love to spend time with my family watching Netflix or Prime or whatever.
What charity or cause are you passionate about?
Anything to do with kids… I hate when kids get bullied… If I had a charity where I could beat up bullies… [he laughs].
What vacation spot is on your bucket list?
Later in life, if I was offered a one-way ticket to Mars, I’d take it.
If you could domesticate a wild animal, what animal would it be?
Easy: the capybara.
Off the Cuff
he most successful self-syndicated newspaper comic in history is the face of Alaska for readers of 650 papers in the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Caribbean. Chad Carpenter has been scribbling gags about outdoor life (human and animal) since Tundra began in 1991.
“When I started this, my intention was to avoid a real job and find some way to sit around and doodle and get paid for it,” he confides. However, “Making people laugh means a lot more to me now than when I started.”
Carpenter’s career has also pivoted into multimedia, producing Moose: The Movie (2015) and Sudsy Slim Rides Again (2018). “If I could make a living making silly, family-friendly, cheesy movies, I would. That would be my absolute best way to make a living,” he says. “But it’s really hard to make a living in movies.”
Chad Carpenter: Making the movies that we made. Big financial scariness… It turned out very well, but we had no idea that was going to be the case.
Q: What’s your greatest extravagance?
Carpenter: If I were incredibly wealthy, I would be incredibly eccentric… If I had a lot of money, I would be doing lots of incredibly stupid things with it that were incredibly fun.
Q: Dead or alive, who would you like to see perform live in concert?
Carpenter: Abraham Lincoln. I would go to one of his lectures.
Q: What’s your favorite local restaurant?
Carpenter: The Grill at Grand View Inn & Suites.
Q: What are you superstitious about?
Carpenter: I’m a little OCD. I sometimes turn on a light switch three or four times, if that’s a superstition.
Q: Is there a skill you’re currently developing or have always wanted to learn?
Carpenter: I’m constantly developing my artwork… I look at my past work and I cringe. “My gosh, I did not know how to draw.”
Q: What do you do in your free time?
Carpenter: Next question, please! Everything I do is related to creativity, but that’s kinda what I do for a living… I don’t fish, I don’t hunt, I don’t have hobbies. I’m constantly looking to create things out of nothing.
Q: What’s your best attribute and worst attribute?
Carpenter: I’m not afraid to be immature and enjoy life, and I guess my best attribute is, uh… Was that my weakness? I can’t remember.
