Barks sees his Ducks (I don't consider the few stories with Mice characters he made) as living in the same universe than ours. Most of the time, he uses places from our universe (Klondike, Australia,...), he adds legendary places that we know about in our universe, but that we have never seen (El Dorado, ...), and also new places that he has invented (Brutopia, Duckburg, Goosetown, Pickleburg, Plain Awful...) He is the first to use the word Duckburg, which is Donald's hometown (the name Duckburg first appeared in the last panel of the Barks' "High-wire Daredevils", from 1944, in which a panel along the railway tells "Duckburg 2096 miles", but another name for Donald's hometown, Quackville, appeared in "Kite Weather"), and the word Calisota (this name is a combination of California and Minnesota), that he only used once, in "The Gilded Man", which is the state in which Duckburg is located. In "Fast Away Castaway" (W US 35-04), we can also see the gulf of lower Cauliflowernia. It's impossible to say whether Cauliflowernia is the same than Calisota, than California, or is another new state...
In The
Carl Barks Library of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories in Color # 44,
Barks tells :
"Duckburg was sort of
figured to be near Burbank, California, the main plant
of the Disney Studio,
but obviously it had to be moved around to fit the requirements
of whatever story
I was writing. So it became a place of fantasy, like a fairy-tale
locale.
It had a desert, a lake,
a sea, snow, tropical hurricanes, anythjing that was needed.
I would have been very
handicapped if I had been compelled to keep the location
in Southern California."
And in The
Carl Barks Library of Walt Disney's Comics and Stories in Color # 49,
commenting on "Double
Masquerade" :
"In "Double Masquerade"
I used the seashore of Duckburg-- not too out of place for
Burbank, which is a half-hour
drive from the ocean."
According to some sources, Barks would have told he considered Duckburg
as a city state, like, for instance, the Vatican.
Barks has never drawn maps showing Duckburg entirelly, but he has made at least three maps with pieces of Duckburg :
1): In "Fishy Warden", we can see a map of the river's estuary :
2): In "Some Heir Over the Rainbow", an old man sells a treasure map to Huey, Dewey, and Louie:
The colorist has obviously made a mistake, the map should look like this (it is not a river, but a coast!) :
3): In "Raffle Reversal", Gladstone finds a map that shows where a pearl necklace :
Lots of authors helped themselves with Barks' stories (references
to places and the maps above) :
* Dan McIntire drew a
very funny and interresting map only based on Barks' stories.
* In "Introduzione a Paperino", Marovelli, Paolini,
and Saccomanno made another much serious
and interresting map of Duckburg with only Barksian references too.
* The publisher Egmont once offered a
map of Duckburg with some references to Barks' stories in weeklies.
* In the Italian "Topolino", two
interresting maps were published in 2002, with some references to Barks.
* The American artist Don Rosa created a very special Ducks'
universe, very realistic, but at the same time he is probably the artist
who cares the most about Barks' references. Here
is a page about his map and his conception of the Ducks' universe.
* On his site, Andrea Salimbetti has a
page with a map of Duckburg he drew, and two maps of the western coast
of the US which illustrate Don Rosa's and Carl Barks' points of view.
Other interresting sources on the web about Barks' Duckburg :
* Here
is a great page on Peter Kylling's site with a list with all the
drawn and named places in Duckburg.
* David Gerstein has written
a "Donald
Duck Universe Guide" for Egmont's writers, which lists places and characters
in Carl Barks' Duck stories.
* In his website, Sigvald Grøsfjeld
jr. has a very interresting section,"The
lives and times in Duckburg", about the Barks/Rosa version of Duckburg.