Ghengis Khan started life as a small idea sketch by Carl Barks. “I was going through a bunch of gag sketches Barks had done in the 1970s for his watercolors Famous Figures of History as They Might Have Looked Had Their Genes Gotten Mixed with Waterfowl and I remember thinking it was too bad he never got around to painting some of them. This is one of those. Barks’s sketch is just the loosest of ideas, yet he captures so much humor and attitude in the sketch, the oversized sword, the scowl, the hat, the dog! In my initial sketch I had replaced the dog with more treasure, but I realized that the pup helped with the humor. The ferocious warlord … and his more-ferocious doggo!”

“Designing the frame gave me another opportunity to explore how a narrative frame can extend the world of the painting without drawing our focus away from it. On the left we see more of the background soldiers marching on with their flags flutter in the wind, below, the piles of captured loot continue outside the painting, and on the right, more ruins provide evidence of where the Great Khan has been! I love the possibilities these frames provide for extending narratives, bridging the world of the painting with our real world. I think if Carl and Garé Barks had lived to see this technology they would have embraced it as well.”