Barks' commentaries:
The first Uncle Scrooge comic book had been Only
a Poor Old Man (FC0386 - Editor's
remark). Dell Publishing decided they were going to
make the book a steady feature, as Scrooge had only been
a supporting character before. So Back to the
Klondike was the second of Scrooge's own books. In
the first issue Scrooge said he had made much of his
fortune in the Klondike, so I did a little further
buildup on his past to make a whole story about the
Klondike years of his life.
I wasn't sure just how I wanted to make
Scrooge - just how much of an old tightwad, how cranky. I
was afraid if I got him to be too softhearted, then he
would be wishy-washy. So it was difficult to make him do
what he did in this story and still keep that whole
tightwad personality.
In this tale of a sourdough's return to
scenes of long-ago triumphs and troubles, Uncle Scrooge
reveals a tiny soft spot in his flinty old heart. As
originally written and drawn in 1952, this robust
adventure was deemed too robust by the publisher's
editors. They scissored 5 pages.
Now Uncle Scrooge himself was based on Gould
and Harriman and Rockefeller. All those guys made their
fortunes in railroads and mines and so on by being just a
little bit unscrupulous with the way they eliminated the
competition. Scrooge had to be in that mold, or he couldn't
have made it in an era when he was up against all those
plutocrats.
When Scrooge lets Goldie win, I had to
struggle hard to make it look right. But he did it and
was able to make himself believe that he had fooled the
other ducks into believing he was still the old hard-hearted
guy, that he hadn't let his dignity down by letting her
win, that it had been an accident, and that
because of his memory pills he had been swindled. I don't
know at what stage that ending suggested itself, but
somewhere in the panel-by-panel breakdown I came to it.
I didn't write a full script, but I wrote a
fairly detailed synopsis. And then I broke that down into
panel-by-panel stuff. I started it when I was still
living in San Jacinto. I had just been divorced from my
second wife at the time (Clara Balken - Editor's
remark), and I was kind of at loose ends. I thought
I would like to go up to Seattle and spend the summer up
there away from the heat. So I took my drawings and
drawing board and drove north. I drew most of the story
in motels; some in Grants Pass, Oregon, and some in
Seattle. I was working on the story for at least a month,
but not steadily.
The mosquito scene came out of a situation
where Goldie had to have the help of nature to battle
those darn ducks. The gag of the ducks unrolling
themselves and squeezing the mosquitos - that's a sight
gag that grew out of the situation. I didn't even think
of it until I was far along in the writing.
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