Important: It is essential for you to have access to the original 1961 Dell issue of Uncle Scrooge #34 in order to follow the more technical information on this page. Reprints tend to have diverse alterations!

THE STORY

Synopsis:
Scrooge, Donald, and the nephews are blown up in the air to a nearby, small planet. It seems to be Valhalla, the home of the ancient gods!

Comments:
Besides his interest in legends Barks was also very interested in mythology. From time to time Barks looked to the tales of Nordic, Roman and Greek mythology in order to get ideas for his stories. In this one he manages to combine the Gods from all three mythological worlds mentioned above.

THE WEAKNESSES

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The main plotline of an inhabited planet near Earth is in itself a major oddity, but that kind of unrealistic events are fully allowed in a comic book story, and should not be neither debated nor questionned. On the other hand, Barks made a few other oddities of a slightly more realistic nature:

1: Pseudo science: The scientific part of the story is very strange indeed, and the astronomer really had to come up with some convincing explanations in order to get us to accept the whole concept. When Scrooge asks if the strange planet contains metals he answers: Yes - especially iron! Its magnetic force is equal to Earth's, which is why the two planets don't crash together! The repelling force weakens at odd moments!
In an interview Barks declared: You'll have to read the story to see how I explain away such anomalies with scientifically provable hogwash...

2: Dispensable: Donald's presence was not really required in the story! He had nothing much to do, and he did not contribute to the plotlines. All the actions are taken care of by Scrooge and partly the nephews, while Donald rests...

3: Factual error: Barks shows Thor, the God of Thunder in Nordic mythology, in his chariot driven by four horses. This is not correct. Thor's chariot was pulled by two goats. This error was corrected in AA28/1962, the Danish edition of the Donald Duck magazine.

Inconsistencies: The ancient 'gods' frequently use modern day phrases such as Hitchhiker, Hallucination, Lord, Champion, Suburb, Kidnaping...

THE INTERVIEWS

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Many times Barks was asked about the published story as well as the missing panels. Here are some of his responses:

1: Oh, I've had stories butchered! I remember a story in which a planet that was Valhalla came down close to the Earth. And the ducks were picked up by a cyclone and transported to this big planet which was up there. The gravitational pull between the two planets was sort of controlled by how much gold there was on Valhalla and how much gold there was on the Earth. And while they were up there the kids and Donald, I think, persuaded Thor to come down and explore the Earth to see whether they wanted Valhalla to go any closer to Earth than it was then. So Thor came down in his chariot with the kids and went over the busiest street intersection in Duckburg. I had all kinds of noise and traffic and smog, every unpleasant thing we have on the Earth was in that one big, massive panel. And here was Thor in his chariot coming down over this street intersection. I worked for a couple of days to make that drawing, and it was taken out of the story and, I guess, wounded up in a waste basket some place, because they needed a little space to print an ad for some kind of ... sugar candy, I guess. Made me very disheartened!

2: I wrote a 16-pager of Uncle Scrooge and the ducks getting blown into Valhalla - a wandering small planet that strays into the earth's shadow. This Valhalla is peopled by dog-faces named Thor, Odin, and other names common to the Norse Gods. Also Vulcan, Jupiter, Venus, and the Latin Gods are named.

After Barks saw his amputated 16-pager that ended up being published as a 14-pager, he sighed: My chin hit my knees when I saw the big half-page stupender I did of Thor and Vulcan and a nephew riding above the busiest street corner in Duckburg in the gold chariot missing! Thor's horses terrified, thousands (at least) of people gaping upward in disbelief. Autos bumper to bumper, smoking, clanking. In short, I gave Vulcan something to be scared about. All wasted effort! - From that point on Barks stopped making half-page splashes...

Extra:
3: The main clash in U$28 The 'Paul Bunyan' Machine from 1960 did not turn out exactly as Barks had wished for: There are some bad spots in some of the Scrooge stories that I wish could have been done over. The climax fight in the Paul Bunyan theme could have been improved with a halfpage spread of Scrooge's and the Beagle Boys' giant machines hacking each other to pieces, but I was afraid the editors would delete such a scene as being too violent.
Barks' fear was not unfounded; the following year he drew the Valhalla story, in which he incorporated the half-pager that was unceremoniously cut by the editor to make room for an advertisement. This made Barks very hesitant to use those elaborate panels, which is also why he refrained from drawing one in U$70 Doom Diamond from 1967, where Scrooge and the Beagle Boys are battling it out using giant boats.

THE BREAKDOWN

The whole story was manhandled by the editor in order to make room for an advertisement, and Barks' art suffered bigtime. The following is a technical breakdown of the putative and known deplorable doings that resulted in a total of two pages (i.e. 16 standard panels) - that were scattered around - being cut, meaning that the story went from 16 finished pages to 14 published ones:

Breaks seem to appear on page 10. This is most noticeable between panels 7 and 8, because the space between them is much wider. Possibly, the vertical black line between the panels (not shown in later issues) is a trace of a cut panel. Mayby this cut art contained a longer meeting between Hercules and the nephews. It could be that more information is given on the stone which Thor uses to offset gravity and maybe some hints are given as to why some stones on Valhalla have special qualities. In the background of panel 8, there is a silhouette of the uncoming nephews who may be contemplating about what Hercules might just have said or showed in some deleted panels. This is apparently confirmed in the nephews' comments in panels 2,3, and 4 on page 11.

The deleted half-page Duckburg overview which Barks has called 'the most complicated drawing I ever did' must have been cut from the bottom of page 13. Panel 5 shows Vulcan looking down in fright. This panel looks like it has been cut at the bottom to make room for the caption. A close look at Thor's speech balloon seems to show that its upper border is added by the editor.

Barks was concerned to balance fantasy with science, thus he would have taken care to explain the crucial detail of the 'unmagic stone hammer' (page 14, panel 2). In its compressed form, Scrooge's comments render no explanation. The hammer simply appears and solves everybody's problems.
In a letter to a friend in 1985 Barks tried to reconstruct the missing pieces from that scene: The stone hammer which Uncle Scrooge brings to Vulcan is something that he invented a page earlier while trying to make gold bars himself. Vulcan's magic one was by then locked up. I dimly remember that Scrooge had a battle with his conscience on whether the world was worth saving, and that he decided to go for the gold, but his slyly-made stone hammer wouldn't deliver the shiny stuff. There must have been something in the business of his developing his stone hammer that led him to later think, that the stone hammer might have reversal qualities, but that important story point has long since vanished into the waste bin...

The caption of panel 5 in page 14 could have been added or changed. Possibly the composition of this panel was also changed because the left speech balloon points to Scrooge (who has a closed beak), but it is the nephews who seem to speak. This means that the bottom half of page 14 could have been part of more material at this point of the story.

The living room scene (page 14, panel 6) might have been part of a larger scene in which Donald and the nephews hear a clunking sound coming from outside. It could be that in this deleted part, Louie says: 'Another of childhood's cherished illusions reduced to so many nuts and bolts'. This was a Barks commentary from memory to a friend in 1960.

Reversing all the gold production on Valhalla is not the only way to re-establish the circumstances. In theory it can (according to the astronomer's explanation in page 2) also be done by transferring some of Earth's iron into gold. And that is exactly what Scrooge is working on in page 14, panel 7. Consequently, there is no reason at all for the nephews to protest in panel 8, as they did on Valhalla before having captured Vulcan and Scrooge. This could mean that panel 14.8 originally showed the capture of Scrooge on Valhalla, a scene which is not shown in the published story.

On page 14, panel 8 (the published story's last panel) the left nephew's head seems to have been retouched. If this panel originally took place on Valhalla, then it must have shown the nephews wearing their caps. On Earth, in panels 6 and 7, the nephews are shown without caps. This could mean that panel 8 originally came from a similar Valhalla scene, that was retouched to make it fit after the two previous panels by removing the caps from the nephews' heads.

If the original story contained an ending in which Scrooge was approved to make gold on Earth but not on Valhalla, then it could very well have seemed a little confusing to a reader who had not focused much on the theorising in the first part of the story. Throughout the story, making gold is the key to all the problems, and the story also ends with Scrooge making gold as a key to the solution.
Maybe the editor thought that this was too confusing to be easily understood especially after cutting two pages, thus he changed the ending. He had his hands in the story, anyway, and a choice of cut panels to use in a very abrupt, new ending.

THE VEXATIOUS PAGE