In U$36 'The Midas Touch' Barks introduced a new character which he would use as a star in seven adventure stories and two tenpagers. Her name is Magica de Spell. This evil Italian witch lives in a shack on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius but that does not stop her from travelling around the world in search of Scrooge and especially his lucky dime. She has the unshakable belief that if she one day gets hold of the coin, and melts it down into a medallion, she will be the world's richest and luckiest duck. Magica is considered to be Scrooge's strongest opponent, and she actually succeeds in getting hold of the dime a few times. But only for a brief moment.

In nearly all of Disney's older feature cartoons there is a witch in some role and most of them are both scary and evil. Instead, Barks made his witch both interesting and attractive which proved to be a stroke of genius as she became a much more appealing opponent to Scrooge than, for instance, Flintheart Glomgold.
Surprisingly, Barks never really liked his own criminal invention Magica de Spell (or Flintheart Glomgold, or the Beagle Boys). They were all developed as pure villains to humiliate and frustrate Scrooge, and as such do not have the appeal that his other characters possess.

THE WITCHCRAFT
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Magica mostly uses her ability of stunning the opponents
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But sometimes she stoops to the use of ordinary hypnosis
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Multipurpose liquids are also part of her fiendish arsenal
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Her powers comes from both magic wands and a more down-to-earth battery

THE SUBORDINATES
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Normally Magica is a loner - not surprising as her main objective in life is just an old wornout coin - but from time to time she is seen along with some helpers

THE DISGUISES
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Many of Magica's disguises are fairly transparent
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Others are more cunning and harder to see through
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And some of the more fiendish ones are downright magical