Synopsis:
Donald and the nephews are stranded on a coral reef with an old Spanish galleon. But the barren reef is inhabited - by a man in ancient armour.

Comments:
Barks worked very hard on this story and with such dedication it is no wonder that he liked the result. It is interesting to know that it was his wife Garé's favorite story, because, as she said: 'It's got pathos'.

Barks' comments:
I can remember the first idea I had on that was just trying to figure out something Donald could do. I thought of him sailing boats and came up with a potential ten pages of gathering seaweed, and selling this kelp, which would give me a lot of gags with boats. I think of a scene, a locale, and think, 'Well, I feel in the mood to draw boats, and the ocean, and so on,' and that would cause me to start working on that particular type of story. As I developed more and more things with the story, I think it's quite possible that that 'Ghost of the Grotto' was brought in as a menace. There is so much in that, I couldn't have thought of it in a whole bucketful of writing at once. It had to come out one thing after another.

Synopsis:
By accident, janitor Donald at The Duckburg Museum discovers that a square rock from Peru in fact is an egg. He is promptly sent out to get more...

Comments:
The main idea of using square eggs was really not an invention of Barks'. Square eggs had been a joke for many years and people talked about breeding chickens that would lay square eggs being more handy for storage.

Barks' comments:
My best story, technically, is probably the square egg one, I guess. 1949. That was about the time I hit my peak in stories. I couldn't say for sure whether that was the peak in art, but I remember I felt more interested in art at that time. I mean, I tried a little harder, although some of the stuff since that time has probably been better.
On the choice of story: The 1943 cartoon 'Saludos Amigos' had some influence on my choice to do an Inca story. I realized that it was a popular subject and that Disney's would love to have me use that locale. At that time, they were trying to get access to show their films in South America. They'd lost the whole European market during the war.
Apart from the inventive and adventurous story it is strewn with direct and psychological gags, a few of them are even running gags such as for the nephews' constant use of bubble gum: It was puffed up in the studio's story department as being a very good gimmick if you could get a running gag going to connect sequences. Look how the chewing gum gag holds the Andes story together.
When you analyze the structure of the story, you see that it was built on little short sequence gags. Almost every page had a gag or two in which the characters moved through a bit of action to a short climax, and then switched to another little action and another climax. It just stepped up and up. All of these little situations had to deal with moving them along the main story plot.