Synopsis:
Chisel McSue presents Scrooge with a valid paper that enables him to obtain all Scrooge's wealth. It can be avoided, though, if he finds a certain case of horseradish at the bottom of the sea...

Comments:
Why did Barks choose such a special and unusual product as horseradish to be the focus point of the story? The explanation is quite simple; he paid tribute to his older brother Clyde who was the owner of Hotel Clyde in Tulelake, California (still a hotel which bears the same name today). Back then, the Tulelake area was known as the Horseradish Capital of the World producing 1/3 of USA's harvest.

Barks' comments:
I liked the story about Uncle Scrooge's search for the horseradish down under the sea in the sunken ship. That gave me a chance to show his character where he was up against a situation where he could dissolve all of his troubles by just leaving a guy to drown out there in the ocean. But he perpetuated his troubles by rescuing the guy and saving his life. It gave me a chance, too, to show that villains don't reform just because you do them a favor. They don't turn around and do you a favor in return. They remain villains right through to the end.
I liked stories that gave me a chance to draw water and ships sailing into storms, and big pictorial panels. In this one there's a whole page in which I have a ship wallowing around in the waves.

Synopsis:
Scrooge buys all the 1916 quarters in the world just to chuck them into the ocean. Except for one. It will be worth a fortune...

Comments:
Again, Barks made a story about the vast and unruly ocean as a backdrop, but this time most of it is set on the ocean floor - the fabled sunken city of Atlantis.

Barks' comments:
The art I was doing about the time Scrooge discovered Atlantis under the sea that was probably as good as I've gotten, art-wise.

Synopsis:
Donald moves to a quieter neighbourhood in order to get a good night's sleep. But it is not that simple with an alpenhorn blower in the house...

Comments:
The story evolves around noisy neighbours. Barks had firsthand knowledge of the annoyance, because he and his new wife Garé were living in a San Jacinto apartment house next-door to inconsiderate people at the time: At one side a couple played loud music, and upstairs an alcoholic woman was knocking empty bottles about every night.

Barks' comments:
I guess among the very best ones is a 10-page story of Donald, where he got to complaining about everything being too noisy and he moves to a very quiet place, and he was not satisfied until everything was absolutely silent around him. He went around everywhere seeing if there was any noise he could pick up.
Donald is naturally the loudest one of all. That's really good, and even the secondary figures are well done, for example the cheese-taster who blows his alpenhorn.

Synopsis:
Scrooge longs for some peace and quiet so he buys a large, remote area to enjoy its tranquillity. But the land is inhabited...

Comments:
This was one of the first ecologically founded stories in the comic book world, and it was close to Barks' heart, because he was always an environmentalist. Later on, Barks would make harsh comments on the way we treat the environment in his stories, culminating in the early 1970s when he wrote biting environmental stories about the decline of ecology for the Junior Woodchucks magazine (see more HERE).

Barks' comments:
On comparison with FC0062 Mystery of the Swamp: I realized that only the plotline was similar; all other elements were breaking new ground. Besides, the pygmy Indians were more believable and interesting than the Gneezles, so I went ahead with the story and let the gags fall where they might.
The ducks were always peewees in comparison with the villains. In order for them to become a menace, they had to come up against somebody smaller.
Barks added great ambiance to the Peeweegah Indians' speech by letting them speak in pentametres, a type of poetic verse borrowed from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic The Song of Hiawatha: About the 8th grade, I had to read it and recite it in school. I thought it was a tiresome way of telling a story back then, but the meter lends itself very well to the comments of the Peeweegahs when they talk about what they're going to do.