Synopsis:
Scrooge decides to hide all his money on an asteroid far away from thieves. But the asteroid is inhabited...

Comments:
Apart from one long trip to Europe, Barks rarely left his native country. Still, his name is known outside Earth because he had a small asteroid named after him. In 1982 Ted Bowell of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona discovered an asteroid which was officially named 2730Barks by Cornell University. In a later interview Barks commented on the event:
'In one of my later stories, called 'Island in the Sky', sometime in the sixties, the ducks try to find a place to hide Uncle Scrooge's money, and they passed a bunch of these small asteroids on the way there. One of the men there at Cornell University, where they had a whole laboratory for the study of the asteroids, read that comic book and thought that was quite a thing, that these ducks could run onto a bunch of peculiar asteroids on their way to the asteroid belt.
Anyway, they thought that was pretty good. My stories made the asteroids interesting, and opened a possibility that there might even be some among them that would have a few vegetables growing on it. And so they named one of their discoveries after me. He wrote to tell me that the surface was approximately 100 hectares (nearly 250 acres or 1 square kilometer (Editor's remark)) in size. In any case it would be big enough for a money bin...'. (See the official letter HERE.)

Barks' comments:
In 1983 two of the greatest Disney legends, Floyd Gottfredson (mouseman) and Carl Barks (duckman), were interviewed together and asked to name the favourite story they had written. Gottfredson explained that his favourite was Island in the Sky (ran as a newspaper strip from 1936 to 1937 - Editor's remark), a story based on a secret atomic-power formula. Then Barks astonished everyone present by announcing: 'The one I like best now after all these years in looking back over the whole chain of them that I did, was Island in the Sky'! Barks was referring to his own story in U$29 which, by pure chance, had the same title as Gottfredson's story...

Synopsis:
The Sceptics' Club has offered a prize to whoever can produce a genuine flying saucer. Shortly after, such an object lands in Scrooge's office...

Comments:
The world-famous filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have been dedicated fans of Carl Barks and his comics since childhood, and they have used some of Barks' ideas in a number of their films. 'My greatest source of enjoyment in Carl Barks' comics is in the imagination of his stories. They're so full of crazy ideas - unique and special', Lucas once said. In the Indiana Jones trilogy 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' (1981), 'The Temple of Doom' (1984), and 'The Last Crusade' (1989) the filmmakers used several booby traps from Barks' stories U$07 'The Seven Cities of Cibola' and U$26 'The Prize of Pizarro'. Examples are flying darts, a decapitating blade, a guardian idol, a huge boulder, and a tunnel flooded with a torrent of gushing water.
Some may argue that Spielberg's film 'Batteries Not Included' (1987) has clear references to 'Micro-ducks from Outer Space' in which Scrooge has dealings with tiny aliens. In Spielberg's film, the tenants in an apartment building are being forced to move from their homes by developers. Tiny aliens come to the rescue and use their extraterrestrial abilities to defeat the bad guys.

Barks' comments:
I liked that story! I felt that I had touched on something that was a little different than just about any other space-type story that's come around. Creatures from outer space are villainous characters usually, and they have not rung a bell with me, because I have felt that out in outer space there are good people as well as bad, so in that story I did a little preaching, I guess.
Of course, that micro-duck story is something that I just grasped out of thin air. It's a fable, you might say...