When Carl Barks stopped writing comic book stories at age 65 he planned for a quiet retirement where he would just relax and paint a few paintings along with his wife Garé. Was he wrong!!! The last part of his life turned out to be far more hectic than all his years before. He was finally revealed as The Good Artist and soon reporters, publishers, and fans swarmed to his home, and mail poured in from all over the world. In the beginning of the 1970s he was also given permission by the Disney Corporation to make duck paintings. What a retirement...
As if this was not enough, Barks was also repeatedly asked to write more duck stories for his former publisher, Western. It would take 4 years before he finally caved in and agreed to write and sketch a few stories for a newly planned magazine starring The Junior Woodchucks. The official name for the series was to be Huey, Dewey and Louie Junior Woodchucks (commonly referred to as HDL).

Barks had a free hand in choosing topics and he chose to write about the environment, a topic which had been close to his heart for many years. He also chose to make Scrooge the predominantly bad guy who was only thinking of profit from his shady deals and polluting factories while the Junior Woodchucks were defending the environment. The stories always ended up with Scrooge realizing the errors of his ways - until next time...

Barks created meticulous scripts and sketches for the new stories and different inkers were hired to finish his art. They all followed his layout almost to the letter except for one thing; in a number of the stories Barks used the JW official bloodhound General Snozzie - whom he had invented himself many years before - but in the final art Pluto was chosen instead. There can be little doubt that this was Western's decision, and there can be even less doubt that Barks disliked the decision having always avoided the 'dumb dog', as he once called Pluto, in his own stories.
Barks started to use a type of layout that he never used on a regular basis before - panorama panels. In his former stories, Barks drew the panels in pairs, 4 rows to a page, but in the new HDL stories he quite often used stretched, panoramic panels that took up the space of two normal panels. In the subpages you are presented to these panoramas exclusively.