Barks' commentaries:

Lemmings are mysterious little creatures. At times there are almost as many of them as there are dollars in Uncle Scrooge's Money Bin. At such times they stage mass migrations to the sea. Millions and millions of lemmings all going the same direction at the same time, every lemming looking exactly like every other lemming.

In this nightmarish story Uncle Scrooge has the task of finding one lemming among all those millions, which wears around its neck a tiny, but very valuable, locket. Nobody but Uncle Scrooge could get himself into such a predicament, and nobody but a great lover of fine Norwegian cheese could ever get him out. The moral of this story is 'Never put all your eggs in one basket - or lock all of your secrets in one locket'.

It happened that there had been a big migration of lemmings a short time before I started the story. I read about it in the paper, and that got me to thinking of lemmings. I read more about them in the National Geographic and other places, so I felt they would be a good prop as a menace. From that, I hit upon the idea for a big climax situation of having Uncle Scrooge's safe combination being on the neck of one lemming in a migration of millions of lemmings. I built backward to a beginning and then moved forward with the panel breakdowns.

I named the boat the Moony Gull so that the readers could remember it if they saw it again. There is a little trick in the naming of things like ships. If you're going to have a ship in a scene early in the story and then not see it again until quite a while later, the name of that ship or some feature of it has got to stick in the readers' memory so that they recognize it instantly when they see it again. It's a good thing to have a lot of impact in the name of something. Many of my names had little puns in them - like the villain Chisel McSue - so that people would relate to them quickly.

Not long ago, I got a letter from some guys in Norway who were fascinated by the fact that I had made the lemmings so authentic and that I knew about the cheese and things made in Norway. The lemmings and cheeses were so authentic that they thought I had surely been to Norway. When they found out that I'd never been there and had only read about them in geographic magazines, it seemed that I disappointed them a great deal. They send me some Gjetost by airmail. It was soft when it got here but was really tasty stuff. It had a picture of a reindeer on the wrapper, so I thought: I bet it's reindeer cheese! But it wasn't. (Gjetost is Norwegian for goat's cheese - Editor's remark).