Barks' commentaries:

Ever since that distant day when man saw his first star, men have dreamed of exploring space. Curiously, those dreams have usually turned into highly imaginative nightmares, which populate the unknowns of space with dreadful creatures and mad scientists and so on and on. Could not there be other types of creatures up there? Uncle Scrooge didn't do any speculating on the type of creatures he might find before he set out on his trip into the dark void - he just wanted to find no creatures at all!
He finds, instead, a system of life that closely resembles our own, and he finds, too, that emotions exist out there - hunger, fear, frustration, pity, and, finally, a great joy, which is all the sweeter because he bought it at a frightfully high price.

Island in the Sky was published in 1960, so I must have done it in the fall of 1959 (Actually, Barks sent the story to the publisher in mid June, 1959 - Editor's remark). I went back to the Buck Rogers style of spaceships because I thought they looked more picturesque. They had a cartoony quality about them that the regular rockets of today don't have. Of course, in 1959 we didn't have very much in the way of rockets. They were just cigar-shaped things, and they didn't seem to have any potential for glamour as they were flying through the sky. But that's a generation long ago, and practically nobody remembers them but old-timers like me.

The story shows what Earth people will do one day when they get into outer space and meet up with people who live in other worlds. I'm afraid that the Earth people will make a mighty bad impression on whoever they meet. Certainly Uncle Scrooge and Donald carried their Earth ways up there to this little planet. They had their fears and greeds, and they imposed them on these poor little people who lived on this barren island in the asteroids - very much like regular Earth people would if they got there.
It also gave me a chance to have Uncle Scrooge finally relent and do something good to repay the damage he and his nephews had done. The way they rewarded those little Indian fellows was nice. It was a situation that is very much duplicated in real life, where the people who have nothing are always in sight of plenty but are unable to reach it. The little guys were there in sight of this beautiful planet full of food, and they were starving. The fact that Uncle Scrooge was able to bridge the gap for them with nothing more complicated than a rope made a nice little touch for the story.

The first idea I had for the story was that Scrooge was going to outer space to find an asteroid where he could hide his money. And, of course, I had to think up something interesting he could find on those asteroids. So I kept turning over ideas after one another, and I came up with this business of there being two asteroids; one is bare, the other is all covered with vegetables. People live on the bare one and starve. Everything grows lush on the other one. It added an element to the story that made the plot worthwhile.

I managed to get a little humor into this by having old Scrooge's stinginess cause the ducks to practically starve to death on the way there to the asteroids because he was hauling rocket fuel so he wouldn't have to buy it at Space Wheel 5. Then when he finally had to buy it on the way back, it was out of his own goodness of heart that he had gotten himself into the situation. I could just visualize old Uncle Scrooge hurting inside as he looked at the prices!