THEUNDERGROUNDSTORY

Carl Barks invented large numbers of memorable secondary characters for his Disney comic book stories. Most of them were only used once as they served specific purposes in specific stories. The perhaps most unusual and inventive group were the underground beings introduced in U$13 Land Beneath the Ground from 1956. This is the story.

THE STORY

U$13 Land Beneath the Ground - 1956

Synopsis:

Scrooge McDuck is afraid of the increasingly frequent occurrences of earthquakes, so he digs a tunnel under his Money Bin to ensure that the ground is solid. Here he encounters the strange land Terry Fermy where the enterprising inhabitants make earthquakes...

10 brief comments:

Which is the most steadfast and secure building in Duckburg? Which building cannot be rocked or affected by attacks by humans or nature? The Money Bin! But Barks found a way, anyhow. He invented a whole land under Duckburg and suddenly the mighty and impregnable Money Bin is in peril. Attacked from the most unlikely place - the underground.

Barks used polymorphic characters (organisms that can assume more than one form) from time to time. The first example was introduced in FC0062 Mystery of the Swamp, in which the midget-like Gneezles could swell up considerably and transform into battering rams. Barks widened this ability in the story, in which all the legless Terries and Fermies constantly changed from being characters with arms and heads to transform into round balls that acted as battering rams.

When Barks tried to think of a type of beings to inhabit the underground world, and he decided to go for round and jolly looking characters. They are not unlike a swelling Gneezle in appearance, and they even perform their acts in the same basic way. However, in this case the characters use their great numbers in order to 'rock' the world...

After the first earthquake Scrooge's Bin money seeps through a crack and begins to fill the caves under Duckburg, which is in fact the triggering reason for the following earthquakes.

The extraterrestrials living under Earth's crust may rightly be named intraterrestrials.

The beings are of two main families; the Terries who wear bow ties, and the Fermies who wear four-in-hands.

Barks got his scenery from pictures of the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.

The ducks witness thousands of underground dwellers from all under the Earth, who rally together in order to prepare for the most perfect and most violent earthquake ever. This is undisputedly the biggest gathering in the history of funny animal stories!!!

The beings actually compete with each other to make earthquakes and the winning team gets - an ancient Greek jug! When the ducks flee from the underground they bring the trophy along, but Scrooge drops his hat in the process. It now becomes the new trophy...

Towards the end of the story an enormous earthquake rattles all the infrastructure and buildings in Duckburg, and it must be believed that much of it would have to be repaired or replaced. A massive task with colossal costs...

BARKS' COMMENTARIES

What is down under the surface of the Earth? Geologists say a strong layer of rocky stuff and, below that, hot soup. Uncle Scrooge got to worrying about how strong that layer of rocky stuff might be, and he set about digging a hole down through it. He never got deep enough to find the hot soup, but he got into some hot soup of another kind.

In this science-fiction adventure Uncle Scrooge and his helpful nephews find the cause of earthquakes, and they unwittingly trigger one that would jolt Richter right off his scale.

I can't think of how I happened to come up with the idea. I suppose I was always figuring on poor old Uncle Scrooge and his problems with his money. I couldn't have the Beagle Boys always being the guys who were trying to bore into it. There had to be other menaces. One menace that came up naturally was an earthquake. It's about the only thing that could affect that tremendous bin with its walls so many feet thick. A cyclone or rain or lightning couldn't hurt it. It must have been with that thought in mind that I got to working on the idea of having Scrooge drill a hole down into the ground to see what was under there, and how solid the foundation was. Would they find a big geyser of molten metal or lava, or would it be something else completely unexpected?
I took the idea that it must be the completely unexpected. They find a hole filled with queer creatures that live down there. I thought of lizards and all sorts of dragons before I came up with these comical little round-bodied guys. After I invented them, I decided they could be the guys who made earthquakes. The story was then built from the problem of how Scrooge could combat an earthquake, moved to his exploring to see how vulnerable he was, then to the guys who actually cause earthquakes.

At the time I wrote the story, the popular stations around San Jacinto were the ones that played western music, cowboy music. That's all I ever listened to on the radio. I didn't have a television, in fact, televisions were not very common in that early time. I would listen to that cowboy music. It became part of my nature to think in terms of a lot of people listening to it. Out here in the West and in Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, western expressions like So Long, pardner and They went that-a-way were just part of the way people thought. So I was thinking the same way, and I had the Terries and the Fermies talk that way because it sounded a little funny. One of them says: You should hear the fellows talk that live under a place called Boston. The ones that lived underneath Duckburg talked this western lingo. The ones from Asia talked Siamese or Hindi or whatever it was that the radio stations over their heads broadcast through the rocks and shale slabs.

I got Donald into the head-butting contest to give him something to do. With Scrooge being the main protagonist and the three kids and their Junior Woodchucks' Guide Book being the brains that always saved him, Donald needed some lines. So he had to be shoved into a situation like that in order to justify paying him any salary. 30 cents an hour, he got!

THE BUTCHERING


Scrapped panels 7 and 8 planned for page 10

Occasionally, Barks was subjected to cuttings in his stories for several reasons, of which censorship (see more HERE) and lack of space in specific issues were the most prominent. In general, Barks was not too bothered when his editors at Western Publishing decided to cut a number of panels from his artwork (as he was at least always paid in full whether or not all his material was used), because they typically needed the resulting space for diverse commercials, but in one instant he was furious (see more HERE)!
As for the story on this page Barks made (or had made) more panel cuttings than in other stories. The original story was 32 pages long, but only 27 were published. In the elaborate book Uncle Scrooge McDuck - His life and Times (see more HERE) you can enjoy the whole story (minus 1 page), that was restored with the help of Barks himself.

The main reason for the cuttings was this: During the 1950s the US postal service enforced a peculiar demand saying that comic book magazines sent as second class mail were to contain a minimum of two stories and no characters were allowed to appear in both!
Because of this rule, the Uncle Scrooge story was reduced from 32 to 27 pages in order to make room for a 4-pager, U$13 'Lightning Power Plant', starring Gyro Gearloose fighting the elements during a rainstorm. But even that was not enough as Huey, Dewey and Louie starred in both stories. Thus Donald's nephews were replaced by Morty and Ferdy from the mouse universe.
In order to secure the best overall flow in the story Barks volunteered to tighten up his pages, which in turn meant that several single panels throughout the artwork were deleted - but, luckily, saved in his files!

See more on some of Barks' artwork that has survived HERE.

THE TITBITS

The Money Bin has defied very strong impacts such as being moved (U$15 'Moving Money), pocket-sized (U$33 Billions in the Hole), attacked by magic (U$38 The Unsafe Safe), tilted (U$51 How Green was My Lettuce), and in this story it is buried under the ground and catapulted into the air...

Scrooge's characteristic hat (it can be called a top hat, topper, silk hat, dress hat, opera hat, high hat, and stovepipe!), which he always claims 'that I bought for 2 dollars in 1910 and it will still last many years' is definitely the single most indestructible garment item in the duck universe!!! It has been torn, flattened, eaten(!), shot, and destroyed numerous times, but in this story it is taken over by the Terries and Fermies as a future trophy!
Still, it is back in place in the following stories...

Impressively, Barks wrote no less than 4 stories in which the money building was the target for a landslide crucial to the plot. The others are FC0367 A Christmas for Shacktown, U$51 How Green was My Lettuce, and U$68 Hall of the Mermaid Queen.

It is a remarkable coincidence that the issue's front cover (also made by Barks) features another type of a destructible money building...

It is possible that the globe today still holds a number of ethnic tribes and undiscovered nationalities in rugged mountain regions and unwelcoming jungle areas. Barks dreamed up several very different communities in his stories (Gneezles in FC0062 Mystery of the Swamp, Awfultonians in FC0223 Lost in the Andes, Atlanteans in U$05 'Atlantis', Indians in U$18 Land of the Pygmy Indians, extraterrestrials in U$53 Interplanetary Postman are examples), but in this story we encounter strange beings in every sense of the term - and they even live just under our feet!

The intraterrestials live all under our Earth, and the ones from this story gather from many parts of the underground USA. They all speak Terrisian, but with different dialects as the panel suggests (see more HERE).