It’s hard to imagine a better example of an Uncle Scrooge adventure story than “Crown of the Mayas”. With its inspiration likely pulled from one of cartoonist Carl Barks’ many cherished issues of National Geographic, the story sees Uncle Scrooge, Donald, and the triplets flying off to the Yucatan region in search of a lost civilization, all so Scrooge can join the Duckburg Archaeologist Club (to better sell shovels to prospective clients).
Unluckily, the ducks are tailed by two frauds named Slyviper and Foulcrook, both of whom have been ousted from the club for presenting false artifacts (in this case, faux ‘pre-Babylonian chop suey cookers’). Given that it’s so easy for Scrooge to discover a lost temple, Slyviper and Foulcrook plan to swoop in and steal that discovery out from under the ducks.
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The story has all of the hallmarks of a great Scrooge story: the lost civilization, wonderful treasures, and even a secret underground chamber. Scrooge truly was the Indiana Jones type, decades before Indy was invented, and “Crown of the Mayas” illustrates just a common, everyday outing for the miser.
The Complete Carl Barks Disney Library Vol. 30 – Uncle Scrooge: Lost Beneath the Sea is a treasure trove of such stories, filled with lost treasures, witches, and number one dimes. All the long stories presented here typify the best of Barks’s Scrooge, and wedged between these are shorter gag strips that typify his quick sense of comic timing. There is no misplaced line, no faultily rendered panel: these strips are Barks running at top form.
It isn’t just the heroes that shine: in “For Old Dime’s Sake,” we get a pitch-perfect Magica De Spell story. After Scrooge’s Number One Dime (as always), Magica hones her fearsome magic to bombard the money bin with cyclones and thunderbolts; the magic has been deciphered from recipes found ‘in a crypt beneath the oldest temple of Zeus’. Magica is her old, cruel self, filled with enough hatred to wilt away the leaves of bushes, but Scrooge is (as ever) prepared to weather her weather; it comes down to a series of transformation spells. Magica becomes Scrooge just long enough to nab the dime.
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The book starts of with the cracking titular story, “Lost Beneath the Sea”, which not only sees Scrooge losing his dime in a shipwreck (sending his good luck plummeting, which dries up his oil wells), but it concludes with the invention, on Barks’s part, of multi-limbed Martians that prove useful to Scrooge’s Dime recovery operations. That Martians could so easily slip into a McDuck story – and so simply be written out – illustrates just how endlessly inventive Barks was at the peak of his skills.
Lost Beneath the Sea is the perfect introduction to the work, with every story providing a showcase of what made the Uncle Scrooge strips so powerful, so unique against the other Disney strips of their era. Even Barks’s own Donald Duck strips, classics in their own right, pale a little in comparison. Lost Beneath the Sea further proves that even strips with a questionable understanding of history are, in fact, timeless.
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