Review by Frank Plowright

Carl Barks so often comes up with ridiculously brilliant throwaway ideas, and one of them opens ‘Lost Beneath the Sea’, with Scrooge stating he intends to buy the Taj Mahal, Mount Everest and Hong Kong and ship them to his Duckburg amusement part. Is he really that rich? However, for deals that big he feels he need to be accompanied by the first dime he ever earned, his Number One Dime, to bring him luck. It’s an odd admission as Scrooge has never previously bought into Magica De Spell’s assertion that the dime is essential to his good fortune, instead valuing it sentimentally and symbolically.

Through cleverly engineered circumstances Scrooge isn’t aboard when the ship carrying the dime sinks at sea, and funny scenes of messengers reaching Scrooge in remote locations chronicle his subsequent failing finances. What develops is a first rate story with a watertight plot packed with good recurring jokes, brilliantly drawn. There are similarities to the earlier undersea adventure searching for a coin, ‘The Secret of Atlantis’, but that was a rare quality dip during a golden run, and this variation is a considerable improvement.

There’s also great charm to back-up strip ‘The Lemonade Fling’. Scrooge invests in Huey, Dewey and Louie’s lemonade stand, but wants to verify their honest. The best way, he concludes, is to have them earn a ridiculously unlikely amount of money, so much they’ll be tempted to short change him on his fifty percent, only he’s going to have to finance that spending. Barks escalates the sheer number of customers inventively and hilariously. Of course, there’s never any doubt as to the kids’ honesty, and Barks supplies a good ending.

The quality of the main story is such that it was chosen as the title tale for the 2026 collection grouping together Barks’ Uncle Scrooge stories over 1963 and 1964.