Rendezvous With Death #4

"Go Slowly Sands of Time" feature story was plotted by Carl Barks in the form of a series of watercolor illustrations and adapted for comic book format by the Danish Gutenberghus Group. This was it's first U.S publication in comic form. In 1968, Carl Barks was asked to create new Disney stories for the Danish market, as they had run out of stories to reprint. Barks could not be convinced to produce a story, but he was talked into producing a synopsis and plot for someone else to break down and draw. The project fell flat. In 1975 he was interviewed for a film on comic artists and asked if he had a script to show them. The synopsis for "Go Slowly Sands of Time" was all he had at that time. The film's director showed it to the right people, and then Barks ended up producing 12 paintings for the story to be produced in a storybook format (published in Uncle Scrooge McDuck: His Life and Times). Carls Barks elaborates... "In the late 1960s, a fellow in Denmark, named Jacobsen who puts out all the Disney books in Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia was running out of stuff to reprint (Carsten Jacobsen was appointed editor-in-chief in July 1970 for Gutenberghus, now Egmont - Editor's remark). So he wanted me to do some original stories for them. I said I wouldn't do original stories. I was tired of it. Well, he said, could you do just a synopsis? Just something that his writers could take and break down into story form so that his artist could draw them. So I thought, well, all right, I'll try that. I made a brief synopsis of a Scrooge plot and turned it over to the Disney office to send on to Jacobsen. I don't know whether they ever sent it or whether Jacobsen couldn't see going to that much work to have it broken down into artwork, but nothing ever came of it. After months went by I thought: Well, I guess that's the end of it. In 1975, I was interviewed for a film on comic artists and was asked if I had an original script left from one of my stories. This Scrooge synopsis was the only one I had left. The film's director took the script and showed it to the right people and I ended up drawing it. So now, finally, something has come of it. Go Slowly, Sands of Time! is kind of a spiritual story of Scrooge, which gives him a means of going on and on forever so you don't have to feel that he comes to the end of the line and dies all at once. He's going to just keep on going into eternity. Kids that read about him a hundred years from now can think of him as still being alive. He has found the fountain of everlasting youth with his money. This brand new adventure is presented in storybook style, which is a wide departure from the traditional comic book format of paneled drawings full of dialogue balloons. The tale's theme is a departure, too, from the usual moment-by-moment motivations of Uncle Scrooge's frantic emergencies. This is a tale of great need and a great fear, and of the near hopeless search for solutions. The storybook format of brief narrative passages laced with graphic watercolors is well suited for staging the tale's underlying drama, which deals with a kind of time that never marches on. I think I put over in the story a little bit of Scrooge's philosophy for living a long time - at least what people think of as a way of living a long time - to enjoy your work and keep busy at it. Supposedly that gives you a longer life. Of course, that's problematical, but I did add that one little thing that not everybody is going to be able to take advantage of - swimming around in this bit vat of money. That really gives Uncle Scrooge his extra longevity. Wouldn't it be something if there were a chain of public money pools? People would be allowed to put on a pair of extremely tight tights with no pockets in them and dive around in money. When they get out they could be x-rayed to see that they haven't swallowed any!"
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