THE STORY

FC0223 Lost in the Andes - 1949

Synopsis:

Janitor Donald Duck at The Duckburg Museum accidentally discovers that a square rock from Peru is in fact an egg. He is promptly sent out to get more accompanied by his nephews. After weeks of hardship the family finally manage to find Aig Valley high up in the misty Andes mountain range, where they encounter a happy (yet literally square!) people in their town called - Plain Awful...
Through a fair bit of detective work the Ducks find the chickens that lay the special eggs, and they are allowed to bring back two specimens of the remarkable species, a feat that will revolutionize the global egg market. But all is not well after all...

10 scattered comments:

The story, that was published in Western's Four Color series in April 1949, fills 32 pages, and Barks was paid a total of 800 dollars for the job by his employer Western Publishing in October 1948. The amount almost equals 8,000 dollars in today's money.

Barks: The 1943 cartoon 'Saludos Amigos' had some influence on my choice to do an Inca story. I realized that it was a popular subject and that Disney's would love to have me use that locale. At that time, they were trying to get access to show their films in South America. They'd lost the whole European market during the war.
Barks had visited the cinema to see the film right after the premiere, and he still remembered several titbits of which he used and copied some in his story years later. Examples are the llamas' special appearances, the wooden suspension bridge, and Donald who at one point greets a Peruvian by cheerfully exclaiming Saludos, Amigo.

The main idea of using square eggs was really not a new invention at the time. Barks: Square eggs have been a joke for more years than I've been on Earth. I remember hearing people talking about breeding chickens that would lay square eggs more handy for storage from the time I was a little child.

Many stories have food as a triggering device (see more HERE). In this one, eggs are not only the triggers but they also permeate the whole story.

The Ducks wind up in the sheltered Aig Valley hidden in the mountain range of Peru. All the Indian inhabitants have small wants in life - and they even look alike...

Donald meets the numerous inhabitants of Aig Valley in Peru and their chickens that lay so many eggs that they have become the only source of food.

Barks not only told the story of square eggs - he also invented the square hens hatching them into chickens! Although they are not exactly in focus the whole poultry concept is a vital part of the story. After many endeavours Donald manages to bring home two square chickens, which are to be used for breeding. He is on top of the world, until the closing panels reveal that the fouls are both male roosters. Donald is heartbroken.

We probably all recall that the Ducks end up in the square town of Plain Awful, but it probably escapes most of us that the town is situated in Aig Valley! So, when the Ducks glare down at the area from the mountain tops they are, in fact, looking down over Aig Valley.

Surprisingly, the story (one of Barks' own absolute favourites) never rose to its expected and deserved heights on a global scale (see its position on a listing HERE).

It is possible that the world today still holds a number of ethnic tribes and undiscovered nationalities in rugged mountain regions and unwelcoming jungle areas. Barks dreamed up such a community for this story, and the people were even given the trait of being square physically as well as being harshly opposed to anything round. Maybe such a tribe will emerge some day in reality?

Barks would always turn to either an encyclopaedia or to his beloved National Geographic magazines in order to get foreign locations rendered as correctly as he could given the natural limitations of the comic book media. This meant that he attempted to draw nature scenes and folklore in a convincing way. As for the official Peruvians, Barks meticulously authenticated their clothes and headgear, but the Awfultonians were molded as he saw fit, namely as one identically looking mass, just as he did in other stories such as FC0062 Mystery of the Swamp.

THE RUNNING GAGS

The inventive and adventurous story is strewn with direct and psychological gags, a few of which are even running gags such as for the nephews' constant use of bubble gum. Barks: It was puffed up in the studio's story department as being a very good gimmick if you could get a running gag going to connect sequences. Look how the chewing gum gag holds the Andes story together.
Another running gag was the multiple ways of cooking and serving square eggs. These were the only source of food that the Awfultonians knew about, and when Donald asked them why they did not eat the chickens, the happy people had no clue as to what a chicken was. Chickens is the guys that lays these eggs, bellowed an agitated Donald.
See more examples on running gags HERE.

In the story Barks attempted to end every page with a twist or a cliffhanger, but there are lots of surprises all over the pages as well. Here are three examples: Donald discovers a square egg, the nephews discover the strange square chickens that lay the eggs, and the nephews use a trick to blow square chewing gum bubbles.

THE PERSPECTIVE

FC0223 Lost in the Andes

AR130 Return to Plain Awful

In drawing his stories Barks made constant use of all types and shapes of geometrical figures (see more HERE). And he did so, masterfully, without a hitch - except in one panel in this story! The halfpage splash panel when the Ducks arrive to Aig Valley looking curiously down on the village of Plain Awful. The geometrical construction of this panel would come back and 'haunt' Barks for the rest of his life because of the flaws that he later recognized...

Barks: It was influenced by the old Inca method of laying stone. I got a lot of material about the Indian tribes in the Andes out of the Geographic; the way they strung their bridges across canyons, the way the canyons had little paths carved along their sides, and the Inca way of fitting stones together without mortar. I notice that I botched up my perspective a little in drawing that. I should have laid out all these little squares by measuring points instead of from the vanishing point. They become diamond shaped toward the bottom of the panel.
When I was drawing it, some neighbour friend dropped in and sat there persistently talking to me, all the time that I was trying to make that big, complicated layout. And I would have to look up and answer, with my thoughts interrupted. There I was, hell-driven to draw that scene! It was just in my system. I wanted to draw it; and there I had this talking neighbor: talk, talk, talk. It's been a problem my whole life: whenever I was up against something on which I had to use my head and do some really deep thinking, somebody would always come along and have to talk about something. Even a stranger will buttonhole me and start talking. I was trying to work out all those complicated perspectives. He just looked at it with a blank stare and kept right on talking.

It is entirely possible to grasp what Barks means by talking about different geometrical points, because we have another rendering of the very same scene! The American artist Keno Don Hugo Rosa actually made a sequel to Barks' story 40 years later. It was AR130 Return to Plain Awful, and in it he featured the Ducks - plus Uncle Scrooge - revisiting Plain Awful. When you compare the two artists' renderings of the scenery you are able to see the geometrical differences.

THE SUBTLETIES

Here are three examples of things that are easily overlooked because of their subtlety:
When an artist is composing a panel he will sometimes find himself cornered, because he realizes too late that a certain gimmick will be lost unless he bends the rules a little. In the story Barks wanted to show the book's title, The Egg and Us (Barks' easily recognizable version of Betty McDonald's bestseller The Egg and I) but he was forced to place it on the backside of the book as Donald was placed in the wrong position in the panel.
Barks liked to add strange incidents and mini-scenes to his panels as this reversed situation (showing part of a larger panel) featuring a fish catching a gull (see more examples HERE).
Barks also liked to play with foreign dialects in self-constructed pseudo-languages as the third example indicates (see more examples HERE). Furthermore, he liked to invent surprising names for secondary characters such as the expedition's leader, professor Artefact McArchives, and the first outside visitor to Plain Awful, professor Rhutt Betlah from Bummin'ham. The name is an inventive reference to Rhett Butler from the American blockbuster film Gone with the Wind, while the location was Barks' clever reference to the American explorer Hiram Bingham III, the credited discoverer of the famous hidden Inca citadel Machu Picchu. Still, Barks refrained from giving any of the Awfultonians individual names, presumably because they were meant to be seen as one unit.

Barks played on the Duck family's physical and mental feelings throughout the story. Here are three very different examples: Donald, as a janitor, thought that he could polish the museum's valuable gems but he was demoted to brushing off dusty rocks instead, Donald and other expedition members succumb to severe food poisoning, and Donald finally realizes that he has messed up badly as he has brought home two roosters instead of one hen and one rooster.

THE COMICAL EFFECTS SCENES

The story is teeming with different types of short comical sequences. Here are three examples of many: Egg manufacturers are overjoyed by the prospect of the new kind of easily packageable eggs (notice the egg-shaped globe!), Donald cracks one of the precious eggs in front of an old Peruvian in order to prove a point but to no avail because the man has broken his glasses, and a self-appointed champion-loony instantly turns the position over to Donald who talks about square eggs: Me no longer goofiest guy een Andes! Meet the new champion, he cries out to his friends...
Barks: When you analyze the structure of the story, you see that it was built on little, short sequence gags. Almost every page had a gag or two in which the characters moved through a bit of action to a short climax, and then switched to another little action and another climax. It just stepped up and up. All of these little situations had to deal with moving them along the main story plot.

EXTRA

Here are two basic ideas on how to make your own square egg:
In an unfinished Disney wartime cartoon bearing the working title The Square World there is a sequence (see some rough idea sketches above) revealing how to make a square chicken, that in turn can lay square eggs: You simply take an ordinary chicken, place it in a power-driven machine and press it firmly together on all sides thus resulting in it leaving the machine in the format of a cube, while a square egg is left behind.
One of the more 'scientific' solutions was genuinely published by an English newspaper after the European Poultry Fair in 1976: At last, the square egg. It doesn't come that way, of course. The hen lays it normally. You have to hardboil it and shell it, then put it in a special box, apply a gentle pressure with a screw top and freeze it for 20 minutes. Then it comes out cube-shaped. Ideal for making sandwiches, and it won't slide off the salad plate, say the manufacturers, the Goldenlay Company, which is Britain's biggest egg distributor. The special box was shown at the European Poultry Fair Wednesday.

So, surely, you can make a genuine square egg in a few inventive ways. Try!