Disney-comics digest #629.

[Don Rosa]

>JON & WILMER:
        Thanks for trying to help me, Wilmer, but your idea won't work. I
think I state somewhere in the story that the Universal Solvent retains NONE
of the dissolved matter... otherwise (as you mention) I knew $crooge would
never be able to handle it once it was in that diamond-jar.
        I could say something like the glob of solvent was sucking in air
and condensing its atoms thereby creating a slight draft toward itself.
That's not a bad idea, and in fact is an idea that was a major part of the
last version of this story in 1977... it's how I explained, in that version,
why Lance Pertwillaby was not squished by air pressure when in the shaft
(this current version handles that problem better, I believe).
        Actually, since the U.S. had condensed the atoms of the surrounding
material and pushed the residue back into the walls of that little chamber,
what we would have had was gravity directed AWAY from the glob of solvent.
Since there would be a concentration of mass in the walls of that chamber,
$crooge would have been walking on it like David Innes did in Pelucidar
(walking around the inner shell of the hollow Earth).
        And if that wouldn't have been the case, and if the gravitational
field was not effected by anything, what was left of it at the Earth's EXACT
center would have been SO slight that, even if $crooge would have been drawn
to the exact center of the Earth toward the glob, it would have been SO
gradual that his speed would have been measured in inches/eon.
        No, the true scientific principle is one that Jon touched on. It's
the one scientific principle that always outweighs all others by a tiny bit.
It's the scientific principle known as "it made a great gag, so I did it
that way".>

        I'm wondering if that comment about "the 1977 version of this story"
confused anyone? As I discussed on here while doing that tale, many of my
Duck stories are recreations of other comic strips I did as a hobby for my
own amusement years ago. This particular story of a trip to the center of
the Earth through a vertical shaft is one I did last in 1977 for a
fanzine...and which I had previously done in 1959 after seeing that Pat
Boone movie. I mean, that James Mason movie. That means I'm due to do a new
version again around 2012.