The Time Vortex, also known as The Vortex of Time, and entitled Zio Paperone e il Vortice del Tempo (literally Uncle Scrooge and the Vortex of Time) in the original Italian, is a story written by Carlo Panaro and drawn by Paolo De Lorenzi. It features Magica De Spell, Scrooge McDuck, Huey, Dewey and Louie Duck, Donald Duck, Ratface, Gyro Gearloose, Elvira Duck, Albert Quackmore, Fethry Duck, Gus Goose, and, during the time travel segment, Goldie O'Gilt, Soapy Slick and "Carl the Pianist".
Description[]
It's Scrooge's birthday at the Money Bin, and all is well — except that Magica De Spell has hatched a scheme to use a new time-traveling spell to travel back in time and steal Scrooge McDuck's first dime from him in his Klondike days, before the poor duck has even learned of Magica's existence, let alone prepared for her attacks!
Behind the scenes[]
A celebration of the 60th anniversary of Scrooge's debut in Christmas on Bear Mountain, the story was first printed in December of 2007 in the Italian Topolino #2715. It was printed in English in Uncle Scrooge #445, with localization by Thad Komorrowski.
The story was the subject of a printing error in said Uncle Scrooge #445, as the table of contents refers to it as The Vortex of Time while the story, on its title page, calls itself The Time Vortex (as seen above). Oddly, Komorrowski has stated that neither was the title he sent to the publishers in the first place alongside his English script.
The story lifts its structure of Magica time-traveling to the time of a younger Scrooge to get the Dime from him, encountering a few rarely-seen figures from Scrooge's past along the way, but eventually finding the laws of time travel such that she has to give the Dime back to Scrooge in the end so that History can take its course, is transparently borrowed from Don Rosa's 1992 Of Ducks, Dimes and Destinies. In doing so, it also echoes the 1991 A Dime in Time, which is in some ways closer to th 2007 story as its time jaunt is also to the Gold Rush Klondike rather than 1877 Scotland; although the similarity is largely coincidental, as Magica does not mention (or, indeed, appear to remember) the events of Dime in Time in The Time Vortex.
Constructed as a tribute to Carl Barks first and foremost, The Time Vortex features a brief appearance by "Carl the Pianist", a transparent caricature of Barks.