When ending up with the publishing of a shorter version of my Big Sneeze story with non-Disney characters, I found room for at supporting strip, and as was the case with Carl Barks I knew it had to be a four page filler. So I added a funny little episode with the first swindler of mine, Breezy Bumber. He may not have the scope and capacity of my later frog character, but I did reuse him later as a sidekick to Buzz Buzzard in the Happy Water album and in a couple of other places. The script for this little story was lifted from a american comic book with humanoid characters, so if the lingo sounds authentic this is the reason. I have forgotten where the original version was used.
At that time I did not know the reasons for using fillers in funny animal comics, but later i learned why. Barks had earlier filled his 32 page one-shots from cover to cover with one long story, but when the magazines shifted to a regular monthly basis some postal regulations had to be respected. One of these were, that there had to be more than one story in the magazine, and that other story had to feature other characters than those appearing in the leading story. So Barks had to display another character here. He dug up Gyro Gearloose, who had earlier appeared a couple of times in his stories with the ducks. The regulations also ment, that he had to redrew Donald Duck as another character in one episode, and his nephews originally appearing in the lightning-fishing story, had to be substituted with Mickey Mouse’s nephews. So we can thank the restrictive postal regulations for the making of all those funny Gyro Gearloose 4-pagers!
