Notes:
changes: censored; Gladstone art-director Gary Leach wrote about the censoring in an e-mail sent to the Disney Comics Mailing List on 29 July 1998:
A point or two about "Treasure of Marco Polo":
The "cheap watches made by McDuck Enterprises" line was one we came up with to replace the "worker's paradise" reference, in order to make the story palatable to those at Disney charged with defending the "Disney Index" (presumably to the death). This, among other changes, rendered it approved for publication in the original Carl Barks Library.
The story had been on the "Disney Index" for a number of years by the time the staff of Another Rainbow (original identity of what is now The Bruce Hamilton Company, current parent company of both Another Rainbow and Gladstone) began ramping up to produced the Barks Library. The lines referring to revolution and worker's paradise and the like had been part of the reason it had been banned, possibly due to the intense political sensitivities aroused in the U.S.A. by our recently, and badly, concluded "involvement" in Vietnam.
The infamous "strangulation" scene: I don't know about anybody else, but I feel that Barks' editors were out to lunch when they let that through in the original publication. Or maybe they were just disarmed by all the James Bond/Man from UNCLE/Avengers tomfoolery running rampant in the Sixties (which, don't get me wrong, I loved!). Whatever the reason, the editorial standards of the day, had they been engaged in this instance, would almost certainly have caused that scene - or at least that wire - to be excised before the story saw print. I'm not saying we did what Western should have done, but I am implying it.
Hmm...that didn't come off very humble, did it. Oh, well...