Separated at Birth: Go down to the shore, kick off your shoes, dive in the money bin

L: Walt Disney's Comics and Stories #622 (March 1998),
detail of a 1974 painting by Carl Barks
R: Superman: The Man of Steel #56 (May 1996),
art by Jon Bogdanove, Dennis Janke, and Patrick Martin

(Click picture to Cornelius Coot statue-size)

Of course, regular readers of "Separated at Birth" will notice what's wrong with the examples above: I always put the earlier example on the left and the "inspired" follow-up on the right. But the Superman example is two years before the Disney one...what gives? Well, the WDC&S cover image is actually just a detail from a 1974 Carl Barks painting entitled "The Sport of Tycoons":



Scrooge swimming in his money bin is a familiar enough visual to anyone raised on Disney duck comics or even DuckTales...



...but it's actually an infrequent cover subject on Disney comics. Here's another rare example:


Cover of Uncle Scrooge #250 (January 1991), art by William van Horn

But if you wanna go back to the beginning, the grandaddy of all divin'-in-the-money-bin images comes from the one of the earlier appearances of Uncle $crooge McDuck himself, in Four Color #386 (aka Uncle Scrooge #1):


Cover of Four Color #386 (March 1952), art by Carl Barks

Nope, it's not the cover that's the inspiration, but rather the first panel inside, also by Carl "The Good Duck Artist" Barks:



So there you go: how a comic book fifty years before inspired a Superman cover. Say, how come Scrooge never had an extra-dimensional imp come to bother him every three months?

Special bonus: check out this beautiful scale model of Uncle Scrooge's money bin!