Trick or Treat

As its animators were working on this cartoon, the Disney studio asked its comic book unit to produce a special Halloween issue that would appear on newsstands as the short reached the big screen. Western Publishing duly sent storyboard stats to its star artist, asking him to draw a feature-length story similar to that of the cartoon. But Carl Barks "soon found that the material wouldn't fill the 32 pages that were then the length of a feature, so I ad-libbed some extra stuff", hammering out extensive additions and revisions. Some of his new material, however (including a spooky graveyard and a six-armed cyclops named Smorgie), were considered so dark, grisly, or bizarre that parts of the comic book had to be redrawn or were censored outright, and when "Trick or Treat" appeared in Donald Duck # 26 (November 1952), it had been shorn to 23 pages.

The eyes of Dewey's costume are only shown as holes throughout most of the short until the very last shot of the nephews waving goodbye to Witch Hazel, then his eyes are shown peeking through the holes.

The title cards, including Donald's face usually shown over a sunburst background, are done in the style of painted graffiti on a fence.