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Fantagraphics Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers: The Count Roquefort Case: Disney Afternoon Adventures Vol. 3 Review

It’s not a reboot. It’s a comeback. Fantagraphics is bringing us another Disney Afternoon in Vol. 3 of their Disney Afternoon Adventure book series. This series hooks up nostalgia to our veins in the form of the collection of comics from the Disney Adventures magazine as well as early 90s Disney comics starring characters from our favorite Disney Afternoon shows.

Disney Afternoon Adventures Vol. 1 was released in the summer of 2020 and featured the daring duck of mystery, Darkwing Duck, on the cover. It was definitely one of my favorite books released by Fantagraphics that year. Disney Afternoon Adventures Vol. 2 featured everyone’s favorite pilot Bear, Baloo, from TaleSpin. Fantagraphics’ newest volume release in their Disney Afternoon Adventures stars the team that you call when you need help…not the Ghostbusters…I am talking about the Ch-ch-ch-Chip ‘N Dale Rescue Rangers.

Chip ‘N’ Dale Rescue Rangers: The Count Roquefort Case: Disney Afternoon Adventures Vol. 3

Product Description:

It’s not a reboot… it’s a comeback! Chip ’n Dale Rescue Rangers, TaleSpin, Darkwing Duck, DuckTales, and Adventures of the Gummi Bears return―with more classic 1990s adventure comics based on beloved TV cartoons from The Disney Afternoon package!

From Disney Adventures and its Gen-X sister magazines come pulse-pounding sagas! In “The Count Roquefort Case,” the villainous Fat Cat wants to plunder the medieval legacy of Monterey Jack’s European forebears! Then “The Curse of Flabbergé” sends Scrooge McDuck and Launchpad McQuack to the cranky country of Brutopia, where heroic freedom fighters help in the hunt for a priceless treasure! And in “The Kitty Kat Kaper” and “Cat in a Hot Tin Suit,” Darkwing Duck fights his first-ever battles with the world’s greatest criminal mind… Fluffy! Plus TaleSpin, the Gummi Bears and more!

Included Stories

There are 11 stories included in the 204 pages of Chip ‘N’ Dale Rescue Rangers: The Count Roquefort Case: Disney Afternoon Adventures Vol. 3:

Review

  • The Count Roquefort Case (Chip ‘N’ Dale Rescue Rangers)
  • Lucky Dog (Adventures of the Gummi Bears)
  • Honey, I Shrunk the Ducks (DuckTales)
  • The Show Hyuck’st Go On (Goof Troop)
  • Contractual Desperation! (TaleSpin)
  • Mouths Wide Shut (Bonkers)
  • Neither Fish Nor Fowl (DuckTales)
  • The Kitty Kat Kaper (Darkwing Duck)
  • Cake Walk (Chip ‘N’ Dale Rescue Rangers)
  • The Curse of Flabberge (DuckTales)
  • Cat in a Hot Tin Suit (Darkwing Duck)

There’s no case too big, no case too small
When you need help, just call…

Fan-Fan-Fan-Fantagraphics

Fantagraphics delivers another spoonful of childhood goodness from the Disney Afternooniverse in this 3rd volume. We get eleven stories featuring characters from our favorite Disney Afternoon shows plus Bonkers. The stories in this volume come from various issues of the American publication Disney Adventures, French Collection Disney Club magazine, French Le Journal de Mickey, French Picsou Magazine, and German Strolchi – Das Comic-Magazine fur Tierfreunde. Even if you have your complete collection of Disney Adventures magazine, you will want this volume for the treasures of the newly translated Disney Afternoon stories from Europe.

The Chip ‘N Dale Rescue Rangers story “The Count Roquefort Case” from the first issue of the French Disney Club magazine is as amazing as any Rescue Rangers content that you can find out there. I always wish we had the Disney Club magazine, but I would never be able to read it unless it was translated like the story is in this volume. The other Rescue Rangers story “Cake Walk” is straight out of the Disney Adventures magazine and my memory.

“The Show Hyuck’st Go On” from French Le Journal de Mickey is headlined as a Goof Troop story, but it from the post A Goofy Movie timeline. I had no idea this existed or how many more stories like it is out there, but it was great to see a little bit of Max and Roxanne dating after A Goofy Movie. Thanks Jonathan Gray for getting this translation into this volume.

The previous Disney Adventures volume from Fantagraphics features quite a bit of TaleSpin including three of the seven stories from the early 90s Disney Comics TaleSpin series. “Contractual Desperation!” adds a fourth story from that series. I hope that we get the other three in future volumes.

Adventures of the Gummi Bears content is always welcome, and this volume includes a rare story featuring Sunni, Cubbi, and Gruffi published in Germany with “Lucky Dog”.

Bonkers is celebrating his 30th anniversary this year. We get “Mouths Wide Shut” from French Le Journal de Mickey as a Bonkers birthday gift.

We get a double dose of French stories from DucktTales with “Neither Fish Nor Fowl” from Picsou Magazine and “The Curse of Flabberge” from Disney Club magazine. A third included classic DuckTales adventure titled “Honey, I Shrunk the Ducks” is from Disney Adventures magazine. I want to have a money bin full of all of these Disney Afternoon comics to swim in.

The final treats and my most favorite stories from this volume are from Darkwing Duck. We get two of the three comic stories from Disney Adventures featuring the super villain Fluffy, “The Kitty Kat Caper” and “Cat in a Hot Tin Suit”. Hopefully the third story “Fluffy’s Reign of Terror!” will be included in a future volume. James Silvani and Aaron Sparrow also did a retelling of “The Kitty Kat Kaper” titled “The Kitty Cat Caper!” for issue #5 in their Joe Books Darkwing Duck series if you want to track down more Fluffy goodness. As a bonus, there is a page in this volume from Doug Gray titled “The Tale of Fluffy” that tells the behind the scenes story on the creation of the Fluffy character as well as pictures of Fluffy concept art used for both stories.

I really can’t get enough of these classic Disney Afternoon stories, and I hope that Fantagraphics continues to publish them in many future volumes of this Disney Afternoon Adventures series until we have them all.

HIGHLY RECOMMEND

Thank you to Fantagraphics for allowing us to go through this nostalgic Disney Afternooniverse journey.

Order: Chip ‘N’ Dale Rescue Rangers: The Count Roquefort Case: Disney Afternoon Adventures Vol. 3

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6 comments

  1. Fantagraphics doesn’t have a 4th volume solicited yet do they? I think I was able to pre-order volumes 2 & 3 from amazon at the same time but I don’t see another one in the pipeline yet.

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  2. I just got my copy of this volume along with the One Saturday Morning book last week, and as someone who has almost all the 1990s Disney Adventures issues AND all the Boom!-era Uncle Scrooge issues where they ran some previously-unpublished-in-the-US DuckTales stories, I thought I’d make mention of some tidbits of information that you didn’t mention in this review. I haven’t had time to read ALL the stories in this book, but there are some things that I need to mention regarding some of the stories that I HAVE read before.

    “The Curse of Flabbergé” previously appeared in Uncle Scrooge #394-395, where it was translated by Christopher Burns and David Gerstein. Jonathan Gray apparently redid the translation here, as there’s plenty of different dialogue here. I can’t list all of them here, but among the more notable changes I noticed are:
    * In the previous version, the first panel on page 2 had an extra dialogue balloon added where Scrooge directly referenced another DuckTales story that Boom! ran.
    * In the hospital scene, Launchpad now asks if the nephews brought him any junk food instead of Darkwing Duck comics, with this version adding a new Darkwing reference later on.
    * When Scrooge is screaming “MY DIAMOND!” repeatedly, the earlier version had him shouting different exclamations in each panel (including a reference to that rock song they parodied in the first SpongeBob movie).
    * Felina Mitzgrovna was Brutland’s tsarevna in the previous version and is their princess in this version.
    * Papa Bruto’s two henchmen, Minsk and Pinsk, are now named Max and Morris (and also dropped their accents).
    On the other hand, they also kept in the references to Prince Greydrake and the “sea monster ate my ice cream” bit, albeit with different wording. This does make me wonder, though… when “The Arcadian Urn” appears in the next volume, will they still include the reference to Mickey, or will Disney retroactively enforce the “don’t mention Mickey” mandate on the original DuckTales too?

    Then there’s the two Darkwing Duck stories featured here. Doug Gray has actually stated that these stories suffered a bit in editing, with some dialogue getting altered or removed, and in at least two cases, the joke getting muddled. You can actually see his “director’s cut” for both stories on his blog, at these links:

    https://mongomblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/darkwing-duck-kitty-kat-kaper.html

    https://mongomblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/darkwing-duck-cat-in-hot-tin-suit_11.html

    While this collection obviously doesn’t restore everything from Doug Gray’s original intended scripts, it does at least reinstate Tuskerninni’s “I’m going to edit you for television” line (and Darkwing’s response) in “The Kitty Kat Kaper”, which is far more in-character than the roaring noise he made in the original printing. They also fixed the oddity of Fluffy grabbing the satchel while Darkwing and Launchpad aren’t looking (which gives it away early that he’s the mastermind) by simply recoloring the cat on those pages into one of his minions. (Incidentally, Aaron Sparrow’s retelling not only included these fixes as well, but also brought in Darkwing and Launchpad’s “blankety-blank” dialogue from Doug’s original script, which didn’t make it into this reprint.)

    I too hope that “Fluffy’s Reign of Terror!” shows up in a future volume, though it has a two-page splash panel (something you don’t often see in Disney comics), which might make it difficult to reprint in this hardcover format. (Though it’s probably still more likely to be reprinted than any of the “double-vision” comics from Disney Adventures’ 3D issues.)

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