Walt Disney's Treasury of Classic Tales volume 3

The third book in the Treasury of Classic Tales series got on sale last month and recently arrived in my mailbox. This book chronologically collects the Sunday pages from May 1959 to December 1962, starting with Darby O'Gill and the Little People and ending with In Search of the Castaways. As with the first two books, all stories inside are comic adaptations of Disney movies – both live action and animation.

When this series started two years ago I was a bit surprised and also skeptical to the project, as I didn't think there was a huge market for the series. And comic adaptations of movies, and especially the live action ones are not the comics that interest me the most. But after three books I'm glad this series saw the light and it turned out to be a lot more interesting than I thought!

I still haven't read all the stories in the first two books, but the way I did it (at least tried to) was to first watch the movie, then read the Sunday pages and I ended with the regular comic book adaptation of the same movie. This made it a lot of fun comparing the different versions of the story and I might do a couple of blog posts about this if I get around to it.

I want to read the rest this way too, but unfortunately not all these movies are easily accessible and I don't have any home media releases of most. But I'm not in a hurry, I'm just glad these rare Sunday pages finally got collected and are available for when I'm ready to read them!

Sadly, it looks like the third book will be the last book in the series, but we do get a page inside the 3rd book suggesting that a 4th volume was planned too.

 

But according to a podcast in April this year, the series will be cancelled after volume 3. They originally planed 4 volumes, but they won't be able to do more books because of low sales. According to the podcast the Disney Archives in Glendale have proofs for enough stories to do the first 4 volumes complete, but after this they only have source material for sporadic stories for the rest of the series. So I guess it would be a lot of work tracking down sources and maybe restoration work have to be done too if they wanted to do the entire series complete.

But looking at the list of stories planned for the 4th volume, Miracle of the White Stallions is missing – it should be between Son of Flubber and Savage Sam. So it sounds like they already had to start skipping stories in this volume too.

I hope plans change and we'll get more volumes sometime in the future, but I'm glad for the three we got and I'm looking forward to digging into the 3rd volume. Especially stories like Darby O'Gill and the Little People and others that are completely unknown to me! I just need to track down the movies first...

From "Darby O'Gill and the Little People"

Disney comics published by Scholastic

Scholastic is a publishing company specializing in books for children and for educational purpose and have a lot of titles with Disney characters. But I only know of two publications that can be defined as comics or graphic novels. With their enormous library I think that is a bit strange – so this post is mostly asking other collectors and Disney comic fans if anyone know if more exist? If you know of any titles not mentioned in this post please make a comment below!

The two titles I know of is Return to OZ and The Black Cauldron, both having comic adaptations of the movies with the same name. They are © 1985, so probably published this year too. 

Return to OZ and The Black Cauldron published by Scolatic Inc.

 

First comic page

Back cover

I got two more British publications with comics titled The Disneytime Storybook that are "produced exclusively for Scholastic Publications". But both are published/distributed by London Editions Magazines (Egmont) and World International Publishing Limited (also Egmont) while the spine says Cliveden Press. So I don't count them as Scholastic comics.

The British "The Disneytime Storybook"

 

Both are identical to the British The Disneytime Annual 1989 and 1990 in content, just in softcover instead of hardcover. The storybooks even share the same ISBN number as the annuals!

The British "The Disneytime Annual" 1989 and 1990

Inside the 1989 Storybook and Annual

Actually (at least) one of the two storybooks exists in hardcover too, published in Australia by Budget Books Pty Ltd. but otherwise identical to the two British editions.

 

The British softcover book (left) and the Australian hardcover (right)

British Storybook (top), British Annual (middle), Austraian Storybook (bootom)

But getting back on track; what I'm trying to figure out is if Scholastic has published more Disney comics?