Chief Casey's Longest Night (originally titled La Lunga Notte del Commissario Manetta in Italian) is a comic story written by Tito Faraci, and drawn by Giorgio Cavazzano . It features Detective Casey, Chief O'Hara, the Phantom Blot, Peg-Leg Pete, Mickey Mouse, and, in their debut, Brick Boulder, Bob, Floyd, Paul and Inky. Leonardo Da Ginchy, a Monstrous Green Alien and Paul's Aunt Esther are also mentioned.
Description[]
An unexpected promotion promises to send Detective Casey away from Mouseton to become chief of his own police department, with the vacant detective post to be filled by the "toughest tin-star in Texas", majestic musclehead Brick Boulder. This is not to the likings of Peg-Leg Pete and the Phantom Blot, who'd rather keep incompetent Casey around than have to deal with Boulder. When both devise near-identical schemes to discredit Casey on his last night as "detective" and thus have his promotion cancelled, it is only the beginning of a stupendous comedy of errors…
Behind the scenes[]
This story, widely considered a classic among Tito Faraci's works, was first printed in January of 1997 in Topolino #2147. It was printed in the United States of America in 2018 in Walt Disney Showcase #58, with localization by Joe Torcivia.
Together with a reference to Leonardo Da Ginchy and miscellaneous gags, Torcivia's translation added one particular joke with a surprisingly deep history: where the original dialogue was vague as to how the Phantom Blot was arrested, the localization states that, after nearly making a successful escape, the Blot stopped dead in his tracks to gawk at an exhibit of "Victorian ink blots", allowing the cops to take him in. This gag had been thought of 52 years prior by a young Torcivia as a potential one-pager for an issue of The Phantom Blot, and he had been waiting since the beginning of his translating career to find an opportunity to use it.
Torcivia has championed the idea that, being an issue-long tale featuring the Phantom Blot as one of the title characters, and a scaled-down version of the 1960's Phantom Blot logo on the cover to boot (on top of the regular Showcase title), the story's printing in Walt Disney Showcase #58 (IDW's 6th, and, to date, last Walt Disney Showcase issue) ought to also be considered as the hitherto-missing The Phantom Blot #8.