Hermes Press has announced that it will reprint the complete The Phantom series that has appeared in newspapers since 1936. The first volume is due out in September. As the daily strip ran in a different continuity from the Sunday version, Hermes Press will issue three volumes of dailies each year and one volume of Sundays collecting five years of the strip, in full color. Hermes Press will be using press proofs as its primary source for these reprints so the strip will look better than when it was originally printed. For the Sunday version of the strip, which will be released next year, “Hermes Press will digitally recolor all of the Sundays so our complete version of The Phantom will be the definitive version of the most important action/adventure strip ever,” observes Publisher Daniel Herman.
cool, so very way cool. can’t wait, beats superman and batman to print by a few years. cool.
I have never been a fan of adventure serial strips, with the exception of The Phantom! It has always been one of my favorite strips and is always a ‘must read’ for me. This is great news.
Finally, when so many adventure strips have been reprinted (or at least started) several times, an American publisher commits to reprint the Phantom. Because so much of what has come out in the past few years mirrors reprint volumes published several years ago, Walt & Skeezix is the only series I’ve purchased since Kitchen Sink was unplugged. That will all change come September when the first volume of The Phantom comes off the press.
The Phantom book has finally arrived, but what a disappointment for all fans with great expectations. Dan Herman told us that “Hermes Press will be using press proofs as its primary source for these reprints so the strip will look better than when it was originally printed”, but not so.
The first Volume has several errors, at least one of them leads me to think that HP did use another reprint publisher’s books as “proofs”, and failed to proof read the strips with the result that a bad edited strip was printed edited in the book.
The book has several strips edited wrongly in addition to the mentioned example.
This is indeed a sad book for a fan of the classic Phantom strip.