Comic strips

For Those Who Came in Late – How The Phantom is Writ

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D. D. Degg Updated: January 2, 2023 at 3:47 pm EST 1 minute 0 comments

For those of us following The Daily Phantom (not an easy task) writer Tony DePaul has written a large summary of how he writes the adventure comic strip and the basics of the Wrack and Ruin story to date.

From Tony’s (December 27, 2022) The Nickels of the Man:

As for this morning, here’s a bit more on what we talked about in October with the Wrack and Ruin saga, the narrative running in the Monday-through-Saturday strip.

I’ve been writing the story on a serial basis. I have notes on where the closing chapters are likely to go, and how they might get there, but we’ll see. When I sit down to write the story in script format it may choose to sort itself out in an entirely unforeseen way. These things have a life of their own.

On the material I have scripted, I’m pretty far ahead of the reader at this point, maybe 35 weeks or so.

A fascinating look into the mind of the writer and his objectives.

Tony admits:

This isn’t an easy tale to read two and three panels at a time. When overseas publishers reprint it in comic books or trade paperbacks, I hope a certain aesthetic dimension might become more apparent.

We can only hope some publisher in the U.S. publishes it as a graphic novel.