The 21st Phantom
Mike Manley has returned to The Daily Phantom today with a new story.
And though I can no longer find it on Mike’s Facebook page he did mention that he had a hand in the direction of this story (IIRC).
The 2nd Phantom
Upcoming in The Sunday Phantom is a tale of the past with writer Tony DePaul experimenting with the script.
Jeff Weigel and I are working on a Phantom adventure set in 1590-91. (Do feel free to scroll down if you could hardly care less.)
This one is mainly told through text blocks instead of dialogue. Call it a tip of the hat to Hal Foster: Instead of putting the reader in the story with a simulated present moment, Jeff and I are going to hold up the tale as a tableau, hang it on the wall, as it were.
I didn’t want to use direct quotes in text blocks, Foster’s way in Prince Valiant. Didn’t want to use anonymous narration though, or burn art space continually reestablishing the present. So I’m using a particular kind of textual voice to create an off-narrative space where the 21st Phantom can tell the tale to Diana without us needing to be there.
This sounds more complicated than it is, it’s really quite simple when you have the page in front of you.
Jeff’s been running occasional B&W previews of his art on his FB page.
The above excerpts come fom Tony DePaul’s The Nickels of the Man blog where, in the same installment, he discusses his thoughts on his The Chain episode that just ended in The Daily Phantom.
The 22nd(?) Phantom
I had three aims in mind, wrote about the first two here a few months back. I wanted to go on record dismantling a 1953 story by the same title, The Chain: do a demolition job on both its underlying premise and its treatment of race.
What I held back at that time was my third purpose: to have this new take on The Chain show how the Wrack and Ruin series continues; how it’s baked into the lore now but can morph into an entirely new context that raises new narrative issues. This week, the Phantom gains some insight into that evolving context and amends his thinking, or holds it open to amendment anyway…
The Phantom discovers that his son, Kit, has experienced a small part of the Mozz prophecy in a nightmare. The nightmare so disturbed Kit he felt he needed to come home from India, which we saw him do in the concluding chapter of Wrack and Ruin.
In the nightmare now revealed in The Chain, Kit saw himself as a killer at age 30, fighting somewhere on a disputed frontier in Asia. Born to be a Phantom, he builds his life instead around vengeance. He disarms prisoners, marches them behind a building and shoots them to death.
We saw this other Kit in a prophecy sequence in Wrack and Ruin, and here in The Chain we find out Kit has seen it for himself. He doesn’t know the future events that may prompt this transformation for the worse—though we do…
Here Tony connects the plots linking his The Phantom stories.
Read The Phantom at Comics Kingdom.
Summaries of The Phantom stories, in three month segments, from Joseph Nebus.
The lineage of The Phantom from the Ghost Who Walks fandom wiki.
As a teenager, I enjoyed reading the Phantom in the Sunday Post, but that was back when Lee Falk was still doing the writing. Now that the Phantom has become a commercial enterprise produced by a series of over a dozen different writers and artists, it has lost all of its former charm, and is now just another meaningless zombie. The fundamental problem is not that there are a few zombies in the comics, the problem is that the zombies are starting to outnumber (and choke out) the new, original, creative strips.