Introduction

‘The Phantom’ comic strip first appeared in American newspapers on 17 February 1936, and soon found success in both the US and overseas markets. By the mid-1960s, it was being promoted by the King Features Syndicate as the ‘number one adventure strip’ in the world. Over a period of more than eighty years the adventures of the Phantom have been adapted into comic books, novelisations, animation, video games and live action media. Today, the masked adventurer is often considered as a precursor (or perhaps even a prototype) of the modern superhero.

There are many reasons why ‘The Phantom’ has resonated with generations of readers, but it is impossible to overstate the contributions of creator/writer Lee Falk. Having developed the original scenario, Falk employed a compelling mix of classic adventure tropes, archetypal characters and romantic sub-plots in his storytelling that kept audiences entertained for over six decades. This was combined with a unique, mythic quality that clearly distinguished ‘The Phantom’ from other adventure/fantasy strips. Throughout the years Falk ensured that his strip remained easily accessible to new readers by prioritising engaging, self-contained storylines over any strict adherence to long-term continuity. His version of the ‘The Phantom’ remains the definitive one for many fans.

The distinctive artwork was also critical to the strip’s popularity/longevity. Ray Moore, Wilson McCoy and Sy Barry are the artists most prominently associated with the strip during Falk’s tenure, and each brought a fresh perspective to the feature through their unique interpretations of the characters/storylines.

Many of the events and influences that shaped ‘The Phantom’ are lost to time, but others were recorded thanks to the diligent efforts of individuals who sought to acquire and preserve relevant first-hand accounts. This document aims to provide insights into the production of ‘The Phantom’ during the Lee Falk era (1936 – 1999) by looking primarily at the recollections of those directly associated with the strip. Other Phantom-related material from that period (such as novelisations and animation) is noted where there was involvement/commentary from those creators. Quotes have been selected from a variety of sources and presented with contextual commentary. An ‘Endnotes’ section is also included, containing additional information.

This is not a complete historical overview of the Phantom strip, nor does it delve into the biographies of those involved. Instead, it is an opportunity to hear how Falk and others viewed/recalled various events relating to ‘The Phantom’ during the article’s timeframe. References are provided throughout, both to acknowledge sources and to assist those interested in pursuing further information.

I am not a professional writer or researcher and acknowledge that this remains a work in progress. Anyone who discovers new information via a new quote from one of the Phantom’s creators (or a reliable secondary source) that could add value to this project is encouraged to provide it via the website (Comic Book Historians). I also welcome any constructive feedback in relation to factual errors, typos etc.

Regards
RM

Last Update: 1 September 2024

Part One: The 1930s

1.1. The Beginning

Lee Falk (Leon Harrison Gross) was born in St Louis, Missouri, USA on April 28, 1911. He was only 24 years old when ‘The Phantom’ debuted, however he had already found success as the creator/author of the Mandrake the Magician’ newspaper strip, which began in American newspapers on June 11, 1934.

Over the years Falk gave varying accounts of his circumstances/experience prior to entering the comic strip field with ‘Mandrake’. Regardless of the precise details, it was a considerable achievement to successfully pitch his idea to King Features, a large New York based syndicate with many overseas markets. This was particularly true at a time when newspaper strips could bring creators significant wealth and fame:

“I didn’t know anything about New York or the field any more than anyone else who hadn’t been in it. I had this idea about this magician as an amateur detective, a traveller. I had been fascinated with magicians all my life.”

Falk had submitted his concept for ‘Mandrake’ to numerous syndicates, but King Features was the only one to express interest:

“Much to my amazement they bought it. I was horrified, because I still had two years of college. So I got an artist I knew, Phil Davis. He was an older man. He was a working artist.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Lee Falk: Interview’ by Spike Barlin, conducted May 23 1983. ‘The Phantom – The Complete Sundays Vol 2, Hermes Press, 2014

Soon Falk and artist Phil Davis (March 4, 1906 – December 16, 1964) were working together on ‘Mandrake the Magician’. Yet Falk wasn’t content to focus on one franchise, and he began developing ideas for another venture. Initial concepts, based around a reporter and the ‘knights of the round table’, were rejected. But Falk persevered, developing an entirely new pitch centred around a masked crime fighter:

“The idea of the Phantom developed rather slowly at first, but by the end of 1935 I could present a scenario and sketches on a character in a grey suit and black mask – and this time the executives at King Features said yes.”

— Lee Falk ‘About the Phantom – A talk with Lee Falk’, by Ulf Granberg, Fantomen En Odödlig legend (Sweden, 1996). Reprinted in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

For his new project, Falk engaged the artistic services of Ray Moore (February 27, 1905 – January 13, 1984), who had been working as an assistant to Phil Davis on ‘Mandrake’. Together, Falk and Moore would produce the first instalments of ‘The Phantom’.

1.2. ‘He was planned to be a kind of rich playboy…’’

‘The Phantom’ debuted on February 17, 1936, in a tale officially titled ‘The Singh Brotherhood’. Readers were initially introduced to ‘famed young explorer’ Diana Palmer, engaged in a friendly boxing lesson with a colleague aboard a ship entering New York Harbor. Aboard was a cargo of valuable ambergris from the South Seas, which was coveted by local criminal boss ‘Fats’ Horgan.

An early scene has Horgan warning his gang to look out for anything that looks like ‘a ghost’, a reference to a mysterious figure who has apparently been interfering in the city’s criminal activities for years. As the story progresses, Horgan quickly gains control of the ship while securing Diana as a hostage. His scheme is thwarted, however, after the ‘Phantom’ makes his entrance. During the subsequent proceedings the masked hero rescues the bewildered Diana and, after stealing a kiss, leaves her wondering if she will ever see him again.

As the Phantom and Diana escape on a small boat, he is depicted using his famed skull ring for the first time (March 5, 1936). Worn on the hero’s right hand, this is capable of leaving the ‘death’s head’ (the ‘sign of the Phantom’) on both objects and those he strikes.

“It seems to me that way back some criminal used to leave his mark that he was there, sort of bragging. And that may have given me that notion. You know, you don’t have an origin for everything. Something just pops into your mind.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Father of Superheroes’ by Will Murray (incorporating material from an unpublished 1972 interview by Robert Porfirio), originally published in ‘Comic Book Marketplace #121 (2005).

Subsequent instalments depict Diana catching up with friends, amongst them ‘rich and lazy’ Jimmy Wells. (Although Wells is shown referring to Diana as his ‘childhood sweetheart’, she appears comfortable with the relationship remaining platonic.) This introduction set the stage for the ostensibly innocuous Wells to be revealed as the Phantom’s dual identity, a scenario strongly reminiscent of the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ and numerous pulp heroes of the day.

But this was not to be. As the story progressed, appearances by Wells and other early supporting cast members suddenly ceased. It was also revealed that the Phantom (whom New York police had supposedly sought for many years) did not even originate in the United States. Instead, as revealed in a sequence commencing October 1, 1936, he was actually from a distant land – and the latest iteration of a crime fighting lineage that began in 1525.

In that first origin sequence, the Phantom explains to Diana that his ancestor, Sir Christopher Standish, was the sole survivor of an attack in the Bay of Bengal by ‘oriental pirates’ (the ‘Singh’). Washed up on nearby shores and cared for by friendly pygmies, Standish subsequently sworn an oath on the skull of his father’s murderer. That oath committed Standish, as well as the first-born son of succeeding generations, to ‘vengeance against the Singh, all piracy, greed and cruelty’. (The present-day Phantom would be inconsistently identified as the 16th, 20th or 21st over the years. It would be several decades before Falk finally settled on the 21st).

This was later acknowledged by Lee Falk as a departure from his original plans:

“From the beginning, the Phantom was not supposed to be in the jungle at all but in the western world. He was planned to be a kind of rich playboy who during the night transformed himself into a vigilante.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Do Comics Disturb You’, interviewed by Alain Resnais. Translation by Ulf Bennetter and Paul Andreas Jonassen. Originally published in ‘Griff-Riff’ (France #12/1964 (excerpt) and ‘L’Europeo’ (Italy) August 25, 1966. Reprinted in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

“For the first few months, The Phantom was intended to be Jimmy Wells, a wealthy playboy who fought crime by night in a mask and costume. This was, of course, several years before Batman and Superman appeared on the comic scene. I never came out and actually revealed that the playboy was really The Phantom and in the midst of the first story I suddenly got the other idea. I moved The Phantom into the jungle and decided to keep him there. Gradually the whole concept of the Phantom developed; the generations behind him, the Skull Cave, his wolf Devil and horse Hero and the Bandar Pygmies.”

— Lee Falk, ‘A Visit with Lee Falk’ by Anthony Tollin, Comic Buyer’s Guide February 1986 and Comics Revue #27 (1988).

Falk’s original premise bore a marked resemblance to various popular radio/’pulp’/serial vigilantes of the era with millionaire alter egos, including ‘The Shadow’ (created in 1931), ‘The Spider’ (1933) and ‘The ‘Grey Seal’ (1914). However, when asked if pulps were an influence Falk replied: “It’s possible, but I am not that familiar with them. I knew there were such things as The Shadow and The Phantom Detective. I don’t think I’ve ever read them. The only pulps I read in the old days were science-fiction.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Father of Superheroes’ by Will Murray (incorporating material from an unpublished 1972 interview by Robert Porfirio), originally published in ‘Comic Book Marketplace #121 (2005).

The Phantom’s revised origins/location were not accompanied by any alteration to his appearance. Instead, the disguising outfit originally designed for certain occasions became the Phantom’s everyday attire/uniform:

“That’s why he wears a costume that is not very practical in the jungle…exactly the opposite, he probably suffers from the heat in it. I feel a lot of sympathy for him. That’s the reason why I, from time to time, let him jump off the horses to enjoy a lovely swim.”

While the Phantom no longer had any civilian ‘secret identity’ to conceal, Falk retained the mask and kept the Phantom’s features hidden from readers. Over time, a mythos was developed within the strip in which only select individuals were allowed to see his face. There were also ‘old jungle sayings’, such as “He who looks upon the Phantom’s face will die a horrible death”. (It was not until August 20, 1937 that Diana Palmer saw him without his mask).

‘The Phantom’ name transferred easily enough to the revised concept, even though Falk originally had reservations about using it:

“I didn’t like the name originally, because it wasn’t that original. The Phantom of the Opera. I couldn’t think of a better name. I wanted something distinctive like Mandrake, but I could never find one. The Ghost Who Walks, The Grey Ghost I thought about. It’s this idea of the man who never died. I kept coming back to the Phantom. It’s been around long enough now so ‘The Phantom’ really means my Phantom. But there are many phantoms. The Phantom of the Opera and others. Fantomas, the old French thing.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Lee Falk: Interview’ by Spike Barlin, conducted May 23 183. ‘The Phantom The Complete Sundays Vol 2, Hermes Press, 2014

1.3. ‘An amalgam of Tarzan’

Falk would attribute the idea of making the Phantom a jungle adventurer to his literary interests, notably the writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Rudyard Kipling. The latter’s work even provided the name of the pygmy tribe that lived with the Phantom in the ‘Deep Woods’:

“(The Phantom) is sort of an amalgam of Tarzan. I grew up on Tarzan, The Jungle Book of Kipling. I loved ‘The Jungle Book’. The Phantom has a patrolling guard. The pygmies. The pygmy poison people where he lives. The call them the Bandar which is after the Bandar-log of Kipling, who are the monkey tribe in ‘The Jungle Book’.

I think the Phantom came out of those jungle names. Also the tales of the great explorers. The Phantom is kind of an adventurer. Mandrake too came out of that. All the way back to Marco Polo. Great travellers, explorers.

— Lee Falk, ‘Lee Falk: Interview’ by Spike Barlin, conducted May 23 1983. ‘The Phantom The Complete Sundays Vol 2, Hermes Press, 2014

The location of the Phantom’s jungle was (at least originally) neither in Burrough’s Africa nor Kipling’s India. Instead, it was the fictional island of ‘Luntok, Dutch East Indies’, described by Falk as ‘a British protectorate off the coast of Java’. The colonial aspect of the Phantom’s world was exemplified by the presence of Captain Melville Horton, an early supporting cast member who worked as a military Doctor for the local ‘British Colonial Service’.

The Indonesian locale was consistent with the depiction of a leopard in an early sequence, while the Bandar tribesmen (despite being labelled as ‘pygmies’ – originally ‘cannibal pygmies’) strongly resembled photos of Indonesian natives from that period. However, ‘Devil’, the Phantom’s pet wolf who was introduced in early jungle scenes, would not have been native to such an area and so presumably originated elsewhere. Unusually intelligent and highly trained, the Phantom’s faithful companion would play a key role in many of the Phantom’s subsequent adventures.

Another early cast member was ‘Guran’, the Bandar leader and witch doctor who was also the Phantom’s friend and confidante. Falk had no recollection of where his name came from:

“Guran? Oh, just a name. I have no idea…”

— Lee Falk, ‘Lee Falk: Interview’ by Spike Barlin, conducted May 23 183. ‘The Phantom The Complete Sundays Vol 2, Hermes Press, 2014

In his incarnation as a jungle-based hero the Phantom’s responsibilities often involved maintaining some level of peace and justice in the wilds of Bengali, where many natives continued to lead largely independent, traditional lives. Numerous early sequences portrayed him as a respected (and sometimes feared) figure, whose authority was greatly accentuated by the myth of the ‘man who could not die’.

1.4. ‘A kind of mythological feel’

The premise of a ‘legacy’ hero, part of a dynasty extending over four centuries, allowed Falk to develop an accompanying mystique/mythology that would never have been possible under the original direction. It also created the opportunity to depict the adventures of past Phantoms in their respective historical settings:

“The Phantom came out of the myths of gods and heroes. There was a kind of mythological feel about the Phantom. The man who could never die. The Ghost Who Walks. I have a lot flashbacks in the Phantom stories about his ancestors. They had been around for practically everything.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Lee Falk: Interview’ by Spike Barlin, conducted May 23 1983. ‘The Phantom – The Complete Sundays Vol 2, Hermes Press, 2014

“I think that’s one of the reasons ‘The Phantom’ remains so popular today. People in India or Europe or South America all have their own myths and heroes can identify with ‘The Phantom’ because it’s so similar to the myths.”

— Lee Falk, ‘A Visit with Lee Falk’ by Anthony Tollin, Comic Buyer’s Guide February 1986 and Comics Revue #27 (1988).

1.5. ‘I sketched out what I wanted’

The Phantom was initially depicted wearing a grey, skin-tight, hooded costume that included gloves (quickly discarded in the story). His outfit also lacked the distinctive gun belt and striped trunks that would be seen later. Lee Falk recalled his involvement in the original design:

“I sketched out what I wanted for the Phantom – the costumes and the character designs – and shifted Ray Moore over to the new strip.”

— Lee Falk, ‘A Visit with Lee Falk’ by Anthony Tollin, Comic Buyer’s Guide February 1986 and Comics Revue #27 (1988).

Tights/trunks were often worn by circus acrobats/strongmen of the era, and even by some early comic-strip adventurers such as ‘Flash Gordon’. Falk, however, recalled another influence:

“In answer to what was the inspiration for the Phantom’s costume, I would have to say that Robin Hood was one of my boyhood heroes.

— Lee Falk, ‘Conversation with Lee Falk’, by Raymond Elman, Princetown Art, 1989. Reprinted in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

1.6. ‘I needed an artist for the Phantom strip’

In addition to sketching out character designs, Lee Falk often mentioned active involvement in the early artwork for both ‘The Phantom’ and ‘Mandrake’. The extent of this is impossible to determine. On numerous occasions he mentioned contributing ‘sketches’/‘layouts’ (perhaps in lieu of, or as accompaniment to, descriptions in his scripts). Some quotes are presented below for comparison:

“The Phantom was an immediate success…I had to stop making sketches for Mandrake. The artist Phil Davis hardly needed them either, since he was a pretty gifted artist, and I was not.

Pretty early on Phil had hired an assistant by the name of Ray Moore, also a very talented artist…”

“Anyway, I needed an artist for the Phantom strip, so I suggested he should leave Mandrake and instead help me with the Phantom.”

“I wrote the scripts, made the sketches and Ray inked the strip. He was now able to draw in his expressive manner and didn’t have to toil with every detail. To this day I’m convinced I couldn’t have had a better artist to visualise the Phantom.”

— Lee Falk, ‘About the Phantom – A talk with Lee Falk’ by Ulf Granberg, Fantomen En Odödlig Legend (Sweden, 1996). Reprinted in ‘‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

“I did the first weeks of The Phantom but it was too much. I really did enjoy the drawing board, but they were better artists. Ray was a very, very fine artist. Then I took Ray off Mandrake and put him on The Phantom. He followed my design and gradually worked in his own and this day I think he made the best Phantoms. He had a real mysterious quality.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Interview with Falk’ by Hal Schuster 1988 reprinted in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

“[Ray Moore] did the inking on the [Mandrake] strip. I continued to do some of the layout. But when the Phantom came along, I had no time. I got Ray Moore to come off Mandrake and onto the Phantom.

Two or three years later, I stopped drawing the Phantom layouts completely. I stopped drawing over a half century ago! But I continued, without a break, until we speak, to write the stories.”

‘Master Magicians and Phantoms, an Interview with Lee Falk’, interviewed by Bob Madison, June 1996. Scarlet Street #22, 1996. Reprinted in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

“…I sketched up some Phantom drawings and Ray Moore took it from there – he was the original Phantom artist.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Conversation with Lee Falk’, Friends of the Phantom #2, Spring 1993

1.7. ‘Ray always drew it for publishing’

There are no first-hand accounts from Ray Moore concerning his part in the development of ‘The Phantom’. However, in 2004, his widow (Claire Moore) was asked about the possibility of Lee Falk’s artistic involvement and said that “Ray and Lee may have worked together but Ray always drew it for publishing.”

— Claire Moore, ‘Memories of Ray Moore – Conversation with Claire Moore’, Friends of the Phantom Vol 1, #24, Spring 2004

Mrs Moore also spoke generally of her husband’s role in shaping the strip, stating that “Ray had a lot to do with it. Lee had an idea and together they worked it out.” This included input into the creation of the Phantom’s costume:

“(Ray Moore) had his own meetings with four or five St. Louis artists who met a few times a week. Lee came occasionally. They discussed it and helped Lee work it out.”

With respect to the stories, Mrs Moore recalled that her husband followed Falk’s scripts “…and only sometimes made changes because he wanted to make it more accurate.”

— Claire Moore, ‘Memories of Ray Moore – Conversation with Claire Moore’, Friends of the Phantom Vol 1, #24, Spring 2004

1.8. ‘I couldn’t have had a better artist to visualise the Phantom.’

Lee Falk recalled having a good relationship with Ray Moore, and praised the special qualities he brought as an artist on ‘The Phantom’:

“I was very fond of Ray and he was a nice fellow to work with because he was so easy-going.

Nobody has ever drawn The Phantom the way Ray Moore did. There was a mysterioso quality about his Phantom that has never been duplicated. Ray also drew the most marvellous women, pretty girls, exotic girls. That’s the kind of girl Ray liked to draw.”

“The Phantom the exotic girls, the bad guys. His people were marvellously done, particularly the Phantom himself. I’ve tried to get his successors to give the Phantom that mysterious, slightly menacing quality that Ray gave him.”

— Lee Falk, ‘A Visit with Lee Falk’ by Anthony Tollin, Comic Buyer’s Guide February 1986 and Comics Revue #27 (1988).

“He got closest to my own vision of the Phantom and he was outstanding in rendering mystery to his drawings.”

— Lee Falk, ‘A Talk With the Creator of Legends’ by Ulf Granberg. Fantomen (Sweden) #24-25, 1985

Lee Falk did, however, indicate that the artwork could vary depending on Moore’s level of interest:

“(Moore) was an impulsive man who could draw fantastic scenes if something in the script caught him – but he could also hand in pretty dull pages if he found the script boring.”

— Lee Falk, ‘About the Phantom – A talk with Lee Falk’ by Ulf Granberg, Fantomen En Odödlig Legend (Sweden, 1996). Reprinted in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

And that this idiosyncrasy may have been reflected in Moore’s depiction of vehicles:

“…Ray couldn’t draw a decent automobile or a tank, or if he could he didn’t bother with it. It would look like something a ten-year old would draw but he was marvellous on the figures”

— Lee Falk, ‘A Visit with Lee Falk’ by Anthony Tollin, Comic Buyer’s Guide February 1986 and Comics Revue #27 (1988).

Falk would also describe Ray Moore as a “bohemian artist”, not naturally suited to the strict conditions inherent in comic strip work:

“He was a real painter. It drove him crazy to do it. He’d stay up all night without sleep and do his work. He’d do it huge. And then paint out his mistakes with white paint because it looked very sloppy. When it was reproduced it looked great.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Lee Falk: Interview’ by Spike Barlin, conducted May 23 1983. ‘The Phantom – The Complete Sundays Vol 2, Hermes Press, 2014

“Ray Moore never liked to draw the Phantom. He is a very headstrong person, who detests deadlines and methodical work. The role of the comic strip artist is heavy, a long and tiring line of work which requires method and patience.”

Lee Falk and Ray Moore reportedly received equal compensation under their contract with King Features Syndicate, with each earning 25% of the income generated from the Phantom strip (with the remaining 50% going to the Syndicate).

— Sy Barry, ‘Sy Barry: His Life and Times’ interview by Jim Amash, Alter Ego Vol. 3, # 37, June 2004, TwoMorrows Publishing

1.9. ‘There were always a few of the women who are taken with him’

Despite an unusual start, the foundational elements of ‘The Phantom’ mythos were largely established by the conclusion of ‘The Singh Brotherhood’. And while the events of the story made for an unwieldy debut tale, the Phantom’s origin was concise enough for Lee Falk to handily recap in four panels – something which he would occasionally do at the beginning of subsequent stories for the benefit of those readers ‘who came in late’.

Key story themes and motifs had also been introduced in ‘The Singh Brotherhood’ that would continue to reappear over the next six decades, notably:
– the Phantom’s ongoing role as Diana’s protector; and
– Falk’s use of criminal gangs as adversaries.

An interesting sub-category of the criminal organisation trope was the premise of ‘all-female’ gangs. The second Phantom story, ‘The Sky Band’ (commencing November 9, 1936) revealed that Sala, a ‘bad girl’ character introduced earlier, belonged to a cohort of air pirates comprised solely of women. The all-female gang premise was reprised just a short time later in ‘The Golden Circle’ (September 4, 1939). Falk would remember such tales fondly:

“One of my favourites is the called the Sky Band, which was an all-female gang of sky pilots who attacked by air and so forth. The Phantom breaks this up with some difficulty because the gang is all women, and the Phantom can’t hit them on the jaw. But he uses his wits and overcomes them. Another which I particularly like, [the Golden Circle] is a female gang of jewel pirates. The Phantom gets mixed up with them, but again he is under a slight handicap.”

This, in turn, gave rise to another recurring scenario in the strip:

“In the course of this there were always a few of the women who are taken with him, and compete for him because he is a very attractive male. I’ve had that pattern in several stories.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Father of Superheroes’ by Will Murray (incorporating material from an unpublished 1972 interview by Robert Porfirio), originally published in ‘Comic Book Marketplace #121 (2005).

Falk would revisit the premise of female antagonists being attracted to the Phantom on many occasions over subsequent decades. As a writer whose work extended beyond the comic strip medium, he knew the appeal of including romantic/sexual elements in stories:

“I have to acknowledge that, there was an avalanche of sex in my strips. And irony. Don’t forget that I also write stage plays. The women in “The Sky Band” radiate of pure sex, today some people have even discovered they were the basis of certain trends. The women in James Bond’s Goldfinger were obviously inspired by these women.“

— Lee Falk, Master of Comics interview by Guido Gerosa. Translation by Ulf Bennetter and Paul Andreas Jonassen. Originally published in L’Europeo #1362 (Italy, 1972). Represented in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

Falk was also aware of how well-suited Ray Moore’s work was to such situations:

“He was great on the Phantom figure and the girls. Marvelous. In fact, he drew the kind of girl you would want to pick up in a bar. That’s the kind of girl he liked. Like Louise Brooks. That type. That may have been his idol. I never thought of that until now. Close cropped hair. Kid of a boyish look in some ways. That was Ray Moore.”

Despite the subject matter, Falk didn’t remember any specific instances of censorship, but did recall:

“If they (the syndicate) got critiques from the readers then you’d hear about it from the editor.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Lee Falk: Interview’ by Spike Barlin, conducted May 23 183. ‘The Phantom The Complete Sundays Vol 2, Hermes Press, 2014

1.10. ‘Marry in haste, regret in leisure’

One of the most ubiquitous themes in ‘The Phantom’ was the romantic relationship with Diana Palmer. Lee Falk made a crucial decision in the early years not to progress this aspect too quickly, even though marriage was discussed as early as 1937’s ‘The Diamond Hunters’. Instead, he made the most of the dramatic tension/opportunities that the relationship presented, occasionally inserting disagreements/misunderstandings between the pair to keep them apart. This became a central part of a storytelling ‘formula’ that Falk employed on the strip for decades.

In the absence of marriage both the Phantom and Diana were romantically pursued by other parties (even if none of the pursuers could ever meet with any success). For the Phantom, this usually meant fending off the advances of various ‘bad girl’ characters. Diana’s pursuers were more of a mixed bag, though many would prove to have criminal inclinations that required the Phantom’s intervention. (Diana even had a semi-regular suitor, Lieutenant Byron, who appeared from 1939 and into the mid-1940s.)

Added to the dynamics was Diana’s mother, Lily Palmer, who was introduced on February 8, 1939 (‘Prisoner of the Himalayas’). She took a dim view of the Phantom as a potential son-in-law, occasionally scheming to separate the two. A short time later, Diana’s ‘Uncle Dave’ appeared. A retired Police Commissioner, he would take a more sympathetic/pragmatic view of Diana’s predicament while maintaining a respectful rapport with the Phantom.

With Diana single, Falk was able to include many scenes of Diana’s home life in the United States, interacting with her family in a largely suburban environment. This provided an effective contrast to the more fantastic/exotic elements of ‘The Phantom’, and helped to ground the strip in a more recognisable reality for many readers.

In 1986 Lee Falk talked about his reasons for following this narrative path:

“People used to ask me why they had never married and I would quote the old saying. ‘Marry in haste, regret at leisure’. The Phantom was just being cautious about this. Actually, I was cautious about changing the formula.”

“Joe Connolly was for many years Heart’s right-hand man at the syndicate; he was the man who really made King Features what it is. Connolly felt that Mandrake should always wear the same costume, even if he was riding a camel through the desert. Over lunch one day he told me, ‘Look, when you’ve got a formula, stick with it. When your drift away from your formula, you drift out of newspapers.’ I took that kind of thing seriously.”

— Lee Falk, ‘A Visit with Lee Falk’ by Anthony Tollin, Comic Buyer’s Guide February 1986 and Comics Revue #27 (1988). Reprinted in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

Falk’s approach to ‘The Phantom’ was similar to that employed on many other adventure series of that era. The main characters experienced little personal change/progression, which allowed them to function as reliable narrative anchors for the readers. Story interest was largely generated by their placement in new and intriguing situations, with any transformative life experiences generally reserved for one-off characters (often those the Phantom assisted in the course of his adventures). This preserved the overall integrity of the strip and ensured the story ‘formula’ remained viable.

1.11. The Sunday Strips – ‘This is a dangerous colour considering his job’

The success of ‘The Phantom’ prompted the creation of a full-colour Sunday strip debuting on 28 May 1939 (‘The League of Lost Men’). A number of assistants would reportedly work with Ray Moore to manage the additional artistic workload – including Lester Harry “Tex” Willman, Hugh Hackaday and Robert Wilson McCoy. (see ‘Endnotes’ for further details). The new Sunday format was also the first to depict the Phantom’s outfit as purple.

From the very beginning, starting with ‘The Singh Brotherhood’, the Phantom’s outfit had been described as grey. However, this did not extend to the Phantom’s early appearances in other mediums. For example, the cover of the 1936 Phantom ‘Big Little Book’ (adapting part of the unfinished ‘Singh Brotherhood’ storyline) portrayed it as red. Italian publishers used the same colour when the strip debuted in ‘L’avventuroso’ (13th September ,1936). When ‘The Phantom’ was initially reprinted in ‘Ace Comics’ in February 1938, it was brown.

Such discrepancies made no difference to Falk, who continued to mention grey in the dailies (e.g.: ‘Fishers of Pearls’ on 22 November 1938). The Sunday newspaper strip colouring, however, couldn’t be as easily ignored. And it came as a surprise:

“When the first Sunday page was to be published in the coloured Sunday section of the newspapers I was on vacation – and when I was back home I was flabbergasted to find my brain child all dressed in a purple costume! Now this is a dangerous colour considering his job. When I created the Phantom I had vague ideas of a grey costume, but pretty soon I realised that the only possible colour would also be the most practical one. If I’d had a say the Phantom’s costume should’ve been green.”

— Lee Falk, ‘A Talk With the Creator of Legends’ by Ulf Granberg. Fantomen (Sweden) #24-25, 1985, ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

(Regardless of the contradiction, Falk persisted in describing the Phantom’s outfit as grey in the dailies for many years after the Sunday strip debuted, with the last reference being in 1953’s ‘The Matchmaker’. It was only as of ‘The Heavyweight Champion’, commencing November 19th, 1956, that he finally began to acknowledge it in the narratives as purple.)

Part Two: The 1940s

2.1. ‘I wanted it to be partly India’

As the 1940s commenced, Lee Falk started referring to the Phantom’s fictional homeland as ‘Bengali’ – a name first used in the ‘The Fire Goddess’ Sunday story (17 March 1940). This reflected his interest in Kipling as well as a desire to introduce particular story elements:

“I wanted it to be partly India, like that guy Kipling and The Jungle Book and all that. Basically, I wanted Rajas.”

“…I wanted something really wild-sounding. You know, like the tiger.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Mr Walker’s last mile’, by Vir Sanghvi, March 29, 1999, Rediff on the Net

This re-positioning of the Phantom’s homeland away from the original Indonesian location had been foreshadowed in the daily storyline ‘The Prisoner of the Himalayas’ (February 7, 1938) – in which the Phantom stated that anything taking place in ‘Barogar’ (described as ‘the most dangerous spot in India’) would endanger his jungle people.

In subsequent years Falk would keep any precise location vague, preferring to view the Phantom’s jungle as one that was unrestricted by consistency or real-life geography.

2.2. ‘He doesn’t care about money’

During this period Falk also continued to develop important elements of the Phantom mythos. ‘The Beachcomber’ (a Sunday adventure commencing July 28, 1940) introduced the ‘treasure of the Phantom’ – depicted as chests laden with gold and jewels that were stored in the Skull Cave. The treasure would soon be the subject of a daily story in which Guran’s son, Timo, betrays the Phantom and aids outsiders in (temporarily) absconding with the wealth (‘The Phantom’s Treasure’, July 14, 1941). While the Phantom had no personal need for money, the treasure was occasionally used to assist his battle against the “forces of piracy, greed and injustice.”
(In later years it would be revealed that the Phantom’s ancestors had also accumulated various priceless historical items from around the world in the course of their adventures, which would relegate the gold/jewels to ‘minor treasure’).

“The Phantom goes there now and then, and enters the Minor Treasure Room, where he keeps jewels, gold, gems, which were given to him by kings and emperors. He doesn’t care about money, since he doesn’t know what he needs them for. He gives a lot to charity.”

— Lee Falk, Master of Comics interview by Guido Gerosa. Translation by Ulf Bennetter and Paul Andreas Jonassen. Originally published in L’Europeo #1362 (Italy, 1972). Represented in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

2.3. World War II

The United States’ involvement in World War II had a significant impact on ‘The Phantom’. Like many of their fellow countrymen, both Lee Falk and Ray Moore left their normal occupations to enter military service. During Ray Moore’s absence the art chores on the strip fell to his friend/assistant, Wilson McCoy (1902 – 1961):

“Ray Moore…when World War II came, went into the Air Corps. Wilson McCoy, who was an artist who did work for advertising companies, and a pal of Ray Moore’s, took over when Ray was gone.”

“I was grateful to McCoy because I had joined the Army, and had done all of scripts ahead of time, so I didn’t have to worry about that.”

— Lee Falk ‘Master Magicians and Phantoms, an Interview with Lee Falk’, interviewed by Bob Madison, June 1996. Scarlet Street #22, 1996. Reprinted in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

(It was also during this time that ‘The Phantom dailies began to be offered to newspapers in a ‘full-frame’ and ‘cropped-frame’ version – a situation that would persist until 1957. This meant Wilson McCoy had to ensure the lower portion of the strip, which was subject to cropping, contained no crucial imagery. Many of the strips that are reprinted from this period in modern reprints are the cropped versions, as they are ones most readily available).

2.4. ‘Little Girls were always writing in’

While serving in the army, Ray Moore was interviewed for a short newspaper article on ‘The Phantom’. Published in May 1943, this piece provided a rare glimpse into Moore’s personality and his perspectives on the popular strip. He was described as someone with a “ready sense of the ridiculous”, who gave “the impression that when he draws the Phantom, he has his tongue firmly in his cheek”. Moore was said to jokingly refer to the character of Diana Palmer as “Puddin’ Puss.”

The article included Moore commentary concerning the Phantom’s unusual costume and the nature of the storylines:

“About the long underwear…that’s the best description I can think of…but it’s really more of a special suit worn only by such characters and not really longhandles.”

“Plot material is simple. Diana is always getting in trouble and then the Phantom gets her out and then she gets in more trouble.”

Moore further disclosed that the Phantom/Diana relationship was resonating with a young female demographic:

“Little girls were always writing in wanting the Phantom to marry Diana.”

— Ray Moore , ‘The Phantom is Hero in Long Underwear’, Fly Paper Vol 1 #12, Thursday May 20, 1943

There was also a brief description of Ray Moore’s working regime (consistent with Lee Falk’s recollections):

“When I sat down for a session with the Phantom it usually lasted for hours. I often turned out three for four days work in a single night.”

— Ray Moore, ‘The Phantom is Hero in Long Underwear’, Fly Paper Vol 1 #12, Thursday May 20, 1943

2.5. ‘When Ray came back, he was slightly debilitated’

It was during his wartime service that Ray Moore experienced a life-changing injury. Accounts differ as to what happened, but his physical health was impaired to the point where he was eventually unable to continue on ‘The Phantom’:

“When Ray came back, he was slightly debilitated. He said he was hit by a propeller, but I think he actually got into a fight and was hit in the head with a monkey wrench. It left him with a nervous disorder, and one side of his face was paralyzed. Anyhow, his hands were shaking, but I still kept him on the payroll for a long time, and continued until he died.”

Ray Moore was able to resume limited art chores on ‘The Phantom’, contributing work as late as 1947. However, his health issues would eventually lead to his retirement and result in Wilson McCoy taking over as the strip’s permanent artist.

2.6. The Marshall Sisters

Wilson McCoy’s artwork was already evident in the Sunday adventure ‘Castle in the Clouds’, which began on October 18th, 1942. This introduced Lana and Greta Marshall, young geologist sisters who became obsessed with the Phantom. Lee Falk evidently found value in the characters, as they continued to appear in the subsequent ‘The Ismani Cannibals’ Sunday story (beginning April 25th, 1943) and ‘Hamid the Terrible’ (July 11th, 1943).

The Marshall sisters were examples of Falk’s ‘bad girl’ archetypes, capable of criminal acts but generally portrayed sympathetically. Their femininity was played off against the Phantom’s masculine, heroic nature:

“They were very audacious. They pursued the Phantom and hogtied him and dragged him into various places. Being a gentleman, he was always at a disadvantage because he couldn’t slug them or shoot them, except try to use his wits to overcome them.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Father of Superheroes’ by Will Murray (incorporating material from an unpublished 1972 interview by Robert Porfirio), originally published in ‘Comic Book Marketplace #121 (2005).

The Marshall sisters would return in two more Sunday tales from the 1940s, making their final appearance in 1947:

‘The Strange Fisherman’ (December 2, 1945)

‘The Marshall Sisters’ (November 23, 1947)

2.7. ‘These were the bad guys’

World War Two provided the backdrop for the Phantom’s longest adventure of the Falk era, ‘The Inexorables’. A daily story debuting on February 2, 1942, it ran for 49 weeks, depicting the Imperial Japanese army’s invasion of Bengali and the Phantom’s efforts to organise native resistance.

‘The Inexorables’ contained an unusual amount of violence for a Phantom adventure, and included various scenes of him dispatching enemy soldiers. The Japanese were written as brutal invaders, while the artwork (by Moore and McCoy) reflected common wartime stereotypes.

The question of whether such material was ‘racist’ was put to Falk many years later:

“Probably. We were very racist then. I didn’t like the Japanese. After Pearl Harbor and after the prison camps, we treated them like villains, which they were.

These were the bad guys. Now we think of the Japanese as yuppies and multimillionaires with big smiles on their faces when they announce that they’re buying General Motors. But in those days the image of the Jap was – they were killers.”

“Everybody knew about the rape of Nanking. They were a very disciplined army and when they got to Nanking and the generals let them run riot with rape, looting and burning, and maybe a half million people were killed. This was a project decided upon by the high command to terrorise China. But it didn’t terrorise them, it made them angry. However, we knew about this, about their POW camps and the Bataan Death March over there. We heard about this but the stories we wrote had nothing to do with the race – this was the enemy!

We felt the same way about the Nazis, who were white and just as bad. During the war the Nazis were presented the same way, as evil, and to me they still are. I was in the war and people of my generation do not forgive too easily. The enemy there was crystalised for us.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Interview with Falk’ by Hal Schuster 1988 reprinted in ‘Master Magicians and Phantoms, an Interview with Lee Falk’, interviewed by Bob Madison, June 1996. Scarlet Street #22, 1996. Reprinted in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

In later years Falk recalled hearing that ‘The Phantom’ strip had become a source of morale for those opposing the Axis during WWII:

“…I had a Norwegian publisher who I met after the War come up to me, embrace me, and tell me the story. During the first two years of the War, I was in the Office of War Information, and still writing the strip. It turns out that this whole time The Phantom was being smuggled into Norway, and published in Norwegian, and that it raised the morale factor enormously. The Norwegians figured that if I was still at home, managing to put out The Phantom, that things could not be that bad in America! It was a big joke on the Nazis.

But more than that, “The Phantom” became the password for the Swedish-Norwegian underground. I always liked that. Just about a year ago, oddly enough, I was at a dinner table with some other people, among them a woman who had just come from Norway that summer. She said that her brother, who was part of the Norwegian underground, took her out to the barn to show her a radio hidden under the straw, where during the war he would broadcast to the states as The Phantom. When she told me, I was so amazed — that not only that it mattered then, but that people still had memories of what he meant to them then.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Master Magicians and Phantoms, an Interview with Lee Falk’, interviewed by Bob Madison, June 1996. Scarlet Street #22, 1996. Reprinted in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011 (also available on the Jade Sphinx blog as of August 2024)

‘

2.8. ‘Bester had ghosted Falk’s strip for a while’

Although Falk is on record as stating that he ‘had done all of scripts ahead of time’ during the war, some evidence suggests a ‘ghost writer’ may also have been employed on ‘The Phantom’ during this period. At one point in the 1970s author Ron Goulart (1933 – 1922) mentioned that his friend, science fiction author Albert Bester (1913 – 1987) “…had ghosted Falk’s strip for a while during WWII”

— Ron Goulart, “Ron Goulart on The Phantom, mostly”, mysteryfile.com, October 1, 2007.

Goulart’s comments were partially supported by Bester himself, who is on record as stating that he “ghosted Mandrake and The Phantom for Lee Falk.” However, Bester gave no details as to when this took place, or what was involved (e.g. whether he was scripting, plotting or both.)

— Alfred Bester, Lillian III, Guy. 2007. What’s it All About, Alfie? An interview with Alfred Bester. Challenger 25, Winter 2007 (from fall 1974). As referenced in the Mandrake Wiki

Given the lack of detail (and Falk’s insistence that his scripts were completed ahead of his service) it has been suggested that Bester/Goulart may not have been referring to the actual newspaper strip, but rather to the Mandrake/Phantom ‘Big Little Book’ series (Phantom editions were produced during the years 1936 to 1947) – or perhaps even the 1946 book ‘Son of the Phantom’ (credited to ‘Dale Robertson’).

(Note: some further information about this topic is included in the ‘Endnotes’ section).

2.9. Mr Walker

If Alfred Bester was involved in writing the newspaper strip it is possible that he contributed to the creation of some important elements that appeared during that period. For example, in the daily story ‘Bent Beak Broder’ (January 11th, 1943) the Phantom first employs the ‘Mr Walker’ alias (an allusion to his status as ‘The Ghost Who Walks’) while donning his previously established civilian disguise (consisting of a trench coat, hat and sunglasses). The ‘Mr Walker’ alias would become a mainstay of the strip.

2.10. ‘They made a Mandrake serial and a Phantom serial’

December 1943 saw the release of the first episode of the 15-chapter Phantom movie serial, produced by Columbia Studios and starring Tom Tyler. The initial instalment showed a character by the name of ‘Geoffrey Prescott’ returning from overseas to take over the mantle of the Phantom. Also present were Diana Palmer (played by Jeanne Bates) – here the daughter of a jungle explorer without any romantic ties to the Phantom – and Devil (played by ‘Ace the Wonder Dog’).

‘The Phantom’ followed in the footsteps of a 1939 ‘Mandrake the Magician’serial. Falk was not involved in either production, and expressed his disdain with both in various interviews, e.g.:

“…I had nothing to do with the serials. They just got the rights and did them. This was during the war. I was either in the army or Washington at the Office of War Information, where I worked for a couple of years. I went to a projection room and saw about five minutes of the Phantom. This fellow came out in long underwear that was very wrinkled. They didn’t have stretch cloth in those days. I thought it looked terrible. I turned around and walked out. I never saw another one. It was awful.

“Tom Tyler was a good actor. But they were very cheap. They were shot in Los Angeles Park and very badly done. The stories weren’t too bad. I’ve got the whole set. But now watching them, you can see a streetcar go by! The forgot to cut it out.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Father of Superheroes’ by Will Murray (incorporating material from an unpublished 1972 interview by Robert Porfirio), originally published in ‘Comic Book Marketplace #121 (2005).

2.11. ‘I gave him a big white horse’

Hero, the Phantom’s white stallion, was introduced only after the serial’s production. Originally appearing as ‘Royal Hero’ in ‘The Maharajah’s Daughter’ daily storyline (August 28, 1944) he was gifted to the Phantom by the ‘Maharajah of Nimpore’ in the tale’s conclusion. Hero was evidently added to ‘The Phantom’ in order to speed up the action:

“Then I thought, this is too slow. So I gave him a big white horse to ride around on.”

— Lee Falk, ‘The Original Cape Crusader Lee Falk, Father of the Comic-strip superhero, is a Truro Legend, too’, Boston Globe July 10, 1996, by Joseph P. Khan, reprinted in‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

2.12. Childhood of the Phantom

‘The Childhood of the Phantom’ (a Sunday storyline commencing July 2nd, 1944) explored the Phantom’s early life for the first time. It explained that the young, jungle-born Phantom had been sent by his parents to the United States for his education, where he became a noted college athlete. He returned to the Deep Woods after hearing news that his mother was dying, after which he remained to assist his father before eventually assuming the Phantom mantle.

During his childhood years the young Phantom was referred to as ‘Kip’ Walker, though in later years Falk used ‘Kit’ (both are short for ‘Christopher’, and are presumably a call-back to Christopher Standish, the original Phantom):

“All firstborn males are called Kit. The Walker was just from the Ghost who Walks. I didn’t want to identify him by any particular name. He is sort of multinational. The Phantom men through 20 generations have married women from every part of the earth, including the islands of the Pacific, and various Asian, African. South American, Western Europe and Mediterranean countries. The son is always sent to the country of his mother for education.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Father of Superheroes’ by Will Murray (incorporating material from an unpublished 1972 interview by Robert Porfirio), originally published in ‘Comic Book Marketplace #121 (2005).

‘The Childhood of the Phantom’ presented a different explanation for the ‘Walker’ surname than the ‘Bent Beak Broder’ storyline. Here it was said to be the surname of the couple who raised young Kip in the USA (i.e. it was the married name of his mother’s sister). Kip was also shown to have attended an American college, rather than Oxford University (which was referenced in ‘The Singh Brotherhood’). Another, more significant retcon also took place when the Phantom and Diana were shown to have first met as young children (after which they became romantically involved during college).

‘The Childhood of the Phantom’ was later adapted for a 1944 hardcover juvenile novel credited to author Dale Robertson It was one of Falk’s top-ten favourite Phantom stories, and he would revisit/retell it (with some differences) in a 1959/1960 reprisal as well as a 1970s novel.

2.13. ‘Bits and pieces of our own lives and identity would appear’

‘Princess Valerie’, a daily story commencing February 18, 1946, centred on the adventures of a young girl lost in the jungle, who was named/modelled after one of Lee Falk’s children. The same character subsequently appeared in in the Sunday story ‘Scarlet Sorceress’ (August 11th, 1946).

Another of Falk’s children, Diane, recalled hearing about the Phantom storylines from her father:

“While growing up we always got to hear previous about the Phantom’s exploits around the dinner table. Dad always ended the story, just like in the strip, with a ‘to be continued,’ which always kept us in suspense waiting to hear the next tale. Sometimes, bits and pieces of our own lives and identity would appear. For example, Princess Valerie, who appeared in some Phantom episodes, is loosely based on Valerie, my sister. My name, Diane, has a remote connection to Diana in the Phantom.”

The names of Lee Falk’s wife (Connie) and son (Conley) would also appear in Phantom stories over the years.

— Diane Falk, Father of the Phantom’ by Joseph Szadkowksi ‘The World & I’, November 1995, reprinted in ‘‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

For Lee Falk, there was added value in obtaining early feedback for his plots:

“I’ve raised three children and I used to try out stories on them – I could tell when their interest flagged that the story was getting boring.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Conversation with Lee Falk’, Friends of the Phantom Vol 1 #2, Spring 1993

‘Princess Valerie’ was one of the last daily stories to show the artistic influence of Ray Moore. It also contained the first instance of an ‘old native saying’ (“When the Phantom is angry, the jungle shakes.”). This was a forerunner to Falk’s ‘old jungle sayings’, the first of which (“When the Phantom moves, he shames the lightning”) appeared in the daily continuity ‘Mr Hog’ (October 28, 1946). Antecedents to these sayings could be found as far back as 1936’s ‘Singh Brotherhood’ (“The Phantom warns only once”).

2.14. ‘I update the tales of myths and heroes and legends.’

“The Twelve Tasks” (December 29, 1946) was a Sunday tale that included a number of the narrative tropes found in various Lee Falk’s Phantom stories, i.e.:
– Diana being kidnapped and held against her will
– A rich/spoiled ruler (in this instance, ‘Prince Pepe’)
– A villain with romantic designs on Diana
– The capture of the Phantom (while attempting to rescue Diana)
– A series of challenges/obstacles for the Phantom to overcome (devised by Prince Pepe, as the price for Diana’s freedom)
– The Phantom pitted against an abnormally large opponent (one of the challenges).

It was also an obvious instance of Falk drawing on myth/legend for inspiration:

“I put him through the 12 tasks of Hercules. I had the Phantom do this in modern times, and that’s the kind of thing I do to keep him fresh. I update the tales of myths and heroes and legends.”

“(H)e’s published in 25 languages, all have their own myths and heroes. They all identify with the Phantom, because he’s some of the old myths and legends modernised.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Master Magicians and Phantoms, an Interview with Lee Falk’, interviewed by Bob Madison, June 1996. Scarlet Street #22, 1996. ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

2.15. ‘Many of the comic afficionados I meet in Europe like McCoy’s work’

‘Queen Asta of Trondelay’ (July 15,1946) became the first daily storyline to credit Wilson McCoy as the official artist. It prominently featured the character ‘Connie Moore’ – whose name was presumably a nod to both Falk’s second wife (Constance) and original Phantom artist Ray Moore. By this stage, McCoy’s interpretation of the Phantom was fully formed, and his bold, cartoony style bore little resemblance to that of his predecessor.

Lee Falk had originally been content with the initial artistic transition to Wilson McCoy:

“McCoy, a friend of Ray Moore, took over his models and created magnificent artwork.”

However, he would express criticism of the style that McCoy employed after shedding the influence of Ray Moore:

“Many of the comic afficionados I meet in Europe like McCoy’s work. They grew up with it and it’s what they’re used to. I liked Mac personally. He was a very interesting man and a hard worker but I felt his drawing style was childish. His Phantom kept getting shorter and shorter and ended up looking like a high school halfback instead of a jungle lord. His character lacked the heroic proportions of Ray Moore’s Phantom!”

— Lee Falk, ‘A Visit with Lee Falk’ by Anthony Tollin, Comic Buyer’s Guide February 1986 and Comics Revue #27 (1988).

“…(McCoy) started out copying Moore exactly, which was good, but then he got into his own style which was more simplistic. I know in Europe they enjoy his work more, but I didn’t care for it at all, actually.”

There is little information available with respect to the working relationship between Lee Falk and Wilson McCoy in the form of first-hand accounts, though it has been reported that the two occasionally had creative disagreements in relation to storylines (Some further information is presented in the ‘Endnotes’ section.)

2.16. ‘He didn’t want to leave Ray Moore out of it’

One of Ray Moore’s last Sunday stories was ‘The Stolen Trophy’ (May 23 1948 – September 5, 1948). This introduced the ‘Jungle Olympics’, created by the Phantom “in the hope that sports would help to end jungle warfare”. It coincided with the 1948 London Summer Olympics (held during July/August).

The end of an era came soon after, with Ray Moore’s final work on ‘The Phantom’ appearing in the opening instalments of the ‘The Haunted Castle’ (12 Sep 1948). Wilson McCoy began to receive official credit shortly afterward on the Sundays, with ‘Fathers and Sons’ (February 20,1949).

Although Ray Moore’s contributions had now ceased completely, an arrangement made with his friend, Wilson McCoy, ensured that he continued to receive income from ‘The Phantom’ for years to come:

“…(W)hen Ray Moore became ill, he set up a contract with Wilson McCoy. At the beginning, McCoy had a small percentage of the strip, something like 8%. Later on, McCoy took over that 25% of Moore’s almost completely. He didn’t want to leave Ray Moore out of it, so they reversed the arrangement. So Moore only had 8% and McCoy had the other 17%”

— Sy Barry, ‘Sy Barry: His Life and Times’ interview by Jim Amash, Alter Ego Vol. 3, # 37, June 2004

Part Three: The 1950s

3.1. ‘A female Phantom’

The early 1950s saw Lee Falk’s introduction of ‘The Female Phantom’ in a Sunday storyline that debuted on July 20, 1952. This also marked the first appearance of the ‘chronicles of the Phantom’ – a series of diaries maintained by the various Phantoms and stored in the Skull Cave.

In ‘The Female Phantom’ the Phantom consults his chronicles after Diana discovers an old costume in the Skull Cave that was apparently made for a woman. The chronicles reveal the story of Julie Walker, who was raised in ‘jungle lore’ alongside her twin brother, the 17th Phantom. Julie employed her skills to save her brother’s life when he was wounded by pirates while on a mission. She then created/donned a Phantom guise to rescue a young missionary from the same evildoers. Her job completed, a tearful Julie quickly realised she wanted ‘to be like other girls.’ She subsequently married the missionary, raised a family and lived ‘happily ever after’.

The concept of Julie Walker as a female Phantom was later picked up (and greatly expanded upon) by American and Swedish comic book publishers. In the newspaper strip, however, her arc was complete, and Falk never revisited the character. Years later he mentioned how the idea came about:

“At one point there was a female Phantom, which turned out to be one his great great great great aunts, you see. I started a female because I liked the idea of the way she would look in the tights. She looked great, you know. Sexy. And it was a nice story for a while.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Father of Superheroes’ by Will Murray (incorporating material from an unpublished 1972 interview by Robert Porfirio), originally published in ‘Comic Book Marketplace #121 (2005).

The follow-up tale, ‘Diana and the Bank Robbers’ (October 19th, 1952), featured Diana (wearing Julie’s old Phantom outfit) being taken prisoner by criminals in the jungle. The opening scenes featured a car modelled on a real-life vehicle owned by artist Wilson McCoy’s daughter:

“[He] needed to draw a car, and mine was sitting in the driveway. It was ’45 Pontiac convertible that I bought used, license plate A2241. I have a strip in which you can read the plate. It was always gangsters riding away, shooting out the back of my car.”

— Carol Dharamsey (nee McCoy), ‘Remembering Wilson McCoy – Insight into the Phantom artist through family and friends’, By Ed Rhoades, Friends of the Phantom Vol 1 #22, Summer 2001

3.2. Jungle Patrol

The early 1950s also saw the debut of the ‘Jungle Patrol’, essentially an update of the ‘British Colonial Service’ that had appeared earlier. Consisting of top male recruits from around the world, the Patrol initially appeared in the daily stories ‘The Professor’ (December 3rd, 1951) and ‘The Jungle Patrol’ (March 17th, 1952). In the latter the commander was shown as ‘Colonel James’, though in subsequent tales it would be ‘Colonel Weeks’.

The organisation was tasked with maintaining order along the jungle frontier, and would prove to be of great assistance to the Phantom in over the years. The
Phantom operated in secret as the Patrol’s ‘Unknown Commander’, delivering messages to them in an unconventional fashion:

“He goes down this well which has a sign that says: poisoned water stay away. It has an underground tunnel there which comes up right underneath his office. No one can go in there except the colonel. There is nothing inside there except a safe which is flush to the floor. Underneath he can open up the bottom of it and put his notes in. Nobody knows how the notes get in there. You think they might try to explore it, but they’re not supposed to so they don’t. Nobody’s ever known. It’s always been there.”

The origins of the tunnel system were never explained:

“It was always there (laughs). I don’t have any stories about where it came from. They don’t know who the commander is. It’s his way of getting messages to them.

— Lee Falk, ‘Lee Falk: Interview’ by Spike Barlin, conducted May 23 183. ‘The Phantom The Complete Sundays Vol 2, Hermes Press, 2014

3.3. ‘Format and colour influence the story’

In 1955 Lee Falk incorporated science fiction into his Phantom strip for the first time, in the Sunday tale ‘The Horned Star Demons’ (August 14, 1955):

“I had an old jungle story teller tell these kids a Phantom story about these demons coming down from the sky. Aliens from the sky with radio antenna on their helmets. Very powerful weapons. They land and see if they can handle this planet. They run into the Phantom. He moves so fast and he shoots so straight and didn’t scare when they create monsters out of the blue. They go back deciding these people are too tough for them.”

This was the first of numerous Phantom stories to be framed as a tale told to others by a jungle storyteller – an approach that left unsure of the narrative’s accuracy.

— Lee Falk, ‘Lee Falk: Interview’ by Spike Barlin, conducted May 23 1983. ‘The Phantom: The Complete Sundays Vol 2, Hermes Press, 2014

By this stage the Sunday strips had taken on a noticeably lighter tone than the dailies, and were Falk’s preferred format for his more fantastic tales. For example, ‘The Rattle’ (August 26th, 1956) introduced the ‘little people’, miniature humans reminiscent of the Lilliputians from ‘Robinson Crusoe’. A few years later, readers would be shown the Phantom’s ‘Isle of Eden’, a small island in which he had raised carnivores and herbivores to live together in harmony (‘The Honeymooners’ May 29, 1960).

During the mid-1960s Lee Falk would be asked whether the different approach taken in the Sundays was because they were intended more for young readers:

“…I have always worked solely for adults. Obviously children read my comics too. Those who work for kids have no prosperity. In the US, comics are more than anything created for adults.

The difference between daily adventures and Sunday adventures is that the latter are more imaginative. The format and colour influence the story. In black and white one can have the characters discussing things, while on the big, coloured pages they need to act.”

3.4. ‘McCoy has been kind to the Phantom’

A newspaper article published in February 1956 offered some insight into the production of the Phantom, together with rare glimpses into Wilson McCoy’s life/persona.

“McCoy has been kind to ‘The Phantom’, whom he inherited when a friend who originally drew the strip went to war. McCoy sees to it that some of the prettiest girls pant and throb for the masked hero.

In turn, ‘The Phantom’ has done well by McCoy. He has taken his master out of an advertising art studio where he painted calendar pin-ups and made him a seasoned world-traveller, a gentleman farmer, a well-to-do cartoonist.”

— George Murray, ‘The Phantom Comes Out of a Barrington Inkwell’, by George Murray, (Chicago American “Pictoral Living” February 12, 1956

McCoy was quoted as having a particular interest in visiting countries where ‘The Phantom’ had found particular success:

“I was especially anxious to go to Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland to find out why ‘The Phantom’ is so popular there.”

— Wilson McCoy, ‘The Phantom Comes Out of a Barrington Inkwell’, by George Murray, Chicago American “Pictorial Living” February 12, 1956

There was also a reference to the Phantom’s role as a morale booster during the War:

“Much to his surprise McCoy learned in Norway that ‘The Phantom’ had been the people’s single best morale-builder during the Nazi occupation. Throughout the war it appeared in the ‘Aftenposten’ of Oslo. Its Editors said: “The occupying Nazis used the paper as an outlet for propaganda. To best accomplish this they had to keep it looking as much like the pre-war editions as possible. We were instructed to keep up all features. Including ‘The Phantom”.

The paper was a year behind American papers in printing ‘The Phantom’ strip and we had a year’s supply on hand. So when the Nazis were telling the people that the United States had been destroyed by bombings from the air, the people read ‘The Phantom’ and saw the American people, apparently undisturbed, listening to radios, driving their autos, living a normal life. They knew the Nazis were lying.”

— George Murray, ‘The Phantom Comes Out of a Barrington Inkwell’, by George Murray, (Chicago American “Pictorial Living” February 12, 1956 (available on the Wilson McCoy web site)

McCoy, described as wearing a ring and tie clasp in the design of the ‘skull-and-crossbones’, provided some information about his work regime:

“These days I don’t have time to do anything except ‘The Phantom.’ I stay six weeks ahead on the daily strip. I stay two months ahead on the Sunday strip.”

“Every morning when I’m at home, winter or summer, I leave the house and go to my office in the little studio I built across the driveway. I get to work at 9 am or thereabouts, put in six hours daily.”

— Wilson McCoy, ‘The Phantom Comes Out of a Barrington Inkwell’, by George Murray, (Chicago American “Pictoral Living” February 12, 1956

Some information on McCoy’s family, and the role they provided in the production of the strip, was also revealed:

“It was in Clayton, 30 years ago; that McCoy met and married the girl three years his junior who was then Dorothy Rainwater. She, too, was an artist. Today she does the layouts and lettering for ‘The Phantom’.

In fact, Wilson’s entire family gets into the picture. Son Robert, 28, often poses as a model for ‘The Phantom’ when he visits from his Pittsburgh home. Daughter Carol, 22, is the model after whom the girl Diana in the strip, is dawn.”

— George Murray, ‘The Phantom Comes Out of a Barrington Inkwell’, by George Murray, Chicago American “Pictorial Living” February 12, 1956

Another revelation was that Wilson McCoy had used his own real-life surroundings as reference for Diana Palmer’s home/surroundings in the Sunday story ‘A Proper Husband’ (November 13th, 1955):

“Take a look at the line-drawings of the panels in the strip and you’ll see hints of the Barrington countryside. It can be called the Phantom’s natural habitat.”

— Wilson McCoy, ‘The Phantom Comes Out of a Barrington Inkwell’, by George Murray, Chicago American “Pictorial Living” February 12, 1956

McCoy’s daughter, Carol, would provide some additional information many years later:

“An art student named Nancy, a young woman in her early ’20s, modelled for Diana a lot when I was still in grade school. I remember being very jealous.”

“My father had one of my chums, Billy Moehlenbrock, model with me on the strip. My sister did also, and my uncle Ed Short, who was married to my dad’s sister, would occasionally pose for him when he needed a senior citizen.”

— Carol Dharamsey (nee McCoy), ‘Remembering Wilson McCoy – Insight into the Phantom artist through family and friends’, By Ed Rhoades, Friends of the Phantom Vol 1 #22, Summer 2001

3.5. ‘The Good Mark’

There was a significant addition to the Phantom mythos in the late 1950s with ‘The Two Signs’ (commencing August 23rd, 1958) – a daily storyline that introduced the ‘Good Mark’ of the Phantom. A sign denoting the Phantom’s protection, it appeared on the hitherto-unmentioned ring worn on the Phantom’s left hand. Now the Phantom had two rings capable of leaving indelible marks:

“The Phantom ring – I’ve no idea. I don’t know where that came from. In fact, I have two rings now. The skull ring, and then later on I created the other ring. I call it the Good Mark. This means you’re under his protection. I don’t know where that came from. It just came. He left his mark. I originally had it that he was there – like Kilroy was here. It seems to me that way back some criminal used to leave his mark that he was there, sort of bragging. And that may have given me that notion. You know, you don’t have an origin for everything. Something just pops into your mind.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Father of Superheroes’ by Will Murray (incorporating material from an unpublished 1972 interview by Robert Porfirio), originally published in ‘Comic Book Marketplace #121 (2005).

3.6. ‘There was always a feeling in the Phantom of equals’

In the daily story ‘The Betrothal’ (March 9, 1959) it was revealed that the Phantom’s father had committed two five-year olds (representing the Llongo and Wambesi tribes) to a future marriage as part of a plan to prevent inter-tribal conflict. The plan goes awry as the tale unfolds, however, when the adult Lloni (from the Llongo) falls in love with a nightclub singer before the arranged marriage can take place.

This tale of romance between two black characters was unusual for the medium of that era, something that Falk would later emphasise:

“I was the first to include romances between coloured people in comics. Nobody else dared to.”

“I had a lot of stories about blacks. I had a story about a black night club singer and a young man from the jungle. A love story. I had endless stories about blacks. I think it’s the way it’s been handled. Blacks never resented it. I think there was always a feeling in the Phantom of equals. A friendship. The way he treats them.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Lee Falk: Interview’ by Spike Barlin, conducted May 23 1983. ‘The Phantom The Complete Sundays Vol 2, Hermes Press, 2014

That same year Falk reprised ‘The Childhood of the Phantom’ (21 Jun 1959) in the Sunday strip, retelling the 1944/45 tale for a new generation of readers with some minor differences. This updated version would later serve as the basis for his 1972 novel, ‘The Story of the Phantom’:

”The story of the Phantom is about a little boy being born. Growing up as a jungle boy with his father who is the Phantom. He learns all the arts of the jungle and then at twelve years old he comes to America where his mother is from. I always send the Phantom’s sons to the home of their mother for their education. He comes to a little town on the banks of the Mississippi. Naturally in Missouri. He becomes a nationally famous athlete. All-American. At the height of his fame.”

“At the end of it he becomes so famous that he has built this college up from nothing to a very famous college because of his athletics. They are building a whole stadium in his honour. The night before the big event, he has his sweetheart there. The next day they are having this big celebration of the stadium in honour of Kit Walker (The Ghost Who Walks). There is a tapping on the window and it’s a little black man has come to get him. His father is dying. He must go back now.”

“So he just has time to kiss his girl goodbye and takes off and goes back. He gets back to the jungle. His father is dying. He has just enough time to see him. He dies. He buries him in the vault where all the Phantoms are buried. There is a costume waiting for him. He puts it on. He looks just like his father. He looks in the mirror and is amazed. He becomes the Phantom.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Lee Falk: Interview’ by Spike Barlin, conducted May 23 183. ‘The Phantom: The Complete Sundays Vol 2, Hermes Press, 2014

3.7. ‘The World-wide King of Comic Page Adventure’

As the 1950s came to an end ‘The Phantom’ was resonating well with readers, and it remained one of the top adventure strips. This was evidenced in a 1959 King Features Syndicate promotional brochure, produced with the intent of attracting new clients:

“Fast-moving, easy-to-read jungle adventures have made The Phantom one of the world’s biggest comic page readership builders”

“The Phantom’s list of 463 client newspapers reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of the International Press…”

The Phantom was described as the “WORLD-WIDE KING of Comic Page Adventure.”

Part Four: The 1960s

4.1. ‘When is the Phantom going to marry Diana?’

At the dawn of the 1960s the Phantom/Diana romantic subplot had been running for almost a quarter of a century and remained a vital aspect of Lee Falk’s storytelling formula. In contrast, a number of other popular comic strip characters of the era had already settled down after marrying their long-term love interests, including ‘Dick Tracey’ (1949), ‘L’il Abner’ (1952) and ‘Steve Canyon’ (1952).

It was within this context that the ‘San Antonio Light’ published an article in March 1960 looking at the question of when the Phantom and Diana might finally tie the knot. In doing so it sought the opinion of artist Wilson McCoy:

“When is ‘The Phantom’ going to marry Diana Palmer?

This is a great problem, says the artist who draws him. Wilson McCoy, in Son Antonio to visit relatives explains that when a comic strip hero marries, reader interest generally drops off.”

— ‘‘Should He Marry? ‘Phantom’s’ Big Problem’, San Antonio Light March 7, 1960, full article available on ‘The Art of Wilson McCoy’ web site.

The relationship was undoubtably continuing to resonate with readers, with the article noting that “…the question of the Phantom marrying Diana is the one about which he [McCoy] receives the most mail.”

The Phantom’s popularity – boosted by a strong overseas audience – was also evident:

“Of the 467 newspapers which carry the Phantom about one half are outside the U.S. The strip is especially popular in South America and Scandinavia.”

— ‘‘Should He Marry? ‘Phantom’s’ Big Problem’, San Antonio Light March 7, 1960, full article available on ‘The Art of Wilson McCoy’ web site.

The same article also provided an opportunity for McCoy to mention the challenging deadlines that he (and other cartoonists in the business) faced:

“McCoy said the King Features syndicate, which distributes the Phantom, prefers the artists to keep six weeks ahead on their weekly strips and three months ahead for Sunday material. He added: “But few cartoonists ever reach this goal, especially if they are not also the author.””

— ‘‘Should He Marry? ‘Phantom’s’ Big Problem’, San Antonio Light March 7, 1960, full article available on ‘The Art of Wilson McCoy’ web site.

4.2. ‘People wondered if the hijackers were inspired by my strip’

A Sunday story entitled ‘The Goggle-Eye Pirates’ (October 30, 1960) showed the Phantom foiling thieves who had targeted an ocean liner. Lee Falk would later recall comparisons being made between his tale and the notorious Santa Maria Hijacking which took place the following year:

“I once wrote a story about a cruise ship that was plying the waters down in the Caribbean. A gang had come aboard as passengers, and disguised themselves with goggles to highjack the ship. I called them the ‘Goggle-eyed Pirates.” First, they took over the radio room, then the engine room to stop the ship. They broke open the captain’s safe, then they went from room to room collecting money and jewels. They put everything into sacks. A helicopter came down on deck to collect the sacks. The pirates threw their guns and disguises overboard and disappeared back into their cabins to blend in with the other passengers. That’s the story that appeared in the strip. About two or three months later, a Portuguese cruise ship near Brazil, was taken over by some men – actually it was a political act against Salazaar, the Portuguese dictator. But the script they followed was almost identical to my story.”

“My original story was reprinted in the papers. They showed a picture of the Portuguese ship and our drawing of a cruise ship – identical. The highjackers ultimately escaped to a rather obscure African port called Bengala, which is similar to the fictitious country where the Phantom lives, Bengal. So people wondered if the highjackers were inspired by my strip.”

4.3. 1961 Television Pilot

In 1961 a television pilot episode of ‘The Phantom’ was produced in colour, starring stuntman Roger Creed as the Phantom. Devil (played by a dog) and Hero (his first live-action appearance) were briefly present in a story centred on a slave camp located in the jungle. The half-hour production included notable guest-stars: Lon Chaney Jr., Paulette Goddard and Richard Kiel.

Script writer John Carr recalled that Lee Falk had very limited involvement in the project:

“He (Lee) came in and went right out. He was cordial and polite but didn’t really express any interest. It didn’t look like a meeting about creativity…it was more like a business meeting.”

The half-hour pilot was never picked up as a series, nor was it ever aired (though a poor copy survives and remains available both in bootleg distribution and on the internet).

— John Carr, ‘Lost Pages from the Phantom Chronicles’ Friends of the Phantom #24, Spring 2004

4.4. The End of the Wilson McCoy Era

In mid-1961 Wilson McCoy was hospitalised after falling ill. He never recovered, passing away on July 19, 1961, at the age of 59.

McCoy’s last work in the dailies was ‘The Werewolf’ (May 15, 1961). He also completed the opening instalments of the Sunday storyline, ‘The Limper’ (August 20th, 1961).

4.5. Sy Barry

McCoy’s initial illness prompted King Features to seek a temporary replacement. At the time the syndicate was considering a submission for a new, Civil War themed newspaper strip developed by artists Seymour (Sy) Barry (b. 1928) and Frank Giacoia. Barry was, at this time, already an experienced comic book and newspaper strip illustrator and had worked with his brother Dan on ‘Flash Gordon’:

“…[King Features] were thinking about [the submission] and it was in that boardroom to be determined and suddenly Wilson McCoy became ill. He seemed to have an infection, a lingering dormant infection that he picked up in Africa and they had gone and treated him with antibiotics but, every once in a while, it would crop up a bit and affect his heart a little bit too.

“ …(T)his time he had a heart seizure in the hospital…and meanwhile they had called me in because I had just finished the script and was fresh on their mind and they knew me from the days I had helped Dan (Barry) on ‘Flash Gordon’…”

The syndicate phoned Barry to advise that the hospitalised McCoy was in “bad shape” and, even though they were “hoping for a recovery” they still needed Sy’s help to “…handle a few weeks…” until McCoy could get better.

— Sy Barry, ‘Interview: Sy Barry’ ‘The Phantom: The Complete Newspaper Dailies Volume 17 1961 – 1962’ interview by Dan Herman (conducted May through July 2019) Hermes Press, 2019

Barry was familiar with ‘The Phantom’ and recognised the opportunity it presented:

“…(A)s a child I always said to myself when Wilson McCoy was doing it…as a teenager anyway, that I would love to draw that strip and give it some drama…and make it a really mystical kind of script you know with strong blacks and good expressions – some feeling, some oomph…”

— Sy Barry, ‘Interview: Sy Barry’ ‘The Phantom: The Complete Newspaper Dailies Volume 17 1961 – 1962’ interview by Dan Herman (conducted May through July 2019) Hermes Press, 2019

“They asked me to do the dailies temporarily. So, I began to work on it, and after I delivered my first week of work, they called me and said, “Sy, this looks like Flash Gordon. It doesn’t look like the Phantom. It’s beautifully done, but it’s not at all like McCoy’s style.”

“…(T)hey discarded it and asked me to do another week of work. So I did it much more simply and they were more satisfied with it. They were worried that the editors would see such an extreme change that they could lose papers as a result. So they wanted me to follow the style and it was just murder. It was so difficult for me to undo what I knew and work in those simplistic terms.”

— Sy Barry, ‘An Interview with Sy Barry – Longtime Illustrator of the Phantom!’ Interview by Bryan Stroud, April 03, 2019, Nerd Team 30 Online Article

Barry’s first Phantom work coincided with the start of Lee Falk’s daily story, the ‘Slave Market of Mucar’ (August 21st, 1961). The final instalments of McCoy’s ‘The Werewolf’ appear to have been concluded with the help of other artistic hands (possibly McCoy’s wife, an Art school graduate):

“I think Lee had finished off with someone else before I got on. Lee had just finished the last week, had ended it and began a new story with me.”

— Sy Barry, ‘Interview: Sy Barry’, conducted by Daniel Herman, May – July 2019, The Phantom – the Complete Newspaper Dailies: Volume 17 1961 – 1962, Hermes Press 2019

While some of Sy Barry’s imagery in ‘The Slave Market of Mucar’ echoed that of McCoy’s, Barry brought with him an approach that exemplified the clean, sophisticated, and detailed characteristics of the “New York slick” style. His modernised character designs and dramatic composition were immediately evident, contrasting sharply with his predecessor’s work:

“I saw the Phantom as a marvellous fantasy kind of character as well as an imposing figure against the villains and that’s the way I tried to portray him, a very ominous imposing figure, dealing heavily against villainy and at the same time trying to get some of the mystery and mystique fantasy into it as well.”

— Sy Barry, ‘A Visit with Sy Barry, by Ed Rhoades, Friends of the Phantom Vol 1 # 10, Summer 1995

The transition away from McCoy’s version was intentional, with Barry critical of his predecessor’s work, e.g.:

“…(I)t was very childish looking, very un-slick and it lacked the real bold and dramatic technique that was applied in those days. “

— Sy Barry, ‘An Interview with Sy Barry – Longtime Illustrator of the Phantom!’ Interview by Bryan Stroud, April 03, 2019, Nerd Team 30 Online Article

Though, at times, Barry would couch his views in a more nuanced/diplomatic context:

“As much as I admired Wilson McCoy’s style, I did feel it needed some modernising and it needed some of the present day technique added to it.”

— Sy Barry, ‘A Visit With Sy Barry’, interview by Ed Rhoades, Friends of the Phantom Vol. 1 #10, Summer 1995

“… I was able to understand why people enjoyed the way (Wilson McCoy) worked, I could understand that. His simplicity, it had its value … and I could understand how people liked that simplistic look to it.”

— Sy Barry, ‘The Transcript of our First Podcast Interview with Sy Barry’ Chronicle Chamber, January 27, 2017

The artwork for the Phantom Sundays took a different path to that of the dailies. Sy Barry recalled comic-book artist Carmine Infantino providing some drawings “…every now and then to show them what he could do on a Sunday”, but was unaware of King Feature’s longer-term plans:

“I didn’t know what was going on with the Sunday except that I had heard that Bill Lignante was taking it over temporarily.”

— Sy Barry, ‘Interview: Sy Barry’, conducted by Daniel Herman, May – July 2019, The Phantom – the Complete Newspaper Dailies: Volume 17 1961 – 1962, Hermes Press 2019

Carmine Infantino was perhaps best known for his work at National/DC comics, and his artwork did appear briefly in ‘The Limper’ Sunday storyline, immediately following McCoy’s final contributions

4.6. Bill Lignante

The Sunday artwork was taken over by Bill Lignante who, like Barry, was an experienced newspaper strip artist:

“King Features called me and I was given the job and that was it. They had known me from my work on ‘Ozark Ike’.”

“I looked at some strips done by McCoy and copied the style. When I worked on the Phantom, I used no assistants. I did the lettering, the layouts, the pencils, and the inking by myself.”

— Bill Lignante, ‘Catching Up with Bill Lignante’ by Ed Rhoades, Friends of the Phantom# 17, Winter 1998

As with Barry, Lignante’s art had a more ‘realistic’/modern look. He remained on the feature long enough to complete the following Sunday adventure, ‘Queen Samaris XII (November 5th, 1961)’.

‘Queen Samaris XII’, was presented as a tale narrated by an elderly storyteller to children in the jungle (in similar fashion to the earlier ‘Horned Star Demons’). It concerned an evil queen, Samaris, who had been granted eternal youth by a witch. The witch’s spell was, however, contingent on Samaris never falling in love…something that inevitably happened when she encountered the Phantom. In the course of the story Lignante became the first artist since Ray Moore to depict the hero’s eyes behind his mask in some panels:

“ I am a realist and I thought that if you were proposed to by a 400 year-old gorgeous queen, your eyes would pop out, and I showed them for that reason only. Other than that, it was easier not to draw the eyes. To make them correctly, you would have to draw the face without the mask then draw the mask over it.”

The approach apparently didn’t garner any negative reaction:

”As with all syndicated strips, I did the artwork ten weeks in advance. If anyone had any objection to my showing the eyes, there certainly was time to change it. There is a staff of artists at King who are there among other things to make corrections.”

— Bill Lignante, ‘Catching Up with Bill Lignante’ by Ed Rhoades, Friends of the Phantom# 17, Winter 1998

Lignante’s gave the Phantom a noticeably larger build than McCoy, reflecting his belief that “…the Phantom should be more muscular to be able to do the things he does.” He also showed bulges in the Phantom’s headgear to indicate where his ears would be:

“I defy anyone to wear a hood like that and not have their ears show.”

Less obvious was his depiction of the strips on the Phantom’s trunks:

“I unconsciously made them run from left to right because it was easier being right-handed. No one ever seemed to notice. I never realized it myself until I saw the movie and then looked back at the old strips.”

— Bill Lignante, ‘Catching Up with Bill Lignante’ by Ed Rhoades, Friends of the Phantom# 17, Winter 1998

Lignante didn’t receive any feedback from Lee Falk during his brief tenure concerning his work. However, a hand-written note from Falk in 1998 (commenting on a redrawn version of the story for the foreign comic-book market) provided some insight into Falk’s opinion of Lignante’s original:

“So pleased with the new drawing of ‘Samaris’ – one of my favorite stories. Badly drawn originally.”

— Lee Falk, letter to Fantomen editor Ulf Granberg dated 5/29/98, Reprinted in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

Lignante was one of a number of artists considered as a permanent replacement on ‘The Phantom’ Sunday strip. Sy Barry recalled that “…Lignante was being considered for the daily, too…”.

— Sy Barry, ‘Sy Barry: His Life and Times’ interview by Jim Amash, Alter Ego Vol. 3, # 37, June 2004

4.7. ‘I worked up a sample and sent it in’

A number of other artists also expressed interest in becoming the artist on the Sunday Phantom strip following McCoy’s passing. These included Sy Barry’s old partner, Frank Giacoia:

“…my dear, close friend Frank, who I submitted the other strip with, went behind my back and submitted a Sunday.”

— Sy Barry, ‘Interview: Sy Barry’ ‘The Phantom: The Complete Newspaper Dailies Volume 17 1961 – 1962’ interview by Dan Herman (conducted May through July 2019) Hermes Press, 2019

Famed comic book artist/inker Joe Sinnott (who would later gain fame at Marvel Comics later that same decade) also applied. Unlike Barry/Lignante, his intent was to continue Wilson McCoy’s style:

“Another character I loved as a kid was The Phantom. I marvelled at the artistry of Wilson McCoy and when he passed away in 1961 from jungle fever, I wanted to do The Phantom. I had already practiced my craft at Atlas, Marvel, Treasure Chest and Dell, and felt confident enough to do a good job. So I worked up a sample and sent it in.”

— Joe Sinnott, ‘With One Single Panel’ quoted in Brush Strokes With Greatness – The Life and Art of Joe Sinnott’, by Tim Lasiuta, pp 78-79, TwoMorrows

There is even some evidence to suggest that Ray Moore expressed an interest in returning as a Phantom artist (despite never recovering fully from his wartime injury). This is somewhat supported by a sample of Moore’s artwork that is clearly based on the ‘The Limper’ storyline, as well as accounts from animation producer Will Meugniot. (see Endnotes).

4.8. ‘Ray Moore, the original artist, was suing over his legal percentage of the strip’

Whether or not Ray Moore was actually seeking to return as an ongoing artist on the ‘The Phantom’, he evidently did engage in legal action that delayed King Feature’s decision to appoint a permanent artist:

“…Ray Moore, the original artist, was suing over his legal percentage of the strip. He didn’t have a percentage with the syndicate; it was a private contract with McCoy. When McCoy passed away, Moore no longer had a hold on the strip.”

Ultimately, however, Ray Moore’s action failed:

“…(I)t was decided that Ray Moore had no legal claims to money for ‘The Phantom’…”

— Sy Barry, ‘Sy Barry: His Life and Times’ interview by Jim Amash, Alter Ego Vol. 3, # 37, June 2004

Sy Barry, who “…would have been grateful just to get the daily”, was subsequently called to a meeting with King Features representatives and offered the role of permanent artist for both the Phantom dailies and Sundays. Under the new contracts 50% of the income generated from ‘The Phantom’ newspaper strip was apportioned between Sy Barry and Lee Falk:

“When I took over, I got 20% and (Falk) got 30%. The syndicate still kept their 50%.”

— Sy Barry, ‘Sy Barry: His Life and Times’ interview by Jim Amash, Alter Ego Vol. 3, # 37, June 2004

This was a particular disappointment for Bill Lignante, who had hoped to continue on the Phantom strip. In later years, however, he would come to recognise the Syndicate’s decision as a blessing in disguise:

“(N)ot getting the Phantom strip was my biggest break. If I was tied down to doing the strip for the last thirty years, I would not have moved to California, I would not have done “Let’s Explore Your Mind” for seven years,” not have worked for Hanna-Barbara for 16 years, would not have worked for ABC for 26 years, would not have created six Palm restaurants, would not have met dozens of wonderful people—including my wife, Alma, a former model, actress, and Miss America. I can’t help but feel I’m a lucky guy, a point I stress most strongly in my lectures.”

— Bill Lignante, ‘Catching Up with Bill Lignante’ by Ed Rhoades, Friends of the Phantom# 17, Winter 1998

(Lignante’s experience with drawing ‘The Phantom’ newspaper strip also led to him receiving further work on the 1960s Phantom comic book published by Gold Key and King Features).

4.9. ‘I found him interesting, I found him intelligent, I admired his writing…’

There was no introductory meeting between Lee Falk and Sy Barry at the commencement of their collaboration, and they would subsequently meet in person only rarely. However, there was regular communication between the two:

“I had spoken to him mostly on the phone and I believe there was a dinner we went to, I think it was a Cartoonist Society dinner, that was way back in ’62 or ’63. I don’t know. I think a year went by before I actually got to see him in person.”

“We were always on the phone.”

— Sy Barry, ‘Interview: Sy Barry’ ‘The Phantom: The Complete Newspaper Dailies Volume 17 1961 – 1962’ interview by Dan Herman (conducted May through July 2019) Hermes Press, 2019

Sy Barry’s first impressions of Lee were favourable:

“I found him interesting, I found him intelligent, I admired his writing, I admired his strip and related that to him and I found our relationship on a pretty even keel. Sometimes a little difficult getting scripts from him on time, but we had a good relationship.”

— Sy Barry, ‘A Visit With Sy Barry’, interview by Ed Rhoades, Friends of the Phantom Vol. 1 #10, Summer 1995

Barry’s completed artwork was sent directly to King Features, with no approval required from Falk, and the two operated within a general framework of distinct responsibilities:

“He (Falk) gave me a great deal of latitude. He did. About the only thing he would complain about was if I would try to change the dialogue. As far as the drawing technique and the characterisation, composition and everything else, it was totally my own responsibility.”

— Sy Barry, ‘A Visit With Sy Barry’, interview by Ed Rhoades, Friends of the Phantom Vol. 1 #10, Summer 1995

“If he made suggestions in the artwork that was fine. If he rubbed me the wrong way, I’d call the managing editor. I’d tell them to get him off my back if there was a disagreement, but rarely was there ever a disagreement. His writing and my artwork worked out beautifully. The only time I ever had to go above Lee’s head was when I wasn’t getting the scripts on time.”

— Sy Barry, ‘Sy Barry: His Life and Times’ interview by Jim Amash, Alter Ego Vol. 3, # 37, June 2004

The timeliness of Falk’s scripts would prove to be an ongoing issue in the relationship – at least from Barry’s perspective:

“He was a master writer. He really knew how to create suspense. But I must say he was a difficult person to work with. He wasn’t an easy person to work with. We had trouble working out our schedules. He wouldn’t listen to my concept of the schedule and…I would talk to him…give him a written schedule…then he would do what he wanted. That was the one area that was a raw spot between the two of us. But otherwise, we got along reasonably well.”

— Sy Barry, ‘Sy Barry: From New York to Bangalla – Afterimages ep 11’, posted May 13, 2021 on Youtube

And, according to Barry, it necessitated his employment of assistants:

“…I was forever getting scripts so close to my needed schedule that I would have a layout man do the layouts for me and I would tighten up the pencils and get them lettered…before I inked them and finish the inks. That period of time would take, oh, I’d say for a set of dailies, about three and a half days to get it all put together and about another two and half days on a Sunday.”

— Sy Barry, ‘A Visit With Sy Barry’, interview by Ed Rhoades, Friends of the Phantom Vol. 1 #10, Summer 1995

Over the years a number of well-regarded illustrators would work in Sy Barry’s art team. These included Bob Forgione, George Olesen, George Roussos, Frank Springer, Don Heck, john Rosenberger, Andre Leblanc, Jose Delbo and Rich Buckler.

The contributions of Bob Forgione (1929 – 1994) could be seen as early as the second Barry story ‘The Epidemic’ (February 12th, 1962).

4.10. George Olesen

George Olesen (1924-2013) also provided layouts in the early 1960s, primarily for the early Barry Sunday continuities.

“Sy contacted me through Ben Oda who was the letterer. I worked for a person named Vic Herman…and they were members of the same club. Ben, who was a real buddy, was a really super guy. He gave Sy my name and Sy called me.”

— George Olesen, ‘George Olesen Interview’, Friends of the Phantom Vol 1 # 11 Fall 1995

Olesen would have a particularly long association with ‘The Phantom’ over the following decades:

“From 1962 to l984 I mainly pencilled the Sunday story, and from 1984 to 1994 I pencilled the daily as well the Sunday story.”

— George Olesen, ‘A Ghost for a Ghost’, Steven Brower Writings, January 1, 2012

George Olesen enjoyed a good relationship with Sy Barry, noting that “It was very pleasant, very easy. We had very few disagreements that I’m aware of.” While his contributions were significant, Olesen emphasised that “Sy created the image of the Phantom the majority of people will know…”.

— George Olesen, ‘George Olesen Interview’, Friends of the Phantom Vol 1 # 11 Fall 1995

Despite his significant role, Olesen would have no direct contact with Lee Falk until the mid-1980s. (As evidenced in a 1995 interview where he stated: “I don’t think Lee Falk knew I was working for Sy until about twelve years ago.”)

— George Olesen, ‘George Olesen Interview’, Friends of the Phantom Vol 1 # 11 Fall 1995

4.11. “More serious and less light…”

Having been granted ongoing responsibility for the artwork in both the daily and Sunday Phantom strips, Sy Barry was free to develop and apply his own style:

“I asked myself, “What does this strip really need?” I knew I could draw better than McCoy, but that wasn’t enough. “What kind of story is Lee writing? What can I add in the artwork to emphasize what Lee was writing? That’s what I did. I managed to capture all the elements that would make ‘The Phantom’ real and worth reading each day.”

“I spotted more blacks in the art, making it dynamic and graphic, so that it stood out on the printed page. I wanted to play up the unusual mystery and fantasy elements that the strip needed. When you think of ‘The Phantom’, you think of a mysterious spectre, not a super-hero. He needed to be surrounded by that kind of environment. I needed to get that feeling of darkness and ghostliness, but at the same time, get some of the humour and characterisation of the characters, as well.”

— Sy Barry, ‘Sy Barry: His Life and Times’ interview by Jim Amash, Alter Ego Vol. 3, # 37, June 2004

“I tried to introduce more emotion. The Phantom, under Ray Moore and Wilson McCoy, always had a stony face with no expression. I wanted to get more anger, laughter, even momentary expressions of fear, into the strip. I wanted it to look exciting.”

— Sy Barry, ‘The Phantom illustrator Sy Barry on the spirit of an artist…and why you just can’t beat a comic strip. The Weekend Australian, by Troy Bramston, June 4 2021

A specific change could be seen in “The Wharf Rats” (a daily storyline starting on 18 June 1962) when the Phantom (in his guise as ‘Mr Walker’) was seen in a stylish new trench coat. Barry instigated the update (with approval from Lee Falk) as he was not a fan of the checkered version that had become a hallmark of the Wilson McCoy era:

“I don’t know what he liked about that trench coat. Maybe he just thought it looked different.”

— Sy Barry, X-Band: The Phantom Podcast #113, Chronicle Chamber, March 12, 2019

While the entire Phantom cast had received a new look with Barry’s arrival, the changes to Devil were less abrupt. Nonetheless, his appearance became less dog-like as Barry strove to align his features more closely to those of a wolf.

— Sy Barry, ‘X-Band: Phantom Podcast #265 – Studio Session with Sy Barry, Lou Manna and Jeremy MacPherson’ November 14, 2023

The new visuals that Sy Barry brought to ‘The Phantom’ coincided with a shift in the general nature of Lee Falk’s writing, something that Barry himself recognised:

“…I would look through some of Wilson McCoy’s work and I would read the story along with his interpretations I would visual it so differently than the way Wilson did it. But the stories were so interesting and at the same time they had a light touch…”

“But my style is more serious and less light, more dramatic and (Lee Falk) went with more dramatic stories…because he saw that I could draw just about everything. Because he knew what Wilson McCoy’s limitations were, he tried to write around it.”

Barry further observed that the Phantom’s dialogue, which would have a little bit of humour to it, became “…became a little more stressed” while “situations became more serious too.”

— Sy Barry, ‘Sy Barry, Complete Interview’ interview by Dan Herman (conducted May through July 2019) Hermes Press, 2019

4.12. ‘My personal feelings have changed’

Two tales, in particular, exemplify the storytelling changes taking place in ‘The Phantom’ during the early Sy Barry period. In ‘The Epidemic’ (a daily adventure commencing on 12 Feb 1962) Falk introduced Dr Lamanda Luaga, a member of a UN medical team on assignment in the Bengali jungles (Diana Palmer was also employed on the team as a nurse). This was soon followed by ‘The Mysterious Ambassador’ (October 15th, 1962) – in which Dr Luaga was elected president of Bengali in the country’s first free elections. The outcome was challenged by General Bababu, who assembled a large army to oppose the new leader. A civil war then spread to the jungle as the Phantom, now acting as a UN emissary, worked to protect Luaga and end the conflict.

Although Lee Falk had written strong roles for black characters for decades, his portrayal of the educated, charismatic Dr Luaga, together with the concept of a new democracy emerging from a colonial model in an African-like setting, were new and clearly reflective of real-world developments. A decade later, Falk confirmed this as the period in which he consciously moved away from earlier portrayals of the Phantom as a jungle ruler:

“I have changed that in the last 10 or 15 years. I de-emphasised that because I didn’t like it. My personal feelings have changed. The Phantom is no longer the ruler of the jungle. His title is ‘Keeper of the Peace’ in the jungle. He was a friend of the people. He is a one-man United Nations, trying to keep the peace. To reemphasise this, I had the Phantom become an emissary for the United Nations. And Diana become a nurse for the United Nations.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Father of Superheroes’ by Will Murray, extract from 1972 interview, published in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

Artist Sy Barry believed the original inspiration for such developments came out of their discussions:

“One of the things that…it’s strange, because my oldest daughter would just once in a while look at the proofs of what I was doing and she would see a president or mayor, and she saw that white people were representing those roles in Africa and she said, “You know dad, things are changing. I wonder if Lee Falk is aware that black Presidents are coming in and black Ambassadors at the UN…and I think he should be keeping up with this and making it more present day.”

Barry subsequently passed on this suggestion to Falk:

“…(H)e was very sensitive…I had to tell him in a very calm way, without getting too instructive, to tell him that in today’s world, the countries in Africa are becoming much more African run, and tribes and chiefs and different kinds of governments are being established. Some were democracy, some were autocracy, but nevertheless they are taking over as black leaders. It’s not white south Africa anymore. The whole of Africa is not apartheid. It’s not colonialism anymore.”

Barry recalled Falk saying he’d had good feedback to the way the strip was being written, but that he would “think about it.”

“Next thing I know he sending me a new story and sure enough the new president of Bengala has been newly elected and he’s Luaga Lamanda, and suddenly Colonel Weeks is Colonel (Worubu).”

— Sy Barry, Sy Barry Complete Interview, Interview by Dan Herman, APRIL 27, 2021

4.13. ‘There are no lions in Asia or tigers in Africa’

The themes and imagery present in stories such as ‘The Mysterious Ambassador’ underscored Afrocentric elements that had by now become prevalent in ‘The Phantom’. Within a couple of years, the general location of Bengali was seemingly confirmed in the 1964 daily story ‘The Reef’ – wherein Diana was depicted sending a message to ‘Mr. Kit Walker, Box 7, Morristown, Bengali, Africa’.

During interviews, however, Falk, would continue to stress that he did not want the restrictions of real-life culture/geography. His Bengali was a land of African-like natives/villages, mountain kingdoms with Arabic/Indian influences, lions, tigers, piranha and many other contradictions. During the mid-1960s he described the Phantom’s jungle as somehow existing “…halfway in Asia, and halfway in Africa”, emphasising that it simply could not be tied down to any specific real-world location:

“Every time I feature a tiger or a lion I run the risk of getting letters telling me there are no lions in Asia or tigers in Africa. I answer that the Phantom does not live either in Asia or Africa, just in the jungle. My own jungle. “

— Lee Falk, ‘Do Comics Disturb You’, interviewed by Alain Resnais. Translation by Ulf Bennetter and Paul Andreas Jonassen. Originally published in ‘Griff-Riff’ (France #12/1964 (excerpt) and ‘L’Europeo’ (Italy) August 25, 1966.

4.14. ‘Masterful art combines with superb storytelling’

A promotional brochure distributed by King Features in 1963 demonstrated the level of confidence the syndicate had in the Phantom’s new look. It prominently featured Sy Barry’s dynamic imagery, together with a blurb informing potential clients that “The Phantom…one of the world’s favorite adventure strips…is BETTER THAN EVER!”

The visuals received a prominent mention inside, and the success of ‘The Phantom’ was trumpeted:

“Masterful art combines with superb storytelling – to make The Phantom by Lee Falk and Sy Barry – a BIGGER circulation-and-readership builder.”

“THE PHANTOM’s appeal is universal – its popularity world-wide – its fans fanatically loyal…THE PHANTOM delights readers of 513 newspapers…”

In another section King Features summarised the elements that were driving the strip’s widespread popularity:

“THE PHANTOM has something for everybody: A legendary hero, the symbol of strength and justice; thrilling jungle adventures; humor, drama and conflict; a continuing lover story – with a beautiful heroine; mysterious happenings in exotic settings, imaginative storytelling and brilliant art.”

Artist Sy Barry soon became well aware of the enthusiastic reception his artwork was receiving on ‘The Phantom’:

“People began to write letters, and the syndicate forwarded batches of them to me, because they couldn’t find room for them all. The letters were all positive. People said they liked the art much better now, and really looked forward to reading it. Many had stopped reading ‘The Phantom’ under McCoy, but were reading it again and asking other papers to run the strip.

One by-product of my taking over was that the merchandising picked up. I was doing art for game, costumes, headgear and all other kinds of Phantom-related material.”

— Sy Barry, ‘Sy Barry: His Life and Times’ interview by Jim Amash, Alter Ego Vol. 3, # 37, June 2004

And he came to believe that this development resulted in some insecurity on Lee Falk’s behalf:

“I think he knew that my artwork would become more recognised than his writing, and there was a certain insecurity about him.”

“— Sy Barry, ‘Sy Barry’ Dollar Bin Bandits interview by Bob Kroll and Oren Philips, posted on Youtube, February 15, 2023

Barry further perceived that, at some point in the relationship, an implicit power play emerged:

“My relationship with him [Falk] in the beginning was reasonably smooth and it was working well but then he started to try and throw his weight around and that’s when I began to resist and we had an unspoken…little bit of animosity between each other. Unspoken.”

— Sy Barry, ‘Sy Barry: From New York to Bangalla – Afterimages ep 11’, interview by Jose Alberto Pinheiro, posted May 13, 2021 on Youtube

According to Barry, one of the manifestations of this scenario was that Falk gave others the impression that Barry was working for him, rather than with him:

“He always told everyone…I mean falsely… he told everyone I was his assistant – and I was so angry at this…I had my own position on the strip. I was the artist. I was paid separately.”

“— Sy Barry, ‘Sy Barry’ Dollar Bin Bandits interview by Bob Kroll and Oren Philips, posted on Youtube, February 15, 2023

Meanwhile, Sy Barry was under constant pressure to ensure the artwork was completed on time, and would face artistic challenges inherent in some of Falk’s scripts:

“Sunday, I would try and take off as often as I could…unless I had a very tough week of drawing, where there was a lot of work in it, which Lee had a habit of doing. The more I asked him to ease up the more junk he put in there…”

“Many times he would throw armies into the stories and I had to draw all these figures with their weapons and their uniforms. And it took one-and-a-half times the time to do a week of work because of all the figure work…”

“That’s why I always needed help, because he overwrote…he wrote too many complicated scenes…”

This even prompted Barry to push the artist/writer boundary by asking Falk to “ease up” on such scenes so that he could catch up (albeit unsuccessfully):

“At the beginning it wasn’t so bad but I didn’t know how often he would pull this and just the fact that the more I complained about it the more he poured it on…”

— Sy Barry, X: Band: Phantom Podcast #225 – With Sy and David Barry

Despite such frustrations, Sy Barry would never lose his respect for what Falk had achieved:

“I did have a lot of conflicts with him, I must say. I respected him. Enormously. I must say, as a writer, he had a wonderful concept. Both for Mandrake and the Phantom. I think his concept on the Phantom is what kept the Phantom going for so many years. The idea of it being an adventure strip and, at the same time, a fantasy strip.”

“— Sy Barry, ‘Sy Barry’ Dollar Bin Bandits interview by Bob Kroll and Oren Philips, posted on Youtube, February 15, 2023

4.15. ‘Comics are not the right place to perform politics’

In 1964 Lee Falk was interviewed by one of his friends, famed French film director and screenwriter Alain Resnais. In the course of this conversation, Falk described the creative process behind his stories:

“The basic idea can take 5 minutes or several hours to think of. First, you prepare the general plot, then the characters, then the more specific events. I work two or three weeks with one subject. In one hour I can write a week of strips. The Sunday page takes 45 minutes, dialogue included. You could say I work 8-10 hours per week.”

While noting that the characters had, for him, essentially taken on a life of their own:

“I can’t let them say what I want them to say. They talk like they want to talk. The are the ones who influence me.”

Falk also spoke of his reasons for avoiding overtly political/ideological commentary in his comic strip writing:

“I don’t think comics should have characters who are political. Politics are one thing, comics another. Comics are not the right place to perform politics. I am and always have been an opponent of McCarthyism, but I never reflected my political views in my comics.

“Of course my ideological world is reflected in my stories, never clearly and most importantly never intentionally. The comic strip page in the newspapers is the only page without politics in the paper, it represents a more relaxed form of reading. But every strip has its own ideological tone implied.”

Falk did note that there were parameters within which he willingly operated as an author:

“It is necessary to respect and not break certain rules in terms of sex and violence.”

“I don’t believe in censorship, but I think we should respect certain rules and a certain amount of tastefulness. It is way too easy to create strong feelings with simple tools.”

His views from this period would remain consistent with comments made in later years…in which he also mentioned his intent to avoid reader complaints, e.g.:

“We don’t discuss sex…religion and politics is very minimal. My only politics is up with democracy and down with dictatorships. Down with human rights violations. Down with torture. This kind of thing which I do in both strips. So there’s no complaint about it.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Interview with Falk’ by Hal Schuster, originally published in ‘King Comic Heroes’ (1988) and ‘The Official Mandrake Sundays (1989). Reprinted in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

“Comics should be first and foremost entertainment. That is why I in my strips avoid politics, religion and sex. You can’t really write about these things without tying yourself up to a specific environment (race/faith), and then the general appeal of the strips is destroyed. But one can very well have a political stance or commitment – and I certainly have that too! – without having to push it on to readers!”

— Lee Falk, ‘The Phantom’s Father in Norway’ by Ann-Louis Nerem, Serieleseren (Norway) #7, 1978. translation by Paul Andreas Jonassen, republished in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

4.16. ‘The Phantom is superior because of his strength, not his race’

During their 1964 discussion, Alain Resnais sought Lee Falk’s reactions to the notion that the Phantom might be interpreted as a potentially ‘racist’ character. While there is no evidence to suggest any substantial perception of the ‘The Phantom’ as a racist strip amongst readers of the era, Resnais’ question presumably reflected general developments in critical theory that were taking place in French intellectual circles at the time. (Note: ‘The Phantom’ had received limited criticism in its homeland as early as 1943, when – together with other American newspaper strips – it was cited in an educational journal for its depictions of race/culture. See ‘Endnotes’ for further information).

Falk professed to being “stunned” by the suggestion:

“I have always been openly anti-racist. Why would the Phantom be a racist hero…because of his attitude towards natives?

“…(T)he Phantom is the most popular comic character among black people in the south. African Americans love the Phantom, because he has always seen black people as equal human beings. In my stories you find love between natives. That is unique in the world of comics.

“The Phantom is superior because of his strength, not his race. I can honestly not see any signs of racism in my stories.”

4.17. ‘The Phantom must continue to be Diana’s protector only’

There was also the question of what was being planned in relation to the relationship between the Phantom and Diana Palmer. Here, Falk reiterated his intent to maintain the status quo:

“I have no intention to marry them. The Phantom must continue to be Diana’s protector only.”

In explaining his rationale, Falk recalled his own reactions to the marriage of another fictional character – one that had helped inspire his jungle hero:

“I loved Tarzan, but only until he married and had a son. Tarzan as a husband and father spelled the end.

I was always nervous when I thought about the Phantom with a wife and child. I seriously considered securing an heir in some other way.”

4.18. Rex King

Whether coincidental to his musings on an alternative heir or not, Falk introduced a new young male cast member in ‘Rex King’, a Sunday narrative debuting on May 15, 1966. The story revealed that the Phantom had come across a baby boy some years earlier, whose true origins were unknown. The child, whom the Phantom named ‘Rex King’, had grown up in the intervening years (a montage of past adventures was used to show what had transpired in the meantime).

The addition of Rex gave Falk the opportunities for new storylines/perspectives, while allowing an exploration of the Phantom’s parental side. Rex would remain a supporting character in the strip for the next two decades.

4.19. Founding of the Jungle Patrol

Lee Falk devoted an entire storyline to the origins of the Jungle Patrol in the Sunday continuity ‘The Founding of the Jungle Patrol’ (5 July 1964). This also revealed how the Phantom came to be regarded as the organisation’s ‘Unknown Commander’, while continuing Falk’s exploration of the Phantom’s ancestors (something that was becoming more prevalent in the strip):

“…(T) he more I did with it, the more intrigued I became with it. I included more background, including stories about his grandfather, or his great-grandfather, and stories dealing with the 17th century Phantoms.”

“I’ve had stories about a 17th century Phantom who conquered a whole pirate city run by a pirate named Redbeard. He conquered Redbeard and his followers, tamed them and made them into the first Jungle Patrol. The Phantom is the unknown secret commander. The reason for this is that it was founded 250 years ago by a Phantom, who was about the 7th Phantom, who was known as the Seventh.”’

— Lee Falk, ‘Father of Superheroes’ by Will Murray

It would later be cited by Sy Barry, when asked which (if any) of his stories stood out amongst his Phantom work:

“…(O)ne of them, more than most. It would have to be, I guess it was the original “Founding of the Jungle Patrol.” This gang of pirates, Redbeard, he was a giant of a guy. Maybe 6 foot 10 or something, he was much bigger than the Phantom. (Referring to the Sunday continuity which ran from July 5, 1964- January 24, 1965.)

“I must give him (Lee) credit, that was genius of him. Using the 400 year period, you know, to be able to make use of 400 years of history and run around all those years.”

— Sy Barry, Sy Barry Complete Interview, Interview by Dan Herman, APRIL 27, 2021,

4.20. Joe Giella – ‘It was tough’

While the layouts of George Olesen were evident in the ‘Founding of the Jungle Patrol’ (and other Sundays strips of this period) the Phantom strips of the mid-to-late sixties also included the work of a number of other talents operating as part of the Sy Barry team. Amongst these was Barry’s long-time friend, Joe Giella (1928 – 2023):

“I met Sy when I was 16 years old at the School of Industrial Arts. We were good friends. We got together later on after we’d been doing professional work. We both helped his brother Dan with the Flash Gordon strip. In the late sixties after I finished working on the Batman syndicated strip, Sy asked me to help him on The Phantom strip. I worked with him three days a week for seventeen years. And we’re still good friends.”

— Joe Giella, “I’m Ninety and Sometimes When I Think About It I Get Worried”: An Interview with Joe Giella, Alex Dueben, The Comics Journal, March 1 2019

Joe Giella brought with him a style that worked well with Barry’s:

“Our styles were similar, because you see, his brother was a big influence on us.”

Having worked on another daily strip, ‘Mary Worth’, Giella found the ‘The Phantom’ – with its greater array of backgrounds, action etc. to be a “…a gruelling strip. It was tough. In order to meet deadlines some shortcuts were required”:

“The Sunday page—believe it or not—we used to do a lot of paste-ups on the Sunday page. George [Olesen} would indicate the panels that he would refer to, and he’d say daily so-and- so and month and the year, we’re using that shot. So what we’d do is, we’d take that shot and we’d paste it up, embellish it, you know—add something to it, add figures—utilize it just to save time.”

Giella also assisted Sy Barry in sourcing other talent:

“Occasionally, he’d ask me to recommend someone, and I would. Don Heck, Frank Springer and what we’d do, we’d take their layouts, rub them down, tighten them up and then ink them and try to maintain the style.

— Joe Giella, RIP Joe Giella. Reflection Interview on Joe’s Phantom Work Assisting Sy Barry, by Ed Rhoades and Pete Klaus, originally published in Friends of the Phantom Newsletter #13, Spring 1996

Joe Giella would meet Lee Falk only once:

“King Features used to have a Christmas party where everyone who worked on the strips was invited. I went to a few. A lot of artists were there. I met Lee Falk and his wife. Lee was an elderly man and his wife was very young. We shook hands. That was the only time I ever met him. I never worked with him directly. Sy periodically would talk to him on the phone.

Lee was very emphatic about things that he wanted. Everything had to be his way. Lee had a lot of muscle. He had two strips, Mandrake the Magician and The Phantom, and these were top strips.”

— Joe Giella, “I’m Ninety and Sometimes When I Think About It I Get Worried”: An Interview with Joe Giella, Alex Dueben, The Comics Journal, March 1 2019

4.21. ‘The Number 1 adventure strip’

A 1966 promotional flyer published by King Features Syndicate announced that the Phantom had become “The Number 1 adventure strip in world-wide popularity”, while noting that “only ‘Blondie’, of all American comic strips, has a greater world-wide readership than ‘The Phantom’!”

The strip’s popularity had clearly grown, and it was now appearing in a total of “583 newspapers – including 261 foreign papers”.

4.22. ‘The father of the first Phantom…was the cabin boy for Columbus’

As the sixties came to a conclusion, Falk continued to explore the backgrounds of past Phantoms and their connections to real-life events/people. In the case of ‘Walker’s Table’, a Sunday story that began on January 5, 1969, this resulted in a revision to the Phantom’s 1930s origin:

“…I began to tie the Phantom mythos with great historical events, like the father of the first Phantom, who was the cabin boy for Columbus. I had a whole story about how he and an Indian boy actually came to the North American continent and saw the Mayans and the Aztecs and so on.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Father of Superheroes’ by Will Murray (incorporating material from an unpublished 1972 interview by Robert Porfirio), originally published in ‘Comic Book Marketplace #121 (2005).

The events of ‘Walker’s Table’ (which referred to a mesa in the American mid-west) meant that ‘Sir Christopher Standish’ (a name that had not appeared since ‘The Singh Brotherhood’) was no longer considered part of the official continuity. Instead, the first Phantom had been the son of Captain ‘Kit Walker’.

A daily storyline commencing on February 10, 1969 (‘The Masked Ball’) featured a villain based visually on Dan Barry (Sy Barry’s brother, perhaps best known for his work on the ‘Flash Gordon’ comic strip):

“Now the funny thing was at that point I was not talking to my brother Dan. We had had a real break up and then I tried getting in touch with him again because I felt- his family, he wasn’t doing well with his family. I felt like I had deserted him so I started to get back in touch with him and he wouldn’t receive me. He wouldn’t respond to me. You know, I had to say that I tried. And I thought of him as one of the villains (laughter). As a result of my experience with him I made him the main villain. He was the guy – he was the pirate.”

— Sy Barry, ‘The Transcript of our First Podcast Interview with Sy Barry’ Chronicle Chamber, January 27, 2017

‘The Hijackers’, a Sunday story that commenced on April 27th, 1969, was evidently inspired by events in the news of the time. Hijackings were a significant concern in the late 1960s, and there were several high-profile incidents, some involving planes being diverted to Cuba. In Falk’s tale hijacked airliners were being delivered to the domain of ‘Prince Charl’…though Cuba was specifically mentioned in the opening sequence:

“I called the character Charl and not Charles because someone might think that the character in the story is Charles De Gaulle or Prince Charles of England.”

When asked about Castro’s possible reaction he replied: “I don’t care if Castro likes it or not.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Rio Grande Trip Inspires Author – Phantom Could Soon Appear on a Raft’, originally published in The Daily Gleaner (Jamaica) March 25, 1968. Reprinted in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, GML, Stockholm, 2011

Colonel Worubu, Falk’s replacement for Colonel Weeks of the Jungle patrol, made his first appearance in the daily story ‘Rex, the Missing Heir’ (which commenced on June 23, 1969). This transition was specifically connected by Falk to events taking place on the African continent:

“It’s his assistant. The idea is he will be promoted when the Colonel retires. Sure, there have been changes in ‘The Phantom’ through the years. Africa has changed a lot since World War 2, so I also gradually changed the Phantom.”

(A sequence in a later story subsequently explained that Colonel Weeks had retired)

To be continued…in ‘Part Two’ (1970 – 1999)

Endnotes

Introduction

“Many of the events and influences that shaped ‘The Phantom’ are lost to time…”

‘The Phantom’ has, of course, always been influenced by broader cultural and social trends to some extent. For instance, 1930s/1940s stories often showcase the adventurous spirit and pulp fiction style prevalent in those decades, with some plots also directly relating to World War II. The 1950s tend to present a lighter tone with an increase in morality tales and various depictions of post-war domestic life. By the 1960s, stories start to incorporate explicit themes of global post-colonialism and Cold War tensions. The 1970s include tales dealing with terrorism and illicit drugs, while the late 1970s/1980s feature a greater family dynamic (reminiscent of the greater focus on the nuclear family in American public discourse and popular entertainment).

This could be the basis for an essay in itself. However, while connections to obvious real-life events are occasionally noted, the main document is largely focussed on influences that are directly supported by surviving creator commentary.

Part One: The 1930s

“Over the years Falk gave varying accounts of his circumstances/experience prior to entering the comic strip field with ‘Mandrake’.”

A Lee Falk timeline may be found on the Mandrake Wiki site (Spotlight on Lee Falk – Timeline – MandrakeWiki)

“Yet Falk wasn’t content to focus on one franchise, and he began developing ideas for another venture. Initial concepts based around a reporter and the ‘knights of the round table’ were unsuccessful…”

Falk recalled his rejected ideas for newspaper strips as below:

“…(W)ay back in the ‘30s, I had an idea for a strip about a foreign correspondent. There weren’t any others at the time. I submitted it and they turned it down. The said the drawing was too much like Milton Caniff. He drew Terry and the Pirates. They turned it down for that reason. I thought it was a silly reason, because Milton was one of the best.”

“Very early in the game, I did 100 pages based on the Knights of the Round Table. I had all my stuff, layout drawings. I submitted it to them and they turned it down. About a year late, Prince Valiant, which is incidentally a very beautiful strip, came out with very similar period.”

(‘Prince Valiant’ commenced on February 13, 1937)

— Lee Falk, ‘Interview with Falk’, by Ed Rhoades, conducted May 7,1994. Friends of the Phantom Newsletter. Vol 2 Issue 3 (1994) and #21 (2000)

(Note: Some sources state that King Features specifically asked Lee Falk to create another strip.)

“In the course of these events the Phantom was depicted using his famed skull ring for the first time.”

As the strip progressed, the mark left by his ring was said to be indelible – though the precise process for this was never explained:

“People say ‘what kind of a ring is that that can leave such a mark?’ I say, I don’t know, that’s the Phantom’s secret.”

— Lee Falk, ‘A&E Biography’ Episode Phantom – Comic Strip Crusader

A panel from ‘The Phantom’s Ring’ (October 29, 1950) states that the gold ring was gifted to the Phantom by the ‘jungle kings’.

“In that origin sequence, the Phantom explained to Diana that his ancestor, Sir Christopher Standish, had been the sole survivor of an attack in the Bay of Bengal by ‘oriental pirates’ (the ‘Singh’).“

In the opening for the daily story ‘Adventure in Algiers’ (June 20, 1938) Falk ran a brief recap of the Phantom’s origin for the benefit of new readers, using the introduction ‘For those who came in late’. This was a device that would be repeated many times over the life of the strip, and examples are used as chapter breaks.

“Standish had subsequently sworn an oath on the skull of his father’s murderer that committed himself, as well as the first-born son of succeeding generations, to ‘vengeance against the Singh, all piracy, greed and cruelty’.”

Hermes publisher Daniel Herman has observed that this is reminiscent of a scene from the 1922 film ‘The Black Pirate’:

“…’The Black Pirate’, likely inspired the Phantom’s oath. In that film, which is set in the first Phantom’s era, a son’s father is killed before his eyes by pirates and the young English nobleman becomes the sole survivor. He swears an oath to avenge his father’s death, which he carves onto a rock. As in the Phantom’s case, a ring is a clue to his identity.”

— Daniel Herman, ‘Origins of the Ghost Who Walks’, The Phantom – the Complete Sundays: Volume 1 1939 – 1942, Hermes Press 2012

“(The present-day Phantom would be inconsistently identified as the 16th, 20th or 21st over the years, and it would be several decades before Falk finally settled on the 21st).”

The Sunday storyline ‘The Mysterious Passenger’ (May 14 1950) was the first to state that the modern-day Phantom was the 21st of his line. This would eventually become the accepted standard, though occasional stories up through the 1960s continue to reference him as the 16th or 20th.

“For the first few months, The Phantom was intended to be Jimmy Wells, a wealthy playboy who fought crime by night in a mask and costume.”

Some commentators have suggested that the decision to change the strip’s direction reflected concerns about potential legal action, with Falk’s original conception being too close to that of characters such as ‘The Gray Seal’ (alias ‘Jimmie Dale’) and ‘The Phantom Detective’.
(For example, see Kevin Patrick’s ‘The Phantom Unmasked’ pp 32-33)

“This was, of course, several years before Batman and Superman appeared on the comic scene.”

In an online article by Vir Sanghvi (Rediff On The NeT: Vir Sanghvi on the passing away of Lee Falk), the author recalls Falk telling him that Batman had appropriated elements of the original Phantom concept before Falk could reveal his character to be Jimmy Wells, and that this was the reason he changed the Phantom to a jungle character. However, this must be an error as Batman debuted in 1939, well after the Phantom’s change of direction.

Elsewhere, Falk noted the influence of the Phantom on the superhero genre, while giving a blunt opinion on ‘Batman’:

“The Phantom has been imitated much more than Mandrake. My character was the first to wear a tight costume and a mask. Later on others came, dozens of them.”

“I don’t like Batman. His psychology is too elementary, a lot of violence and little humanity.”

“The latter’s work even provided the name of the pygmy tribe that lived with the Phantom in the ‘Deep Woods’”

The Deep Woods, the official enclave for the Phantom in his native land, was first referenced in a daily from 23 November 1938 (‘Fishers of Pearls’)

“The Indonesian locale was consistent with the depiction of a leopard in an early sequence, while the Bandar tribesmen (despite being labelled as ‘pygmies’ – originally ‘cannibal pygmies’) strongly resembled photos of Indonesian natives from that period.”

“…‘Devil’, the Phantom’s pet wolf who was introduced in early jungle scenes, would not have been native to such an area and so presumably originated elsewhere. “

While wolves are not native to Indonesia or Africa, they can still be found in India. The inclusion of Devil in the strip does align somewhat with ‘The Jungle Book’ influence that Falk mentioned on numerous occasions (a wolf character does appear in Kipling’s story).

Some have suggested that original Phantom artist Ray Moore may have played a role in adding ‘Devil’ to the strip. For example, in an article discussing the work of Ray Moore, Albert Gallo stated:

“To draw Diana, moreover, Ray often asked his wife to model him, while the idea of having the wolf Devil accompany the Phantom probably stemmed from the artist’s passion for drawing wolves and his love for dogs. After all, as he himself had told in an interview, the first character of his creation was a wolf “with eyes like beacons”, drawn at the age of 5.”

— Albert Gallo, ‘Ray Moore’, Ray Moore – The Phantom website

However, no direct quote has yet emerged to show that Moore ever made any connection between his interest in wolves and ‘Devil’.

“Apart from his involvement in sketching out character designs, Lee Falk often mentioned having some involvement in the early artwork for both ‘The Phantom’ and ‘Mandrake’.”

An article delving into Falk’s artistic involvement in both ‘The Phantom’ and ‘Mandrake the Magician’ can be found on the ‘Mandrake Wiki’ site: Spotlight on Lee Falk – The Creating Years – MandrakeWiki

“Of particular note amongst the criminal organisation trope was Lee Falk’s use of ‘all-female’ gangs.”

Examples of the ‘all-female gang’ trope can be found in:

‘The Sky Band’ (November 9, 1936) and ‘Return of the Sky Band’ (March 2, 1941)
‘The Golden Circle’ (September 4, 1939)
‘Mermaids of Melo Straits’ (November 12, 1945)
‘The Girls’, aka ‘Lady Luck’ (May 24, 1948)

“Despite the subject matter, Falk didn’t remember any specific instances of censorship…”

A possible example might be an early Phantom sequence in which the revealing outfit originally worn by the villainous Sala inexplicably changes between dailies into something far less revealing (September 3, 1936).

“Added to the dynamics was Diana’s mother, Lily Palmer, who was introduced on February 8. 1939 (‘Prisoner of the Himalayas’).”

In early stories Mrs Palmer was given various names, including: ‘Mrs E. V. Palmer, ‘Evie’, ‘Laura’ and ‘Elsie’.

“The success of ‘The Phantom’ daily prompted the creation of a colour Sunday strip debuting on 28 May 1939 (‘The League of Lost Men’). A number of assistants would reportedly work with Ray Moore to manage the additional workload”

The use of assistants is very common in the production of comics strips, particularly adventure strips, and was likely present from the earliest days of ‘The Phantom’. According to Albert Gallo, the addition of the Sunday strip did prompt artist Ray Moore to bring in assistance:

“On May 28, 1939, the serialization of the Sunday stories begins, further increasing the workload. To meet the deadlines, Moore gets help in the creation of the backgrounds by some non-accredited assistants, among these are Lester Harry “Tex” Willman, Hugh Hackaday and the talented Robert Wilson McCoy. The names of Moore, Willman and McCoy are closely linked. Willman, in fact, had been a fellow student of Moore at Washington University and had worked in the same studios as McCoy since 1933.”

— Albert Gallo, ‘Ray Moore’, article (English version sourced from ‘Phantom The Ghost Who Walks Webpage Ray Moore – The Phantom)

“For example, the cover of the 1936 Phantom ‘Big Little Book’ (adapting part of the unfinished ‘Singh Brotherhood’ storyline) portrayed it as red.”

Falk had no involvement in the creation of the Phantom ‘Big Little Books’:

“They were pretty simple things. One page was a drawing, the page was writing. I didn’t have anything to do with that. McKay Publishing had some guy up there. Some hack. Unfortunately. They put out one called ‘Son of the Phantom’. It was terrible. I said never again. But they put out another one when my back was turned. The syndicate went ahead and licensed it. So any writing after that I got involved with in the later years.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Lee Falk: Interview’ by Spike Barlin, conducted May 23 183. ‘The Phantom The Complete Sundays Vol 2, Hermes, 2014

“When I created the Phantom I had vague ideas of a grey costume, but pretty soon I realised that the only possible colour would also be the most practical one.”

Lee Falk occasionally contradicted himself in other interviews, e.g.:

“Originally I envisioned the Phantom’s costume as green, but I didn’t specify that for the color Sunday pages.” The color artists made it purple, which is kind of silly for running around in the jungle. In Europe they made him red. When I met the man responsible, I asked him why red. He said that the mechanicals came over in black and white. They didn’t know what colour to make him, and they had a lot of red ink.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Conversation with Lee Falk’, by Raymond Elman, Princetown Art, 1989. Reprinted in Lee Falk Storyteller

Elsewhere he mentioned brown as a possible alternative:

“I wasn’t really thinking about it at that age. I wasn’t too interested. I was about to embark in the theatre, which was my other love, as a playwright. I was twenty, twenty-one. I just did these in my sleep for a while. I didn’t tell them (the artists) what colour. If I had thought about it twice I would have made his costume green or brown, more of a jungle colour.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Lee Falk: Interview’ by Spike Barlin, conducted May 23 183. ‘The Phantom The Complete Sundays Vol 2, Hermes, 2014

In the daily strips Falk continued to refer to the costume as gray for many years, in storylines such as ‘The Seahorse’ (12 April 1940), ‘The Mermaids of Melo Straits’ (28 December 1945) and ‘The Devil Road’ (24 January 1948).

In one daily from ‘The Matchmaker’ Falk even describes the Phantom as “moving silently, like a gray ghost…” (1953) – recalling the ‘Gray Ghost’ name that he mentioned in interviews as a possible alternative to ‘The Phantom’.

It was only in late 1956, in ‘The Heavyweight Champion’ daily storyline, that Falk had a fight announcer refer to the Phantom as ‘wearing purple tights’.

Part Two: The 1940s

“As the 1940s commenced, Falk began referring to the Phantom’s fictional homeland as ‘Bengali’…”

In an article on ‘The Phantom’ journalist Vir Sanghvi recalled the ‘Bengali’ name had not been used in India, due to the potential confusion it could cause an Indian audience. He raised this during a conversation with Lee Falk, who remembered the name being changed to ‘Denkali’:

“…when King Features picked up the strip for international syndication in the Fifties…they had a little talk with Falk and told him that there were no lions, negroes or skull-caves in Bengal. So could he please change the name?

“I thought, it doesn’t really matter, does it?” he (Falk) remembered. “I mean, I made it up in the first place.” So he let them call it Denkali. (It is still called Bengala in many versions, though.) But he kept the Indian touches”.

— Vir Sanghvi, ‘Mr Walker’s Last Mile’, Rediff On The NeT: Vir Sanghvi on the passing away of Lee Falk

“‘The Inexorables’ contained an unusual amount of violence for a Phantom adventure, and included various scenes of him dispatching enemy soldiers.”

The Phantom had occasionally been depicted killing opponents prior to ‘The Inexorables’. The first example took place in the ‘The Diamond Hunters’, where he fatally shot the villainous ‘Smiley’. However, he only occasionally resorted to killing, preferring to use non-fatal means wherever possible.

“…Alfred Bester had ghosted Falk’s strip for a while during WWII”

Ron Goulart’s full comment is provided below:

“I got the Phantom job originally because Falk, who didn’t keep up with things, had offered it to Alfred Bester, a friend of mine. Bester had ghosted Falk’s strip for a while during WWII and gone on to write The Demolished Man, etc. Knowing nothing of this, Falk assumed he’d be available for the assignment.”

— Ron Goulart, RON GOULART on The Phantom, mostly. (mysteryfile.com) » RON GOULART on The Phantom, mostly. (mysteryfile.com)

“Goulart’s comments were partially supported by Bester himself…”

Alfred Bester mentioned his involvement in an anecdote concerning himself and Lee Falk:

“I had one funny experience during that time that I was writing comics. I also ghosted Mandrake and The Phantom for Lee Falk. Lee and I got together and he was telling me how one of the Sunday pages from Mandrake sold at auction in Paris for three hundred dollars. I told him, when we moved into our brownstone at 68th Street, the old Stephen Vincent Benét house we managed to get, I papered one entire wall of my workshop with the silver prints from Green Lantern. And he said, “My God, they’re worth a fortune today, do you still have them?” I said “No, when we moved out I just left’em behind; I just put’em up with carpet tacks.”

— Lillian III, Guy. 2007. What’s it All About, Alfie? An interview with Alfred Bester. Challenger 25, Winter 2007.(from fall 1974). As referenced in the Alfred Bester – MandrakeWiki

The Alfred Bester – MandrakeWiki states that Lee Falk’s army service consisted of two periods, i.e. ‘About spring 1942 to about September 1943’ and ‘March 1944 to about July 1945’:

“Neither the dailies with Mandrake or The Phantom shows some clear literary characteristics which may indicate that they are written by Bester. One would think that the Sunday was more equal to writing stories for comic book, but even in these stories nobody yet have found any clues indicating Bester as writer.

There is also another possible explanation for stories ghosted by Bester. A situation similar to the Avon novels, adapting newspaper strips into novels. Like the “Better Little Book” series with Mandrake and The Phantom, or the book The Son of the Phantom by Dale Robertson.”

“‘Princess Valerie’, a daily story commencing February 18, 1946, centred on the adventures of a young girl lost in the jungle, who was named/modelled after one of Lee Falk’s children.”

Lee Falk used characters with the first name of his son, Conley Moore in various stories – ‘The Imaginary Playmate’ (October 25, 1953), ‘The Two Signs’ (May 5, 1958), ‘‘Fluffy’ (April 2, 1961), and ‘The Astronaut and the Pirates’ (November 4, 1962)

“Reportedly, there were occasional creative disagreements in relation to storylines (between Lee Falk and Wilson McCoy)”

An article published in the ‘Star Tribune’ (Minnesota, USA) dated June 12,1996 contains the following comments attributed to Ed Rhoades – an internationally respected famous Phantom fan (and publisher of the newsletter ‘Friends of the Phantom’):

“He (Wilson McCoy) was…distressed when the Phantom – which he drew according to Lee Falk’s mailed scripts – dabbled in subjects that a more genteel age considered taboo. The strip looks quite wholesome to contemporary eyes, yet it was branded “very objectionable…in terms of cultural, moral and emotional tone and impact” by “50 trained reviewers” rating comic strips in Parents Magazine in 1949.

That kind of notoriety created friction between the collaborators. McCoy compiled scrap-books filled with instances of violent and suggestive situations dictated by Falk, despite prohibitions in the King Features Syndicate code of self-regulation.

“He wanted the Phantom to be presented in a certain fashion, whereas Falk…was writing for adults in his own way,” Rhoades said.”

The same article also noted how McCoy had “made several trips to exotic locations to make the stories look more realistic” – including a trip to central Africa to meet with forest pygmies. (It is assumed that, during one of those visits, McCoy contracted the medical condition that later ended his life).

‘Artist’s son recalls production of Phantom as family affair’ by Colin Covert, Star Tribune, Minnesota, USA,Thurs June 12, 1996 –. Wilson McCoy Newspaper Articles – The Phantom

Part Three: The 1950s

“The concept of Julie Walker as a female Phantom was later picked up (and greatly expanded upon) by American and Swedish comic book publishers.”

An advertisement appearing in ‘King Comics’ during the 1960s showed the ‘Girl Phantom’ as one of a number of series being produced by the publisher. However, King Comics concluded before any such series saw print. Various short ‘Girl Phantom’ backup stories did appear in King issues.

“…I have always worked solely for adults. Obviously children read my comics too.”

Falk’s comments here are contradicted by a quote from a 1978 Norwegian article:

“…I write primarily for children, that has been clear the whole time. But children are not a homogenous mass. Kids all over the world read the Phantom; children of different races, different religions, different interests, and from all kinds of different environments.”

— Lee Falk, ‘The Phantom’s Father in Norway’ by Ann-Louis Nerem, Serieleseren (Norway) #7, 1978. translation by Paul Andreas Jonassen, republished in ‘Lee Falk Storyteller’

Part Four: The 1960s

Photos of Wilson McCoy visiting the Mbuti in the French Congo in 1961 can be found on the ‘WilsonMcCoy.Com’ website.

“In the course of the story Lignante became the first artist since Ray Moore to depict the hero’s eyes behind his mask during some key panels.”

Early Moore stories had occasionally depicted the Phantom’s eyes behind the mask, indicating that the usual ‘blank’ look was simply a stylistic choice. In various interviews Falk stated that the blank look was an artistic preference influenced by the appearance of statues from the classical era.

By the 1960s the convention of leaving the mask’s eyelets blank was well established, and Lignante’s decision to show the eyes did not please the daily strip artist, Sy Barry:

“…I was very upset when Lignante put the eyes in there. I didn’t think it justified the intent of the Phantom. I mean, don’t forget he’s supposed to be a ghost who walks and there’s supposed to be an intriguing look about him. A mysterious look. And I think not showing the eyes lends to this.”

Barry suggested that a “light veil” in the mask literally prevented the eyes from being visible to others.

— Sy Barry, ‘X-Band: Phantom Podcast #265 – Studio Session with Sy Barry, Lou Manna and Jeremy MacPherson’ November 14, 2023

There was nothing to suggest in the early Phantom stories that he wore anything other than a standard domino mask. In early stories his eyes occasionally appear, and in ‘The River Gang’ (1960) a character mentions seeing a particular look in the Phantom’s eyes. This seems to change with the Sy Barry era. In stories such as ‘The Slave Market of Mucar’ and ‘The Masked Ball’, Barry shows a number of other characters wearing domino masks, but (in contrast to the Phantom) has their eyes clearly visible.

As the 1960s progresses, there are many close-up shots of the Phantom (now depicted with a larger mask/eyelets), with the absence of eyes particularly noticeable due to Barry’s more realistic/detailed art style. (It is possible that Andre LeBlanc’s rendering of a particularly thin Phantom mask – with correspondingly thin eyelets – was a means of mitigating this).

By the 1970s Avon novels Falk was stating that the eyes were not visible, and in the 1980s he reportedly provided a rationale:

“That the Phantom appears to have no eyes is because the mask is made from a special fabric weaved under water. The Phantom can see out. But no one can see in. Lee got the idea when he noticed that many of the old statues of gods had no pupils”

— Svein Johs Ottesen, The Phantom’s Father Celebrate in Oslo’ by Svein Johs Ottesen, translation by Paul Andreas Jonassen. Aftenposten (Norway) August 24, 1984. Reprinted in Lee Falk, Storyteller

“According to artist and animation producer Will Meugniot, another contender for the Sundays was original Phantom artist, Ray Moore.”

Will Meugniot, an artist and animation producer, would later acquire original art (based on Falk’s ‘The Limper’ storyline) that had been prepared at the time:

“The piece was given me by 30s Phantom background inker Tex Willman, who worked with both Moore and his successor, Wilson McCoy. Tex asked Moore for a piece of Phantom art for me.

What Moore had on his hand was this sample art from when he auditioned to take back the strip when Mccoy left. Unfortunately the syndicate thought Moore’s art was too old fashioned and went with Lignante instead.

Moore autographed the piece for me around 1970 and in 1985 Lee Falk signed it as well during a lunch with Stan Lee to discuss the Defenders of the Earth Pilot film…”

— Will Meugniot, as quoted on PHANTOM ART BY RAY MOORE | PHANTOM ORIGINAL ART PAGES (wordpress.com)

(Note: this highly recommended site includes an image of Meugniot’s signed artwork).

“Over the years Sy Barry would employ a number of well-regarded illustrators in his artistic team.”

Sy Barry can be seen discussing various assistants including Don Heck, John Rosenberger, Frank Springer, and George Roussos here:

— Sy Barry, X-Band: Phantom Podcast #225 – With Sy & David Barry (youtube.com)

“Every time I feature a tiger or a lion I run the risk of getting letters telling me there are no lions in Asia or tigers in Africa.”

A 1980 daily storyline ‘The Poachers’ did eventually provide an in-canon explanation for the presence of tigers in ‘lion country’. In a sequence beginning on August 27, 1980, Falk revealed that “many years ago” a ship laden with many exotic animals was wrecked on the Bangalla coastline. While most of the animals had perished, “some survived in Phantom country” – including tigers.

“My only politics is up with democracy and down with dictatorships. Down with human rights violations. Down with torture.”

In ‘The Island of Dogs’ (a daily story debuting June 3, 1963) the Phantom thwarts a plan by a foreign power to install nuclear missiles on a nearby island which could “dominate Africa and Asia” and thus change the balance of power. The story clearly draws inspiration from the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and even features its own tense stand-off near the story’s conclusion. Despite the obvious allegory, the foreign power is portrayed in generic militaristic fashion and never identified.

“There is no evidence to suggest widespread perception of the ‘The Phantom’ as racist amongst readers of this era, either in the United States or other countries where it was being published. That said, ‘The Phantom’ had received limited criticism in its homeland as early as 1943, when (together with other American newspaper strips) it was cited in an educational journal for its depictions of race/culture.”

In an article appearing in ‘Childhood Education’ by Chicago Public Schools teacher Lawrence Kessel, claimed ‘The Phantom’ having a ‘general attitude’ which aligned with the view “That strange and foreign customs of other people are necessarily inferior to our own. That American ways are better than foreign ways.”. Kessel wrote that “The chief evidence of narrow patriotism, and hatred and distrust for foreign people was found in the general attitudes of ‘Don Winslow’, ‘The Phantom’, ‘Buck Rogers’, ‘Tim Tyler’s Luck’, and ‘Scorchy Smith’.”

— Lawrence Kessel, ‘Some Assumptions in Newspaper Comics’ ‘Childhood Education’, Vol 19 Issue #8, 1943

In that same article Kessel asserted that, across all the newspaper strips he reviewed:

“All Negroes were stock stereotypes of ignorant, superstitious, colored people. Much more was implied in the way they were drawn than by what was said. Never did they appear as social equals to white men, and never did they appear in any of the skilled trades…”

— Lawrence Kessel, ‘Some Assumptions in Newspaper Comics’ ‘Childhood Education’, Vol 19 Issue #8, 1943

It is important to note that Kessel believed newspaper comics were a means of teaching children “to learn to think and to think critically” in relation to areas of race/nationality, morality/ethics, education, government/politics and socio-economics. Kessel’s views are in contrast to Falk’s stated focus on entertainment as well as his perspectives on the place of ideology/politics in newspaper comics (see main essay).

Kessel’s full article can be read here: Childhood Education 1943-04: Vol 19 Iss 8 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

The racial aspect was raised during a 1983 visit to Bombay, India, when Lee Falk was asked why the Phantom was ‘white’:

“I remember one question from a girl: “Why is the Phantom white?” I said: “Well, because I’m white. I guess if I’d been black The Phantom would have been black. As a matter of fact, the Phantom is a mixture because the third Phantom eloped with the daughter of a Maharajah, so he is part Indian.” She said: “Oh.” It’s true. The Phantom has married all sorts of ladies from various countries.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Lee Falk: Interview’ by Spike Barlin, conducted May 23 1983. ‘The Phantom – The Complete Sundays Vol 2, Hermes, 2014

Elsewhere, Falk emphasised the Phantom’s mixed ancestry:

“He is sort of multinational. The Phantom men through 20 generations have married women from every part of the earth, including the islands of the Pacific, and various Asian, African. South American, Western Europe and Mediterranean countries.”

— Lee Falk, ‘Father of Superheroes’ by Will Murray (incorporating material from an unpublished 1972 interview by Robert Porfirio), originally published in ‘Comic Book Marketplace #121 (2005). Republished in ‘Lee Falk, Storyteller)

Having worked on another daily strip, ‘Mary Worth’, Giella found the ‘The Phantom’ – with its greater array of backgrounds, action etc. to be a “…a gruelling strip. It was tough. In order to meet deadlines some shortcuts were required”:

During a 2023 youtube discussion Sy Barry would recall Giella remodelling the character of Lily Palmer on ‘Mary Worth’.

Presenting A Sy Barry & Chronicle Chamber Studio Session Hosted Fundraiser (youtube.com)

“The Sunday page—believe it or not—we used to do a lot of paste-ups on the Sunday page. George would indicate the panels that he would refer to, and he’d say daily so-and- so and month and the year, we’re using that shot. So what we’d do is, we’d take that shot and we’d paste it up, embellish it, you know—add something to it, add figures—utilize it just to save time.”

Three tiered Sunday strips began to appear during the 1950s (having previously comprised two-tiers). This allowed newspapers more scope in arranging panels to fit pages, and gave them the option of excluding the first tier to meet any space requirements. This mean the first tier would consist either of recaps from the previous instalment or elements that were not necessary for the story.

In Sundays illustrated by George Olesen, opening panels were frequently re-purposed from the previous week (usually with slightly different dialogue). After returning to the daily continuities during the 1980s, Olesen sometimes repeated entire panels from earlier instalments with little or no alterations.

George Olesen also occasionally re-used figures/poses in both his Daily and Sunday strips (particularly for the Phantom) – with a similar approach taken by Wilson McCoy during the 1950s/1960s.

Recommendations and Acknowledgements

Art of Wilson McCoy is an invaluable source of information/images relating to the great Wilson McCoy, including rare newspaper articles.

Chronicle Chamber is an Australian website offering a variety of videos, podcasts and articles on the Phantom. The Chronicle Chamber team has conducted interviews with many Phantom creators that are available as podcasts and YouTube videos.

The Deep Woods is one of the oldest surviving sites dedicated to the Phantom. While it is no longer being updated, it remains one of the more informative sources of information on the character.

The Frew Phantom Comics site offers Frew (and other) publications for sale. Frew have been publishing the Australian comic book ‘The Phantom’ since 1948.

‘Friends of the Phantom’ was a newsletter published by an American Phantom fan club of the same name, which ran from 1993 to 2002. A total of 23 issues were produced, many of which include interviews with Phantom creators. Scans of the newsletter are available to read for those who become paid patreon members with Chronicle Chamber.

Hermes Press has produced a quality, hard-bound set of Phantom volumes (‘The Complete Dailies’ and ‘The Complete Sundays’). Many of these contain informative articles, and some include comprehensive interviews with Lee Falk and Sy Barry.

‘Lee Falk Storyteller’, (book, published by GML, Stockholm, 2011) currently remains the ultimate collection of Lee Falk interviews. It was produced by The Scandinavian Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club, which has a website here .

Phantom Art by Ray Moore contains many rare images of original Ray Moore artwork. There is also a wealth of other information on the original Phantom artist. Highly recommended.

The Phantom Bible describes itself as ‘A clearly set out reference guide to accepted Phantom Lore and The Phantom Universe. Includes titles, pictures and explanations. Information is garnered from KFS licensed stories, primarily Daily/Sunday Newspaper stories and Team Fantomen stories.’

The Phantom – The Ghost Who Walks is one of the best sources of information regarding the Phantom on the internet. It includes current news and numerous rare articles reproduced from old magazines/newspapers.

Phantom News is a public facebook page created by Ivan Pederson, an enthusiast who has done significant work in restoring/colouring Phantom newspaper strips. Many of the images appearing on the internet that relate to the ‘full-frame’ Phantom daily strips from 1943 – 1957 were restored by Ivan.

The PhantomWiki describes itself as ‘, the online encyclopedia dedicated to the Phantom, one of the world’s most popular comic strips. The articles are created by Phantom enthusiasts from all over the world.’

Sy Barry – Life of Sy is an official website offering information and merchandise (including original comic art) from Sy Barry, whose rendition of ‘The Phantom’ became the standard for decades.

The MandrakeWiki describes itself as ‘the online encyclopedia dedicated to Mandrake the Magician, one of the world’s most popular comic strips of the 20th century.’

Join us for more discussion at our Facebook group

Check out our CBH documentary videos on our CBH Youtube Channel

Get some historic comic book shirts, pillows, etc at CBH Merchandise

Check out our CBH Podcast available on Apple Podcasts, Google PlayerFM and Stitcher.

Use of images are not intended to infringe on copyright, but merely used for academic purpose.

Tag Archives: Phantom’s wolf Devil

‘The Phantom – The Lee Falk Version’ Part One (1936 – 1969) —- by Rosco M

Introduction

Part One: The 1930s

Part Two: The 1940s

Part Three: The 1950s

Part Four: The 1960s

To be continued…in ‘Part Two’ (1970 – 1999)

Endnotes

Recommendations and Acknowledgements