Like a fine wine, the Phantom’s romance gets better with age – from puppy love to “I do” in just 34 years!
I have the habit of saving up for a rainy day the books / comics that I feel I will really enjoy reading. Most people would dive right into it but I like to prolong the pleasure. I feel that enjoying a really good book is, like revenge, a dish best eaten cold. The book I am currently reading falls under this category. I got my copy in 2016 but I have finally got around to reading it. As one gets older one feels that a rainy day may never come and it’s better not to test fate. The comic book in question is Frew issue No. 1798 , a Phantom Wedding Special running to 180 pages.
The Phantom, as I have mentioned before, is my all time favourite comic book hero. I first read his adventures in the pages of Indrajal Comics in the late 1960s and have been hooked ever since. In fact, so great was the popularity of this masked marvel , that he remained the most popular comic book hero in India for three generations of readers from the 1960s through the 1980s before being displaced by the plethora of supermen ( and women) in tights.
The Phantom: More than a mask
The Phantom also wore tights, striped tights in fact, over a figure hugging purple bodysuit. However he did not have any superhuman powers, just a body honed to perfection and the ability to hit a bullseye with his matched pistols at 200 paces with either hand.
Add to that a back story dating back thousands of years. He is the Ghost Who walks, the Man Who Cannot Die. A legend among the jungle folk and the nemesis of evildoers everywhere. A hero to delight and awe a seven year old boy who has idolized him ever since.
Curiously, the Phantom never gained much popularity in his own country but has millions of followers in Australia, Sweden, Norway and , of course, India. Frew Publications in Australia have been publishing his adventures since the 1940s, including translated versions of Swedish, Norwegian and Italian Phantom comics. We in India had to be satisfied with reprints of the original newspaper strips and of Gold Key, Charlton and King comics published by Indrajal and Diamond comics.
My hero did have one tiny flaw. He fell in love like any silly old sap. Talk about feet of clay. The object of his affection was a certain Diana Palmer, Olympic diver and fencer, a nurse with the UN, a mixture of Florence Nightingale, Nadia Comancei and Helen of Troy. Thankfully for us male chauvinist fans , though he first proposed in 1943 he finally got married only in 1977.
A whole 34 years in which he remained a bachelor like all heroes should. Truth be told, over the decades when he remained engaged to Diana I began to quite like her. She kept changing from a blonde to a brunette depending on who the artist was, but she was no simpering , empty headed beauty. She had a razor sharp brain and a physique to match and could hold her own against all comers. A fitting mate you could say. Anyway, the romance played out over the decades as portrayed by varied artists like Ray Moore, Wilson McCoy, Bill Lignante and Sy Barry to name a few.
Romance of a hero
The Frew issue I am reading now anthologized the best moments in this epic romance. From the first meeting of a 12 year old Kit Walker and a 9 year old Diana Palmer, it reprints the key episodes. The college romance of the sporting hero and the all American beauty, the opposition of her mother Lily who does not want her daughter to marry a ‘jungle man’, the proposal (in 1943), marriage in 1977 and the birth of his children and the building of an unusual jungle home.
A favourite sequence has our intrepid hero shaking like a leaf when it’s time for him to inform Lily Palmer that her daughter has accepted his proposal. Wise Diana has just the right advise for him. ‘ Go ahead, just pretend she’s a tiger’.
The Phantom bloodline has always had a male child as the first born ( to facilitate his taking over the mantle from his father ). Lee Falk showed he has changed with the times by avoiding all charges of chauvinism or sexism with Diana giving birth to twins, a boy and a girl. Whether he would have gone the whole hog and had Heloise inherit her father’s mask when the time came, we will never know as Lee Falk left us before he had to make the choice. Anyway , given the rate at which events progress in the life of the Phantom, that eventuality may have only come to pass around 2060 or so.
So here I am, reliving a much loved story, enjoying again the mastery of each artist who has contributed to this epic love story. The icing on the cake is an absolutely brilliant cover by Romano Felmang. A ripe wallow in nostalgia, the book takes us back to our childhood as the very best stories do. I hope the story has many more chapters for us to enjoy. This is one story you wish will never end. Like the Phantom this is a story that will never die.
