Phantom blather

SO HERE’S a word on the Sunday narrative. I had intended to write about the daily side but I’m pressed for time and can bang this out quicker, and there are fewer graphics to find, copy, resize and arrange.

But here’s an even better idea: If you have time for what I can tell you about a make-believe hero, set this aside and put your time to better use reading a real-life hero’s extraordinary end-of-life diary. Especially if you intend to hand your country over to Putin’s BFF three weeks from now.

About the Sunday yarn, The Princess of the Songhai, we’re three weeks into it. I could see last winter it was going to be a heavy lift on the art side, so I told Jeff Weigel I’d be happy to not write it and get on to something else if he felt it was too much.

In February or so I asked whether he’d be interested in drawing a cast-of-thousands tale from history, real-life events told in the narrative style that Prince Valiant brings to the distant mythic past, both in the strip’s heyday under Hal Foster and in the tradition carried on today by Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates

I’ve always enjoyed how Hal Foster held up the past as past. He’d hang it on the wall as a tableau instead of turning it into the present through the artifice of the flashback. He achieved the effect simply by curtailing speech. If you don’t see the characters speak, you’re psychologically in some other time signature.

I wanted to do something like that, if not in exactly the same way. I didn’t want to see quotation marks in narrative text blocks.

Instead, I wanted to hear the characters in free indirect speech; speech understood as akin to what the characters, seen or unseen, must be saying in the time and space they inhabit. I didn’t want dialogue balloons or quotation marks to visually prompt the reader to hear those voices.

I didn’t mind seeing the characters occasionally think in the past, if only because thoughts are without sound, and, as such, they feel soundlessly situated in that same suitable remove I was after for the spoken word. Instead of seeing the characters speak, I wanted to hear them through the language of the narrative itself; to hear their voices over a chasm in time.

Jeff didn’t quite follow the concept at first, all he heard was Hal Foster and he was more than game. Hal Foster’s my North Star, I don’t care how much work is involved—Yes, I want to draw that story, words to that effect.

So here’s the setup: The 2nd Phantom (1548-1604) happens to be traveling through Morocco at a time when its ruler is massing an invasion force to send against the Songhai Empire to the south. As always, the Phantom undertakes his travels not in the guise of the mythic hero but as Walker, his enigmatic, everyday persona.

The 21st Phantom learns of his ancestor’s adventure in the old Sudan when he reads his after-action account in the Chronicles of Skull Cave. He learns, too, that when the 2nd Phantom made his way home from northwest Africa, he had with him a long gun: an arquebus likely made in Spain around the mid-16th century.

Phantoms are handy with sidearms, we don’t typically associate them with muskets, rifles and the like. When the 2nd Phantom set out for the Sudan, he carried a brace of wheellock pistols made in Germany, or one of the German principalities that would have been called collectively, at that time, The Holy Roman Empire, or the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Why would he want to lug around an arquebus as well?

This modern reproduction would be kind of fun to hang on the wall. Here’s a clip of a guy firing one.

Below, four originals in a private collection. I’ll betcha they cost.

In our opening week, Diana Palmer Walker finds her husband rummaging around for the arquebus in the dim recesses of the Major Treasure Room, among the uncurated antiquities that have piled up over the centuries. There’s got to be a story that goes with the arquebus. Naturally, she wants to hear it.

If you’re not familiar with the strip, that’s one of the stock setups in Phantom yarns: the 21st Phantom tells the reader a story about one of his ancestors by telling the story to some other character. He opens the Chronicles of a dead Phantom and tells the tale. He may tell it to Diana, to the twins, to members of the Bandar Tribe, any listener will do. Lee Falk used this storytelling device all the time. So have I.

In this case, though, I wanted the story to occasionally show the 2nd Phantom writing the Chronicle in the past, not the 21st Phantom reading it in the present. If you want the voice of the 2nd Phantom, why not go to the source.

To whip this whole thing together, I thought I’d use language in three discernibly different ways so we could hear the characters speak in their own time and place without needing to see them speak. A given weekly installment of the text might have one voice, two voices, all three, but it had to hang together even if readers didn’t hear what was going on with these shifting points of view.

So the Phantom finds the arquebus his ancestor had stashed away in Skull Cave. Next stop, the Hall of Costumes, where an effigy of the 2nd Phantom stands in the mute historical context I was after. There he lives on, without artifice, in that remote Hal Foster sensibility, a silence that seems to make the past more real (to me, anyway), more so than the tricks of the stock narrative flashback, that artificial you-are-thereness.

We leave the Phantom and Diana here, see them briefly this coming December, then again when the story’s winding to a close in the spring. And yet, through the language of the text, we’re always aware of the off-narrative space they inhabit. The unseen 21st Phantom’s point of view appears and reappears in an ostensibly anonymous narrative style, the Prince Valiant thing.

That’s the idea, anyway. Judge for yourself whether it happens for you as a reader; whether the 21st Phantom’s uninterrupted presence in the narrative comes through in the text below.

The text in Rows 2 and 3 originates in the 21st Phantom’s dialogue in Row 1; it starts there and carries his perspective forward. Whenever the text speaks of the 2nd Phantom in the third person, the effect is to paraphrase the 21st Phantom’s storytelling in the Hall of Costumes, that unseen off-narrative space understood to exist. We don’t need to go there; don’t need to see that setting in the art, don’t need to keep reestablishing the present. It’s right there in the language.

After Marrakesh, the 2nd Phantom’s on his way south and east, headed for home. Given that every Phantom’s a seafaring man at heart, you won’t be surprised to see him navigating the Sahara by the stars. Read both strips below. One version will be published this coming Sunday. The first reader here to see the difference between the two, say so in the comments, I’ll tell you how there came to be two versions.

One more and we’re done, a look ahead to the bonus week seen by Comics Kingdom subscribers. It’s the one graphic here that best illustrates what I was after in this story. Listen for all three voices, each confined to its own row, each with its own narrative perspective and time signature. That’s how you know who’s speaking without being prompted by dialogue balloons or quotation marks.

Last weekend, I said some of this in an email thread with the Chronicle Chamber blokes Down Under, Jermayn Parker, Stephen East, Dan Fraser. We’ll see what they make of it in their next podcast.

In Row 1, it’s obvious, isn’t it? We’re inside the 2nd Phantom’s head. He speaks in the after-action past.

In Row 2, the first-person pronoun disappears and we slide into free indirect speech, a manner of speech logically assignable to just one character: the 2nd Phantom. We’re hearing the 2nd Phantom in the distant past, the hero in the present moment of the adventure. The present moment 1591.

And it’s not simply the language. See the gesture with the right hand. There, Jeff identifies the owner of the perspective borne by the text. The 2nd Phantom’s seated around a fire with men who need to know what he knows. He means to save their lives and property from the invasion force massing in the north.

Finally, in Row 3 we hear the voice of the 21st Phantom in the off-narrative space. It’s free indirect speech understood to be something like what the Phantom must be saying to Diana in the Hall of Costumes. The giveaway is in the first two words of the text, the speaker’s third-person treatment of the 2nd Phantom.

So watch for things like that as The Princess of the Songhai gets rolling. Or don’t. Either way, you’ll see, by and by, how the arquebus came to be in the 2nd Phantom’s possession, and why he assigned it meaning; enough that he was willing to lug it all the way home to East Africa.

I’ll leave you with this: It appealed to my sense of mischief to put the word princess in the story’s title. Lee Falk seemed to have a thing about princess titles. In the 1940s, he published four daily and Sunday stories about princesses, and he went there again in daily stories in 1957, in 1973, in 1992.

A man of the world, had Falk not had occasion to notice that princess is often the polite shorthand for royal pain in the ass?

In my 30-plus years of writing Lee Falk’s Phantom, here you have my first and likely only story with princess in the title. I invite you to guess the eminently guessable twist.

Here, I’m going to wheelbarrow another three truckloads of firewood down the hill and start stacking it.

Tony DePaul, October 17, 2024, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA