The Phantom origin myth

TODAY looks like my best chance for a while to say something about the origin myth, this most detailed version published by King Features since 1936, when Lee Falk created the Phantom.

I’ll stick to the first of its two weeks. The syndicate has asked me not to publish images you can’t see for free at Comics Kingdom. By tomorrow, subscribers will have seen both weeks. Here we’ll deal with week 1, illustrated by the pencils and inks Mike Manley filed.

For those who came in late… Falk’s classic line. His most abiding interest as a storyteller was on the stage, as you may know.

Note the two narrative voices in the opening day. In panel 1, the narrator knows Captain Walker’s intentions. It knows his version of the future. In panel 2, it knows more: Captain Walker won’t navigate the Cape of Storms and emerge into the Atlantic. He won’t set course for England.

The ship is a carrack, true to 1536, not a cog, not a galleon, not a clipper. Over the years, artists both in-house and licensed by the syndicate have depicted the ship as everything but a carrack.

And for the first time, the ship has a name: She’s the Matilda.

I had eight or nine names in my notebook, all meaningful in different ways and worth thinking about. I called her the Matilda to give the Walker family a wider footprint, a broader history. Born in England, the Walkers may sail under an English banner…

… but their English bloodline has roots on the Continent and in Scandinavia. (Well, that explains nicely why we have so many readers in Sweden, Norway and Denmark! I’ve always wondered…)

The key is here: The name Matilda has Germanic origins and is associated, too, with Normandy, colonized by Northmen. In 1066, the name made its way to the British Isles with William the Conquerer. His wife, a future Queen of England, was Matilda of Flanders, the Duchess of Normandy.

Here’s the Day-1 art again so you don’t need to scroll back up.

Portchester Castle, a medieval stronghold built on the site of a Roman fort. Everybody associates Portsmouth with the seagoing adventures of the English. I went with Portchester. It puts a more interesting sound in the ear.

The narrative voice in panel 1 knows geographic features as they were known to sailors at the time. In 1536, there was no headland at the southern tip of Africa called the Cape of Good Hope.

Day 2…

We meet the sire of the Walkers, the male DNA behind all the stalwart Phantom traits passed down to the present day, with the other half, of course, handed down by the resourceful women Phantoms typically choose as their life partners.

For the first time, the Walker family crest. Stephen East of the Chronicle Chamber deciphered the meaning of the crest for readers here.

Day 3…

For the first time, Kit Walker is the crewman who sights a threat on the horizon. In his youthful enthusiasm and naivete, he’s pleased as can be to have a go against piracy. His speech on day 3 is a nod to Tudor English. Used throughout, it would have made the two weeks tedious, I thought. You see it here to set a tone, a feeling for the time. Elsewhere, it’s merely hinted at, an archaic word choice here & there.

I took a certain liberty on the technology of the day; one that served the narrative without too great a stretch. To see one’s enemy from afar, see that enemy closing in all the day long, see that the enemy is superior, that goes to character; it changes the characters from stick men to men who have something on their minds.

The technological question at issue: How far back, do you reckon, did lens grinders know about the optical effect of looking through two lenses at once? How far back, that is, before 1608, when the Dutch refused to grant Johann Lipperhey a patent for placing two lenses in a tube.

He was denied a patent for his telescope because the optical effect he claimed to have invented had been common knowledge for some unknown span of years. For the narrative purposes above, the origin myth contends that Captain Walker—and the Singh—had spyglasses in 1536.

There was a similar patent argument, by the way, about the sextant, the 18th century navigational device that succeeded the astrolabe seen on the Walker family crest. The principles behind the sextant had probably been known for 100 years by the time the Royal Society of London chose to recognize, with cash awards, the claims of two alleged inventors.

Day 4…

Love that first panel! Notice how Mike distorted the stern of the Matilda toward the circumference of the lens; the fleeing Matilda as seen through a crude optical device. That wasn’t scripted, that was all Mike. Just brilliant.

We know on day 4 that the enemy’s day started with thoughts of plunder, but now the Singh are out for vengeance. They mean to send the ship, its crew and all its goods to the bottom.

A little Tudor profanity for color—God’s teeth! I was pretty sure God’s balls would have generated a call from editorial. I swung for the base hit, good enough.

Again, the narrative value of the spyglass: Able to size up the enemy from afar, Captain Walker knows all the day long his crew won’t prevail if it comes to a close-quarters fight. All his men can do in that case is die well.

Day 5…

More youthful naivete from Kit Walker

It’s sunset here for a reason. When Captain Walker says may fortune be yours, he’s hoping his son doesn’t suffer much before death. The sense of it is lost on Kit. He’s innocent of the reality descending upon the Matilda. He thinks the just always win.

Until this telling, we’ve never known what Captain Walker and his son thought, felt and said when battle with the Singh was imminent.

Day 6…

Again, playing around with narrative voice, we have Kit Walker straddling two worlds. When the narrative says every man will die, it means every man but Kit. It sees him born into the legend.

Note the Matilda’s name isn’t painted on the stern. That maritime convention came later. It wasn’t common practice in the Age of Discovery.

On narrative voice yet again, I opened week 2 by hyping a wildly exaggerated line full of bold type and exclamation points. Before his death, Captain Walker kills not two villains, not four—but scores!—40 men! 60 men!—go for 80! There, with a wink to the reader, the heretofore sober narrative tips its hat to the comics genre. A little detour into the preposterous. It was a fun line to write.

The basics of week 2 you already know: The Bandar find Kit Walker washed up on shore in the morning, sole survivor. To them, he’s the fulfillment of a tribal prophecy, the hero who would one day come from the sea. There’s a certain psychological comfort available to Kit as he plants one foot in that magic Bandar world to get the feel of it. Might it really be true? He was destined to be that man? If so, the destruction of the Matilda was no random event. Captain Walker died not in vain. His life ended in service to the destiny of his descendants.

I’ll leave you with this to think about, something Jeff Weigel and I touched upon in the Sunday strip about a month ago: Did Kit Walker, marooned in Africa, understand himself to be founding a generational legend that would go on in perpetuity? I don’t think he did.

The only thing that makes any narrative sense is if the secession worked itself out naturally over time; if it came about as Phantoms projected their present-day thinking onto their forebears, until, at some critical turning point, the legend achieved a forward inertia all its own and became a birthright, a duty.

Jeff and I touched upon that idea here:

Diana has the better argument, don’t you think?

The 21st Phantom knows the legend in a way the 2nd Phantom did not. That biases him toward thinking the legend is by design, the vision of one man powered by its own inevitability. He can’t see things from the 16th-century perspective that washed up on shore.

One of Falk’s earliest tellings…

Here, Falk hadn’t even settled on a name for the man who would become the first Phantom—but we do see a 16th-century perspective! The wrong perspective, I would argue, but 16th century nonetheless.

Primogeniture was a system for controlling family wealth and power, for guarding it from your bastards and inbred cousins, the halfwits. Families like that weren’t out sailing the seven seas like the Walkers; more likely they were making money off the risk-takers of the world. Handing down wealth and power would have been the last thing on the mind of tattered, penniless Kit Walker, lost in Africa in 1536. So primogeniture…? You won’t see it in the lore on my watch. Nor the grotesque ego that proclaims: I commit all my descendants to being me. They must do everything, for all time, as my dry bones would have them do.

That’s hardly heroic; it’s reactionary. A reactionary mind serves itself. It establishes nothing that can last.

Wherever Falk was on his game, I want to preserve that and build upon it, but he was often noodling around, trying things out, discarding them. He wasn’t much interested in continuity. Wherever he contradicts the lore to no greater narrative purpose, I have no problem discarding those elements. I’m Falk’s successor, not his stenographer.

So, no, I think the beaten Kit Walker who washed up in Africa had the sort of idea in his head a young man has: I’ll fight evil as long as I live. When I’m old and feeble, I hope my sons will be the sort of men who fight for what’s right. And it builds from there. It gains traction over a few generations, half a dozen lifetimes, and there you have it—the Phantom legend emerges as a narrative idea.

That’s really all it is even to the characters within the universe. The legend becomes its own thing, bigger than any one man, bigger than all 21 men. Certainly bigger than anything that first man could have foreseen.

Diana sees how it must have happened. From the inside looking out, the 21st Phantom can’t. The legend is too much with him.

Tony DePaul, January 31, 2025, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA