The Nickels of the Man

HERE’S a bit of Vermont up top, Phantom Sunday matters below.

Jonny and I were in Vermont over the weekend to nail more siding up on the building. We were both feeling pretty beat on the ride home yesterday. We had squeezed in a good three work days between 5 a.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday.

We worked in the rain Saturday and under too much sun Sunday.

We’ll likely be up in Vermont in two weeks to finish siding the back of the building. Our friend Eduardo’s coming up with a metal brake; he’ll finish the rakes & soffits in trim coil and that’ll be that for exterior finish.

Eduardo on that snowy weekend last December when we were up there installing windows.

Two tornadoes touched down in Rhode Island Friday, the day we drove up. One hit about a half mile from Jonny’s shop and equipment yard. We drove past downed trees and quite a bit of property damage on our way out of town.

Then up in Vermont, more of what’s not happening globally every day if you trust in Rupert Murdoch more than science. Two months of summer rain in 36 hours. Here’s one of the roads in town that crews haven’t gotten to yet. Alder Meadow Brook turned into Alder Meadow Raging River. Once the culvert was full of water the hydraulic pressure blew out the material around the culvert and sent it downstream.

I camped in the lean-to Friday night, then moved up the hill Saturday when Jonny’s brother, Joe, drove up to take his son fishing on the local ponds. First camping trip ever for Joey. He’s 9; old enough to want to be called Joe, like his dad.

I camped on an old skid trail up the hill.

Turning over the lean-to to Joe and Joey (Joe), I suggested best practices for sleeping out in this state-designated “bear corridor,” whatever it may be that the state means by that. Vermont is mostly woods, bears live in those woods, that’s all you need to know to leave your food in the truck overnight. Scarfing down potato chips in your sleeping bag is not among these best practices.

The Connecticut family that has a vacation house a few hundred yards to the northwest saw a big healthy specimen in his prime lumbering through their yard a few weeks ago; very unlike the adolescent bear the family 100 yards the other way picked up on their remote camera. Showed you this video of that one about a month ago, I think…

Bears don’t want anything to do with you. Unless you have food.

All I smell like out in the woods at night is me. Of no interest whatsoever to the wildlife, my sleep goes like this: Zzzzzzz….

Reading in my tent at night, as ever. This one’s The Lyric Impulse, recommended to me by my old friend Larry Stanley, aka “the perfesser,” former head of the writing program at Brown.

It’s a history of ideas behind certain uses of language in lyric imagery from the 1560’s on.

Wind down with a book, then five or six hours of oblivion with 5 a.m. right behind it… a little bit of light peeking up over the hill.

By the time I get down the hill, Jonny’s got coffee on. The work day begins.

Here we are breaking for dinner as the sun goes down Saturday.

On Phantom matters, if you’ve stopped by for that, Jeff Weigel and I are five weeks into a new Sunday yarn as of yesterday.

There’s an interesting timeline manipulation going on in The Commander Will See You Now. At least I think it’s interesting; wouldn’t have written it if I didn’t think so.

Ordinarily, readers of the strip don’t know where we are in time. That’s a built-in feature of running two narratives at once. If the Phantom’s on Adventure X in the daily strip and Adventure Y in the Sunday strip, one narrative had to happen before the other, he can’t very well be in two places at the same time.

Which is not to say that either timeline is the present. It may be that both narratives have happened in the past, and now the character’s off doing something we won’t find out about until it, too, is in the past.

Anyway, two weeks ago, we put a novel twist on the temporal conundrum by referencing the daily narrative in the Sunday narrative, thus fixing the two timelines in a relationship. It’s a first-ever event in the 87-year lore.

The daily narrative is in progress; we don’t know how the story turns out. You can even make the case (as I do) that, by its very nature, the ongoing daily narrative doesn’t end at all. It posits the 21st Phantom’s death in India in a timeline that may or may not ever become the present, thus it’s always going to be out there somewhere—potentially able to occur in the present.

I contend it becomes the present when the Phantom strip, like all of its classic contemporaries, disappears into the history of this uniquely American art form.

But set aside that layer of complexity for now. What’s relevant here is that because the timelines crossed two weeks ago, crossed where they did, crossed how they did, we know Gravelines has already happened for characters living in the Sunday narrative.

Here’s where the timelines crossed.

Panel 5 is where it happens…

The reader knows John X is the Phantom. So when Patrolwoman Hawa Aguda references the raid on Gravelines as an event in the past, we know the Phantom survived it.

But at the same time, on the daily side, we’re seeing him overtaken by events in a way that is seemingly not survivable.

In the strip published today, the Phantom’s been shot in his lower-right back while protecting Savarna Devi, the prisoner he came to Gravelines to free. He’s got his knuckles in the wound to staunch the bleeding.

Here the Phantom acts out of foreknowledge. He knows the Mozz prophecy.

He knows that the doctor Savarna finds (a veterinarian) saves his life, and he knows all that comes of it: after surviving surgery he’ll say something in a fevered delirium that will lead to Savarna gunning down Jampa, a man she’s wanted to locate and kill ever since he enslaved her as a child. That killing will bring about the end of the Walker line of Phantoms in its 21st generation. Hence the chapter’s title, Phantom’s End.

So knowing what he knows, how many wild horses would you say it takes to drag a wounded Phantom off to a horse doctor?

I felt readers would welcome the timeline crossover as a kind of anxiety relief, given that Gravelines has certainly heaped quite a lot of anxiety on them for over two years now. No harm in reassuring readers, I thought, as long as the story’s doing much more than just that.

And while happy for a little reassurance, many readers would at the same time, I thought, see the Sunday timeline crossover as a spoiler.

Here’s my case to the contrary, from an email conversation I had last week with the Chronicle Chamber blokes in a land down under.

So a timeline crossover as anxiety relief, all good. For readers who saw it as such, I’m glad. Though things may look dire indeed for the bleeding Phantom, we know he’s alive and well in the Sunday narrative at a time when Gravelines is over and done with.

Then, in last week’s Sunday, that moment comes and goes when the narrative posits a new mystery.

Then the strip published yesterday…

So “the mission” John X was talking about in last week’s closing panel isn’t the daily narrative. It isn’t Gravelines. What he’s talking about didn’t happen in Rhodia at all, it happened in Ivory Lana.

That’s how things look within the narrative. It’s how they look to Worubu. He doesn’t see what the reader sees. We see the Phantom, as John X, telling a story that never happened in Ivory Lana or anywhere else.

When the Phantom as John X is unmasking John X as the Unknown Commander who is the Phantom himself, you’re in good company—even Lee Falk doesn’t know what the Phantom’s up to!

That lies ahead…

About John X, keep this in mind: since the very beginning, he’s been in the background of what’s happening at Gravelines.

Here’s a strip published more than two years ago, first week of the Wrack and Ruin series. It’s one of those stock Lee Falk scenarios where the unseen Phantom speaks from the shadows as the UC.

How many readers remember that John X’s name came up four times in the very first week of this seven-chapter daily narrative?

It would be interesting to know, too, whether readers who saw the Sunday strip yesterday—John X unmasking John X as the Unknown Commander—immediately flashed back a year to the still-controversial unmasking of the mortally wounded Kit Walker.

Another first-ever event in the lore. You saw it happen in the prophecy timeline of Phantom’s End.

Tony DePaul, August 21, 2023, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA