I WAS in Vermont last week, solo this time, due to a scheduling error at the lumberyard. On Wednesday the yard dropped off a tractor-trailer load of building materials a week early. We won’t be up there to frame the building until this coming Wednesday.
So here’s something about that, just for nothing, and a bit of Phantom material at the end. A key timeline switch happened this morning.
The garage foundation is all set, materials are on site. I drove up in the kids’ travel van Thursday to throw a couple of 20′ x 30′ tarps over materials that are best kept dry, if possible: the sheet goods, engineered floor joists. Rain was in the forecast for Sunday.
I was feeling lousy when I drove up, achy bones & chills, the kind of cold that makes your teeth and eye sockets hurt. Tested for covid before I left, that was negative.
Took my saws with me because Jonny had marked more trees to be taken down. And there were already cords upon cords on the ground here & there. That all needed to be cut to stove length and stacked.
Been going through work gloves on this project…
VT was home Thursday through Sunday. I was feeling pretty miserable but happy to be out in the fresh air. I find it often helps to be under the actual weather while under the weather.
A bison burger on the firepit.
Didn’t sleep much for three nights. That was a pain. You know the kind of spotty sleep you get when you can’t breathe through your nose. I’d sleep for an hour, read for an hour, sleep for an hour, write for an hour…
I had a book by William James with me, kind of a philosophical pamphlet. Read it by headlamp in the wee hours. Some interesting parts, well written, and then some hoary old ideas here & there. You know you’re reading a 19th century man.
As you likely know, his brother, Henry, was the famous novelist. Anybody here ever read all the way to the end of a Henry James novel? Yeah, me neither.
Sunrise over a hay field on my way out of town yesterday.
Drove the three hours to home, collapsed on the couch in the basement, didn’t get out of my 5-day filthy clothes and into the shower until mid-morning today.
Feeling pretty good now, and expect to feel fine by the day after tomorrow. That’s when we’ll head up to Vermont to frame the building.
On Phantom matters, here’s the strip published this morning. It’ll have many long-time, so-called close readers saying, Wait a minute! He’s alive!? I thought you killed him!
Funny how so many readers can’t seem to track the two timelines that have been going on in this story for the last year. I don’t know what to tell them, except… pay attention!
The Phantom died in the Mozz prophecy. That’s the old seer’s vision of a future that will unfold if the Phantom frees Savarna Devi from Gravelines Prison.
The militia shown above thought Walker, the Phantom’s ordinary-man alter ego, was in India to assassinate their leader, Kit the younger. The Phantom had sent his son to the Himalayas to further his education. That perfectly good plan went awry when a foreign aggressor bombed the city where young Kit was studying, killed his tutor, killed his friends… Kit went off the rails, around the bend, all that.
Kit didn’t find out until it was too late that his father was the man cornered in the mountains, outnumbered 50-to-1. Kit’s girlfriend, Manju, had ended the battle by sniping the Phantom at long distance.
According to Mozz, young Kit doesn’t live much longer himself. So it really is the end of the Walker line of Phantoms if Savarna goes free.
The prophecy timeline ended Saturday, we’re back in the present as of this morning.
In the weeks ahead, I’ll find time to write up a report for you on why this story, and why now. In brief: the hour is short, that’s why.
We’ll talk about it.
Tony DePaul, September 19, 2022, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA
I think you should write into the strip a side trip to Vermont, where the Phantom and crew help with some of the firewood chores. Each one of those babies exceeds my capacity… reading William James in “Reading” is a worthy undertaking.
Hey! Sorry I didn’t see your comment in the queue until now, Brian. Been off grid lately. Got home from VT yesterday afternoon.
Four-man crew, three days, somehow a building magically appears in the woods. We’ve got to go back up next weekend to sheath the roof, build soffits, cut-in for skylights, etc. In the next few days I hope to find time to write up the latest.
I’ll check out “Reading.” Thanks for the tip.
I sincerely enjoy following The Phantom and your work each day.
At some point I might need to go back and re-read the lucha libre story. I remember in a previous entry you touched on The Phantom’s influence in lucha libre and El Fantasma out of Mexico. Fun fact, El Fantasma’s son is currently wrestling with WWE and used to wrestle under the name El Hijo del Fantasma. Some of his ring gear still has slight nods to The Phantom, but not seemingly enough to jolt a lawyer out of bed in a cold sweat.
Ha! What fun! My late friend Tarquino Felix Flores (The Trusted Man) would have gotten a huge kick out of that.
Please let Savarna be the one that catches the bullet and dies. IMOHO, the storyline will be better without her.
Well that would be a sad end to an unlucky life, indeed.
Part of what’s on the Phantom’s mind (I may be giving a little something away here, I think, but not much) is that this whole intersection of action and fate might not be about him. It might be about her.
I’ve been reading the current storyline about a month at a time and have had no problem following it. As someone who has been reading The Phantom regularly since Wilson McCoy drew it, I have to congratulate you on writing a story that is not only full of adventure but is quite moving in a way comic strips usually aren’t. One of the main aspects of The Phantom legend has always been the father/son continuity, and in this storyline you show us what might happen if the bond between father and son (or father and daughter) was broken. Forget the stupid commenters on Comics Kingdom: this Phantom Phan says you’ve written a classic. Thank you! – Bob Deveau
Thank you, Bob. That’s a smart way to read the story, a month at a time. Day by day it’s just too chopped up. Lee Falk had four big panels a day at the height of the craft. We’ve generally got two, and I’m always tempted to open it up into a single panel so Mike has a chance to showcase his art. It is a visual medium, after all.
Yeah I do think this story will read a lot better when collected in reprints. Frew will likely want to publish it as a trade paperback Down Under and it wouldn’t surprise me if Regal puts out an English-language version in India.
I appreciate that you see what’s happening with Kit as his experience in the world severs him from the legend. In the 9/15 strip, Kit says his father should be in the Crypt of the Phantoms but “I can’t do anything about that now.” Of course he can do something about it! He’s been too blinded by his experience to know that.
Thanks for the response and the info about Frew and/or Regal possibly putting this out as a trade paperback. I’ll keep my eye out for it. This is definitely a story I’d like to re-read in the future. It’s a shame what’s happened to comic strips but there’s not much we can do about that, I guess. I very much appreciate the good work you and the artists who’ve worked with you have done to carry on the neglected comic strip (neglected by the general public, at any rate).
Remember, hit the nail, not the thumb.
A lifetime ago, in Maine, my father-in-law, his brother and I were building an addition on a rental house the FIL owned. A guy pulled up, said he was interested in hiring a crew to add on to his house. When we told him what we were doing he said, oh, I should have known you guys aren’t real carpenters, you’re all using hammers. 🙂
Tony, I am trying to raise my reading habits a notch by putting genre reading behind me (except for the Phantom and Prince Valiant) at least for a while… The biggest success I’ve had was reading the novel “The Plague” by Albert Camus. Written in the 1950s, it is amazingly prescient about human nature in the time of Covid.
Thanks for the tip. The James brothers Henry and William, known to me by name only, are off the list.
Your friend, Stephen Rourke, is right about “The Heiress”, being a great film though. Little known fact is that the film was saved by the soundtrack written by Aaron Copeland–Focus groups laughed as they watched the Heiress, waiting for the return of her lover and jumping at the sound of every coach passing by. Copeland inserted music that raised the tension in the background so that audiences “got” the fact that her heart is breaking. Copeland tells the story in his book “What to Listen for In Music”, the chapter on film scores.
It’s a great film, Montgomery Clift is great in it as is the rest of the cast. Olivia de Haviland, a beauty in her time, plays the role of the plain Catherine Sloper to perfection (thanks to IMDB for the memory refresh).
As for the written language of books, at my age I expect writing styles to meet me halfway. Life is too short to have to decode the language to understand the content.
I’m enjoying “The Phantom”–you’ve stretched the concept successfully, and like many other loyal readers, I’m waiting for the payoff. Stephen’s last paragraph was insightful.
Great blog today. Hope you’re feeling better.
Trying to stretch the concept, anyway. Funny you should mention Valiant, a single uninterrupted continuity from 1937 through to the present day. About ten years into my Phantom run for KFS I authorized myself (better to ask forgiveness than permission) to do away with the format I had inherited: three daily stories a year, two Sunday stories a year, all self-contained, standalone narratives. I decided to wing it, write a single continuity for whatever it may be worth. Maybe it should run for a year, or 18 months, or maybe just one month. The longer ones can be broken down into chapters or “stories,” but they’re single narratives that run for however long they ought to run.
The Falk format was too predictable. It had habituated readers to look for a daily story to pivot on some plot point about 15 weeks in, because as they well knew everything was set to turn into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight, then maybe a week of denouement and on to something else.
It’s always fun when readers see a thread from one story pulled into another. Last week, the Chronicle Chamber lads Down Under noticed that the Phantom’s grave in the Mozz prophecy, as seen in the strip in recent weeks, is the same pile of rocks the Phantom hallucinated in the Llongo Forest a few years ago. They didn’t take it the next step into what that fact means, but it was a good get.
https://www.chroniclechamber.com/post/tony-depaul-mike-manley-showed-us-the-burial-spot-of-the-21st-phantom-back-in-2020
Oops, here’s the link: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1093/1093-h/1093-h.htm
Well, that’s it exactly, Sheila. It has a certain beauty on the page, I can’t deny that, but it’s that trademark whole lot of something about a whole lot of not much at all. The long Henry James slog through psychological states, the lives of mannered people who are afraid to live. They talk around corners at one another and remain strangers their entire lives. That said, we’ve all seen it in real life, if not so heightened for literary effect, a not unworthy commentary on the human condition. Thank you for the link!
Tony, just read the short story “The Beast in the Jungle.”
Hello Tony,
I’m glad I’m not the only one who thinks that plywood and power-lams should be kept dry, if possible. You’re a tough egg for heading up there while feeling lousy, but we all know how much you like the outdoors; I’m real fond of the woods myself.
Me and two other guys are going to do one of the abbreviated BDRs, the PABDR-X. I think it’s four legs with a total of about 500 miles; I’ll be thinking of you when we’re riding. I don’t get much writing done, but I do try to keep a journal.
About skiing: around 30 years ago we went up to do some tree-work in exchange for a place to stay while skiing Killington. I seem to remember a sign at the top of the lift that said (paraphrasing) “if you miss the ride back down, it’ll be just as cold and lonely as it was 100 years ago”, or something close to that; it got my attention!
I had to google that route, Will. It looks as if a fair amount of it is at elevation. Bring warm gear!
I had gorgeous working weather in VT. High 50s to mid-60s in the day, down to 40 at night. Nice sleeping weather, insofar as I got any sleep. I had the windows open in the van. Elevation there is around 2,000 feet, which is about where you’ll be in the Alleghenies, I would think.
Have fun, bud! And ride safe.
This morning’s Phantom begs a question: How set is he on saving Savarna Devi? If he doesn’t give it up, it will be the death of him
Hey, Sam. Well, the Phantom is the Phantom, the hero’s journey is what he does. He’s said a number of times over the last year, c’mon Mozz, could you speed up this story a bit? I need to be on my way to Gravelines. The Phantom implied today that the mere telling of the story has to bend the future in ways Mozz never saw, so… he’s right about that or he’s not! We’ll find out.
So glad you are enjoying yourself in Vermont. My wife and I just got back from our summer home on Lake Champlain, near Vergennes. Love that state! (and cheese and maple creamies…….)
I’ve spent a bit of time in that area, up around Burlington. My eldest worked there for a few years, met her future husband there.
Cold winters! That must be why your place in Vergennes is a summer house.
Hi Tony,
Love your updates. Hope you’re feeling well. Whereabouts in Vermont are you? (My oldest son lives in North Montpelier.)
Hi, Tim. They’re in Reading, VT. Lots of trees, not many people. Biggest town in the area is Ludlow, about 20 minutes away.
When I was a kid, we passed through Ludlow on our way to Brandon one summer just after the town was all but destroyed by savage spring floods.
Years later, just after college, I and a bunch of friends passed through Ludlow on the way to Killington for a ski trip. Two of the three cars in the group when they slid off Route 100 into a ditch.
Seems like Ludlow is a place best avoided.
(In all fairness, I’ve passed through Ludlow more two hundred times in my life, and those were the only two disasters; might just be the odds catching up…)
Hey, Paul. It seems a nice little town, though I can’t say I’ve seen the whole of it. What I have seen makes me think the locals not connected to the ski resorts must have a hold on the council, the planning board & all that. Some towns get wiped clean and remade by the tourism industry.
The kids bought in Reading because it’s within 20 minutes of three mountains they like to ski. Okemo, you mentioned Killington… I’m drawing a blank on the third one.
Reminds me of my last semester at Oberlin, when I took a course in modern American literature. I found the books much more interesting and much more readable as we got out of the 19th century and into the 20th. Although there are exceptions: we started with “Huckleberry Finn,” which was enormously readable, but much darker than I remembered from the first time I read it as a teenager. And we ended up with Faulkner, which I just didn’t do well with at all. I get what he was trying to do, but all I can say is it just doesn’t work for me . As for James, I think “Washington Square” works better as the play and movie, “The Heiress.”
I continue to look forward to what you’re doing with the Phantom. It looked to me like Kit’s reaction to the news of his father‘s death was complete shock. And then, for a few seconds at his graveside, he was moved back to being the person that he was before the mountain city was destroyed. Then he turned around and walked away and recommitted himself to being the African. Can’t wait to find out more about the Devi line of Phantoms!
You’re seeing things in the story that I hoped readers might see, Stephen.
Faulkner, oh boy… another one who loses me halfway through. Was it Yale that used to publish The Best of Bad Faulkner? That was hilarious reading. He’s so ripe for parody.
He did come up with the single best description of the novelist’s art, though. Compared it to a one-armed man trying to hammer together a chicken coop in a hurricane, something like that.
It was that way for me with, say, the added disadvantage of that single remaining arm in a cast. My first attempt was just plain bad. But it was a 140,000-word learning experience. I’ll try again one of these years, see whether I’ve learned anything since then.
Ran the first manuscript through the shredder so as to make a clean start.
At Wellesley, I read a lot of Henry James. (Takeaway: The cultivation of consciousness is the only thing worth doing.) At Brown grad school, I was a research assistant to a Henry James scholar. My job was to transcribe copies of the nearly illegible, flowery handwritten correspondence between Henry James and Henry Adams.
You have triggered me. AAAArrrrggggghhhhhhhhhh………
Sheila! I needed that LOL. Flowery is the word, I get lost in it. I’ll bet you would have some interesting conversations with my friend at Brown, Larry Stanley. He gave up trying to get me to read Henry James.