See what’s on the page

HERE’S that piece I said I’d get to on the new Phantom daily story that started two weeks ago. If the Phantom’s not your thing, scroll down to the end for a riding video I shot last night. As always, 2 minutes anywhere will give you the idea. It ends with 3 minutes of me filling the tank at a gas station, that’s pretty exciting.

It wasn’t a great night to be out. The road was wet here and there, a little loose, temperature right around freezing. It was fine, I stayed out of the left lane. Tires don’t warm up much on a winter night, that’s the thing. You don’t want to push cold tires.

Iron piggy this morning. I stripped the side and top cases off her a few days ago, put a GoPro auxiliary microphone in that car-wash sponge you see zip-tied to the rack. Going for amazing sound quality and getting… amazing… ly… sort of average.

On Phantom matters, Bret Blevins and I are deconstructing a confounding little Sunday story from 1953, one in which Lee Falk, the Phantom’s creator, turned his own creation on its head in the service of a trite point he had to make: that patience is a good thing.

A creative thinker, Falk just didn’t bring it on this one. For whatever reason. His Phantom is emotionally immature, a big baby of a man, petulant, cranky. He demands that others bend to his will. When they don’t, he becomes angry. At his worst, he’s told a secret story of his father enslaved, chained like a beast of burden, eventually winning his freedom through patience. Hearing this story straightens the Phantom right out, makes a new man of him.

Okay…

There are two storytelling problems here, both of them foundational: We don’t recognize the Phantom, and it’s just plain dumb to think he might become recognizable because an old man tells him a story. Taken together, those two elements made The Chain stand out for me as an entry point into what I really want to get at: that subset of racially stereotyped Phantom stories from the 30s, 40s, and 50s; artifact yarns our critics seize upon to malign the stories we publish today.

This is just for nothing, but Lee Falk has a recurring cameo in the Sunday narrative Jeff Weigel and I are working on. Here he stands in for all writers; he’s living with the text to see what it wants to do.

A later Sunday strip, same story, just the top row of panels this time.

If you’ve followed the strip over the last three generations, you know it’s not stuck in the 1950s. The Phantom’s no white savior of black Africa. He doesn’t rule over anybody. No one looks to him as a lawgiver. He’s a native Bangallan, wholly assimilated into the land and culture that welcomed his shipwrecked ancestor in 1536. That man would become the first of 21 Phantoms.

In these closing panels from a recent Jeff Weigel strip, the Phantom reflects on the psychology of the sole survivor; how the last man standing finds himself bound to the land that became his home.

You might even say the legend the Phantom serves belongs to the indigenous Bandar more than it does him. In the Wrack and Ruin series, when Old Man Mozz speaks of the Bandar guardians of Skull Cave, he’s not talking about guards posted at the waterfall. He’s acknowledging Bandar possession of the land that makes the Phantom legend possible. He has in mind a durable, tribal reality destined to survive the legend itself.

Our 2024 take on 1953’s The Chain strikes the original tale from the lore by reducing it to a random reality generated by the hero’s brain at rest.

Bret’s having fun with this one. He’s nailed the 1953 Wilson McCoy look in the dream panels.

The Phantom’s having a good time, too. It’s a lark for him to share with Diana and Kit this odd dream he had of being someone other than himself.

Consider this paradox: our biggest foes and biggest fans are the readers least likely to see what’s on the page. One’s too busy hating it, the other’s too busy loving it.

For fans, in part, it’s the hero worship thing, Lee Falk up on a pedestal, but I think it also has to do with how the reader experiences the story. The writing isn’t what readers love; what they love is how the story reconnects them to the feeling they had the first time they read it. All the world was new and so were they.

Readers who have that sentimental connection to The Chain simply don’t see this unfamiliar Phantom on the page; they don’t see the scenario as unworkable.

It’s not that the scenario’s preposterous—everything in comics is preposterous. A man running around the jungle in purple tights, that’s preposterous. The idea is to manage the poetics of the preposterous in a way that delights or intrigues the reader. The Chain can’t do that for a reader who sees what’s on the page.

In Falk’s telling, The Chain posits that children don’t need guidance in building character. They can grow into miserable adults, have personality problems a lifetime in the making, behavior problems, you can fix it all later by telling them an inspirational story.

All you moms, dads, aunts, uncles, teachers, cops—raise your hand if you call bullshit!

The production designer on the 1996 Phantom movie draped the so-called chain of patience across the back of the Skull Throne because it… looked good? Evoked mystery? Maybe. A movie doesn’t ask much more.

Skull throne, right? A vestige of the early tales, the Phantom as monarch of the jungle. Phantom haters get wound up over it, even if the Phantom hasn’t held court in three generations. No assemblies of jungle chiefs stand before him. No one awaits his pronouncements.

The Phantom’s favorite stone chair would be rough on you or me, we don’t have the glutes this hardass does, but he decrees nothing from his kingly perch; he sits here to think, mull his destiny, tell a story, hear a story, that sort of thing.

I write the skull throne into the script every chance I get.

As you can see, there’s no chain of patience on the skull throne in the newspapers. Falk created the chain in 1953 and immediately disappeared it, along with Woru. Ask yourself why he might do that.

I imagine Falk in the Phantom posture you see above, experiencing that most common torment of the writing life: the what-was-I-thinking? moment.

Lee Falk was ahead of his time in many ways. He anticipated American comics culture before Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, before Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Comic books and newspaper comics may not be the same art form, strictly speaking, but Falk had every opportunity to be Stan Lee before little Stanley Lieber ever thought of it.

Falk didn’t want that. He wasn’t a comic book guy any more than I am. He was a theater guy. He wanted to write, produce and direct stage plays while scribbling his cash-cow newspaper strips on the side.

I love how he chose to introduce Diana Palmer when he launched the Phantom strip 88 years ago this month, February 1936. He had her working over a sailor who was supposed to be training her in self defense.

Forty-one years later, when Diana and the Phantom are talking marriage, she can still hold her own.

Ahead of his time as a writer of female characters, Falk was very much of his time with characters of color. Many of his early stories make it easy for our detractors to ignore the work of the last half century and judge us on artifacts from another era: tribal people as narrative props, simpletons, buffoons in grass skirts and top hats.

In The Chain, I think Falk must have been scribbling his own personal commentary on the civil rights movement, the commonplace consensus of the upper middle class with a Central Park view, white, liberal, urban, educated, pro-integration, pro-NAACP, in favor of evolutionary, nonviolent change over riots in the streets. Patience as the universal chain breaker.

The man’s personal decency is a given; I don’t see it undermined if we concede the conundrum of his record on race. He defied segregation in 1942 by helping to bring Othello to the stage with Paul Robeson in the lead, not the usual white actor in blackface. He and everyone else involved took considerable heat for it. Yet in 1953, nearly a dozen years after Othello, he’s still using racial stereotypes in his fiction on the comics page.

In that, he was hardly an outlier. That same year, 1953, John Ford’s Mogambo was a box office hit, featuring Clark Gable, Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly on the Dark Continent, a bwana bwana tale that actors wouldn’t want any part of today. The Africa generating Academy Award buzz for Mogambo was much the same Africa Falk was writing for the newspapers.

What is there to say about that, other than 70 years ago was 70 years ago.

In 2021, Peter Mwaura, the public editor at the Sunday Nation in Nairobi, Kenya, did a hit job on the Sunday strip, calling upon his newspaper to cancel it. He had been unfamiliar with the strip until a reader complained to him about it. He looked into it, insofar as he looked into it, and rested his finding of racism on a vintage story from 1955.

In a world where racism abounds there are dragons out there for the slaying, but the Phantom strip ain’t one of them and can’t be turned into one by the featherweight logic behind this column: The strip was racist in 1955; if its racism isn’t obvious today, it must be subtle.

This is an unserious argument. It’s like being beaten with a pool noodle.

And this is interesting: A column with a 1955 point to make was illustrated with Phantom art from 2018. It was a story Jeff Weigel and I had done. You don’t have to be Roland Barthes to see what’s going on there: The art is joined to an unrelated text to conflate past and present in the service of that text.

Our story, by the way, is about a tribal girl of 12 who outwits three criminals, grown men all, and finds a rather ingenious way of siccing the Phantom on them. Two of the criminals happen to be white, apropos of nothing. Nothing on the page has anything to do with their color or hers.

This is how we do it. The characters in the strip must certainly be aware of color (they do have eyes), but color doesn’t determine relationships. It has nothing to do with who’s in the right, who’s wrong, who’s treated with respect. This has been the Phantom universe from the Falk/Barry era on. Somebody higher up the ladder than Mr. Mwaura must see that on the page, because, going on three years later, the Sunday Nation still publishes the Sunday Phantom.

In 2022, this little dust-up came to my attention via the head office: We were being taken to task over the use of two words—The African—in a strip published as part of the Wrack and Ruin series.

This was in the prophecy timeline, where Old Man Mozz reveals the nom de guerre Kit Walker will be known by in the future.

My first reaction was: If Kit Walker’s not African after 21 generations in Africa, tell me what you think he is.

As for the textual argument: The reader who seizes upon two words—The African—as offensive, provocative, needless, random, disposable, racist, wrong, whatever, has missed a narrative turn that fairly jumps off the page.

To set the stage for those who came in late and are hearing it here for the first time: When Kit Walker went to the Himalayas at 15, there was but one rule—he was to guard the story of his origin!

Two of his ancestors had studied in this same Indian city, and now Kit is privileged to follow in their footsteps only because they had kept the secret.

Here we join Kit on his way to the mountain city in 2016…

In 2022, everything changes the moment we hear Mozz pronounce Kit’s future nom de guerre. We instantly know that Kit has not only broken his pledge to the 21st Phantom—but has broken it so completely, so finally, even his enemies know his story.

The character’s mind opens to the reader at that moment: If Kit’s somewhere on the frontier fighting as The African, we know he’s irretrievably separated himself from the legend. No saving opportunity can reach him. If the Phantom journeys from Africa to India to search for his son, we know he journeys in vain. If the Phantom dies in that search, we know he dies needlessly. He dies needlessly because there is no Kit Walker to be found. The African is all there is.

Non-readers, careless readers, hostile readers, dull readers, all they saw was race in Kit’s nom de guerre. What any close reader saw was a hard stop on all narrative avenues for unwinding the tale.

So that’s the kind of thing I want to get at. The early tales have historic interest, they’re worth knowing, but left unanswered in the lore—in the lore and by the lore—they only serve to arm critics who insist on making the strip all about race.

My intention is to place The Chain of 2024 as a marker between yesteryear and today, as part of my responsibility to husband this funny little enterprise into the hands of the writers and artists who will succeed us, if any.

I like to think the daily and Sunday strips, in their modern configuration, have staying power, this despite the endangered business model, that baby grand swinging in the wind up on the 18th floor, ever poised to slip its hoist. Hence the end-of-lore strategy written into the Wrack and Ruin series. Here’s hoping we never need it.

And here’s that video from last night. See you in the funny papers.

Tony DePaul, February 1, 2024, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA