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The Phantom, 8/18/24

A fun running bit in The Phantom is that we sometimes see original Phantom creator Lee Falk going about his day in pre-war Manhattan, musing about whatever direction the Phantom storyline is going to go in next. This can cause minor issues when it comes to suspension of disbelief, since the Phantom clearly takes place in the 21st century; I buy that Falk could’ve dreamed up plutocrats with their own private rocket companies, though independent post-colonial African states seems a bit more of a stretch. However, I have a harder time believing that our comics scribe neither keeps copies of his own strips nor subscribes to the newspapers that print them and needs help remembering plot points from a few days ago. I guess we really lost something when we replaced friendly one-man newspaper stand businesses with the Internet, although the Internet would also be happy to show Lee Falk last week’s strip, if he asked.

Panel from Slylock Fox, 8/18/24

This is in fact a repeat of a mystery that ran back in June of 2022. However, it’s been redrawn and recolored and — crucially, to establish the much worse vibes — has had dialogue added to show that Slylock has decied to dispense with even the flimsy pretense of rule of law that Forest Kingdom cops operate under and is about to dish out a brutal extrajudicial beating on his shrew nemesis.