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The Phantom, 9/28/04

Aaaaannnd to prove my point about The Phantom having different storylines during the week than it has on Sunday, here’s a weekly strip for your perusal. The Phantom is hot on the trail of one of his tigers, stolen from his private island and cooped up in an American zoo. One of the funny (not ha-ha funny) things about the Phantom is that, unlike most superheroes with dual personas, he’s in disguise in both of them. Whether he’s clad head-to-toe in skin-tight purple lycra, or wearing a mysterious yet stylish trench coat-fedora-sunglasses combo, you can never get a good look at his face. Which leads, of course, to the question of: Why? I mean, if nobody can ever see your face, then who exactly are you hiding it from? Surely if everyone’s used to seeing you in a mask, then going around in plain sight is the best disguise of all. Come on, Ghost-Who-Walks, all the other costumed crime-fighters have figured this out.

Anyway, on this adventure, you’d think the Phantom would be sneaking into the zoo at night all Phantom-stylie in a bid to free his striped buddy. Instead, he’s wandered into the zoo after hours, offering cryptic answers to legitimate questions from the staff. (I bet most zoo-keepers get really peeved when they have their book-learnin’ questioned.) Fortunately, this zoo is run by indulgent types who apparently enjoy, or at least tolerate, the vague prattling of mysterious strangers.

Extra credit question: Can anyone really say “?!” Because people in The Phantom say it a lot. Eternal glory goes to whoever can explain to me how to pronounce it. My guess is a sort of “mmmmmmmmOOOMP!”

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The Phantom, 9/26/04

All right, The Phantom, you’re on pretty thin racial-sensitivity ice already, you hear? It’s bad enough to have lovable African sidekick Guran go around topless, wear that primitive necklace and that ludicrous hat, and, well, be named “Guran”; but I defy anyone who was watching TV in the first half of the 1980s to not read Guran’s dialogue in the lower middle panel as a Gary Coleman-style “Say WHAAAT?”

Or maybe it’s just me.

Odd fact about The Phantom: because it’s not carried on Sunday in all papers, there are entirely different storylines going on in the daily and Sunday strips. This can be a bit confusing at first, but it certainly makes for more action than the Mary Worth solution to this problem, which is to spend all day Monday and Tuesday recapping what happened on Sunday.

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The Phantom, 7/31/04

The Phantom is one of those strips that, it strikes me, was created in significantly less politically correct times, and is desperately trying to make up for it now. After all, it revolves around a benevolent white man protecting the dark-skinned, half-naked, ludicrous-straw-hat-wearing, pidgin-spouting natives of the amusingly named African nation of Bangalla. It’s the sort of comic strip that Rudyard Kipling might have come up with, if he had known about the wonders of form-fitting spandex. Of course, today Bangalla is an independent democracy, with a capital city full gleaming, modern buildings, and a suit-wearing president with the admittedly unfortunate name of Lambada (“the forbidden dance!”) Luaga. (If the current Sunday storyline is to be believed, Bangalla has a thoroughly modern relationship with the U.S. military-industrial complex; I’ll bet President Luaga isn’t so pleased that his old friend has decided to borrow his multi-million dollar missile cruiser for his own purposes.)

Anyway, in the current weekly series, the Phantom is kicking ass and taking names not in Africa but in his wife’s native United States. And while portraying one of the strip’s African villains like a Planet of the Apes extra would probably cross a line that the strip is already too close to, I suppose it’s OK that the leader of this band of evil rednecks looks uncannily like the majestic mountain gorilla, or maybe Ernest Borgnine.

One of the things I like about the Phantom is that his origins lie in an earlier, pre-Superman era of comic book heroes. Although he is highly skilled in both fisticuffs and gunplay, he has no actual superpowers as such, though the melty word balloons in this strip imply that he has the power to make his voice super scary.

Bonus observation: Our redneck posse includes a member of America’s diminishing but still-proud suspender-wearing community.