The Phantom fresh as ever for his 1500th adventure

From - The SMH.com.au

Julian Lewis
April 14, 2007

AUSTRALIA'S most popular comic, The Phantom, has made publishing history with the printing of the 1500th consecutive issue of the adventures of the legendary jungle ruler.

The Ghost Who Walks, introduced to Australians in 1936 in the now defunct Australian Women's Mirror, predated Batman and Superman and was the brainchild of a young Missouri-born writer, Lee Falk, who had already conceived his other great comic kingdom character, Mandrake the Magician.

Brilliantly simple in concept, the Phantom did not have superpowers but was a multi-skilled, physically impressive and well-educated crime fighter who lived in the mysterious "Deep Woods". From there, he came and went pursuing the fight for justice. His adventures ran in the Mirror without pause until it folded in 1961.

Although the Mirror issued five Phantom comic books in 1938, it was not until the postwar years that The Phantom began its assault on the world record for consecutive publishing when a Sydney company, Frew, began issuing the comics in 1948.

Frew was so unsure of the publication's potential - or market - that the first issue was given a cover price of sixpence, and was not numbered.

Frew changed Falk's original title, The Slave Traders, to Enter the Phantom. Original copies in mint condition are rare and are valued at thousands of dollars. The publisher owns only two complete Phantom collections in mint condition, and these are said to be worth well over $100,000 each.

The Phantom gained a cult following, ironically bigger in Australia and other unexpected places such as the South Pacific and Scandinavia, where there is a Phantom theme park, than in Falk's homeland, where it never reached the heights of comic superstardom.

During the past 60 years The Phantom has been published continuously in Australia. It appeared every three weeks from 1956, then fortnightly from 1959. Various special issues and numbering hiccups account for the total 1500 issues. These are now being commemorated by Frew with a special issue containing Falk's first daily and Sunday newspaper stories, one from 1936 and one from 1939.

A Phantom "encyclopedia" has also been compiled, produced jointly by Frew and a sometime Phantom story creator, the Sydney writer Jim Shepherd, who even had the Phantom journey Down Under in one adventure, meeting the then prime minister and real-life Phantom fan Bob Hawke.

Arguments about the many variations of Falk's famous character may be settled by Frew's Phantom historian, Barry Stubbersfield, who has chronicled the many writers who contributed story lines that were officially sanctioned but did not form part of Falk's official history of the 343 continuous daily and Sunday Phantom adventures on which he worked until his death in 1999, at the age of 87.

Reprints of carefully reconstructed Falk originals have been a regular highlight of Frew's publishing schedule. With the help of stories from overseas writers - and Shepherd himself on occasion - and despite the lack of new material from Falk, The Phantom still sells close to a million copies a year in Australia. Total Frew sales since 1948 are estimated at 35 million copies.

The comic that cannot die still seems to rule the genre's publishing jungle from a Skull Cave in Sydney's central business district. The No.1500 Frew special edition of The Phantom is on sale at $11.