The Ghost Who Walks

The Phantom always promised more than it delivered.

Created by Lee Falk, the character began as a newspaper comic strip in 1936. The Phantom was a true pulp hero, more Doc Savage than Superman, relying on his strength, smarts and two holstered handguns (and of course, he was an expert marksman) to battle evil.

Working out of a fictional country in Africa, the Phantom checked off all the boxes: cool purple costume, terrific origin story (phantoming is the family business, handed down from generation to generation since 1560 and leading to the locals thinking the Phantom immortal, calling him The Ghost Who Walks), his Skull Cave headquarters, a pet wolf named Devil and a skull ring that left a long-lasting mark on the faces of bad guys.

As newspaper comic strips began to lose some of their stronghold on popular culture storytelling in the 1960s, the Phantom moved to comic books. Gold Key owned the Phantom franchise from 1963 to 1966 and that’s where the expectation versus execution argument begins. The Gold Key issues of the Phantom sported dynamic covers painted by George Wilson, good enough that Gold Key reprinted them on the back covers minus the title and cover blurbs. But inside, the stories were never very exciting, the artwork stiff.

A typical Gold Key Phantom cover

The license was transferred over the decades to other comic book publishers with mostly negligible results. A Phantom movie was released in 1996 which I seemed to remember enjoying at the time, but I can’t recall any details.  

At a used bookstore I recently came across two Phantom novels published by Avon Books. The painted covers by the same George Wilson who did the Gold Key comics covers lured me in just as they did in 1965. Avon published 15 Phantom books from 1972 to 1975, adapted mostly from Lee Falk’s comic strip, then ghosted by sci-fi author Ron Goulart, writing as Frank S. Shawn. That’s four books a year, a difficult pace similar to the production of the old pulp novels.

As with the comic books, the novels left me feeling that this was a great missed opportunity. They have an entertaining, if shlocky pulp feel to them and seemed to have been written quickly. In The Swamp Rats (1974), the Phantom is almost a secondary character in his own book; sometimes several chapters tick by without any involvement from him, at least until the end when his heroics are needed to end things and bring the villains to justice.

The Hydra Monster (1973) isn’t a monster at all, but a crime organization similar to Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD’s nemesis Hydra, created many years earlier (including a reference to cutting off one limb and two replacing it, part of the Marvel Hydra creed). As additional evidence that these books were written very quickly, Devil the wolf plays a significant role through the first half of the book before disappearing completely.

Going into these books with low expectations feels right. They’re quick reads and if you aren’t paying too much attention, enjoyable in their own ways.