The Phantom 2014 Special

The Phantom 2014 Special
various authors and illustrators

adventure, fantasy, comic

copyright 1946 to 1987
read in February 2015

rated 8/10: really quite good

Okay... really quite good if you're a fan of The Phantom !

Five ancient classics -- the real Phantom. Three more modern Swedish stories -- of variable quality.

I thoroughly enjoyed the classics. And was not embarrassed by the Swedish stories. A good overall result !

An interesting cover picture... Created specially for this special rather than a copy from an old comic. Overall, it's good. I like the attempt. But the Phantom himself needs to be bigger, more powerful. Good... worth doing... not perfect.

Did you notice that I categorised this as "comic" ? Not as a "graphic novel"... It's a comic. With stories from the days before comics tried to move upmarket. If you would be embarrassed to read a comic, just think of it as a book of graphic short stories :-)

Aside from the seriously ott adventures, I also enjoyed the structure of each story. These are re-published exactly as originally published. The Sunday stories were written in larger episodes. The dailies were written three images at a time.

And why did the dailies need so much repetition ? Surely there was less time to forget !? Perhaps the dailies were written in the expectation that not everyone would read the paper each and every day...?

Then there are the two witch queen adventures... One follows the other, both in writing and in historical sequence. The second story spends a lot of time retelling the first...

And how the story has changed !

Same author, four years later -- and the retelling could well be a different story !

It's not strange, just the reality of the author's purpose. The Phantom was written to entertain. It is not an historical document. Just entertainment.

And I was well and truly... entertained.

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"If he had a mind, there was something on it." PG Wodehouse, of a troubled Pongo Twistleton

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