THE PHANTOM #5, Gold Key, November 1963
I've sampled Charlton's run of The Phantom, and now we turn to the earlier version put out by Western under the Gold Key banner. The Phantom had appeared in the comics with reprints of the Lee Falk newspaper strips in David McKay's FEATURE BOOK, KING COMICS, and ACE COMICS, but Gold Key was the first to publish newly-prepared Phantom comics.
The painter of this cover is unknown to the folks at the GCD. I like it a lot, even though if you look close, you can see some sloppy shortcuts. The lighting effect on The Phantom’s captive is nicely done, and the green swamp water reminds me of my pool a week ago. The logo is way cooler than most of what Gold Key slapped on their covers (I read someone somewhere remark that Western’s logos all looked like something you’d see on toy packaging).
The inside front cover is an educational page of panels, under Gold Key’s “Keys of Knowledge” heading. It is number 7 in a series of “information features in Gold Key Comics” and the reader is encouraged to “collect the whole series for useful knowledge”. This time, the “useful knowledge” is about the Fanti Fishermen of the West African coast. I’m not sure how useful that knowledge really would have been to kids in 1963.
“The Swamp Rats” by writer Bill Harris and artist Bill Lignante is 15 pages long. It immediately introduces us to a gang of escaped convicts led by a man who is an expert at navigating through swamplands, then shift to The Phantom sneaking down the well hiding the secret entrance to Jungle Patrol Headquarters. In an awkward transition, the next page shows the Jungle Patrol, the next day, assigning two members, including a rookie, to bring them in. I suppose they wanted to show The Phantom on page 1, even though the plot didn’t call for him to do anything yet.
(Why is the Jungle Patrol all white guys? Evidently, the series’ setting of Bangalla is a British colony at this point in the lore.)
The “Swamp Rats” taunt the Patrol men, and lead the pair into trap--we get one of the terrifying scenes that haunted kids of the mid-20th century:
The gang rescues the Patrol men to work as house-servants in their hideout, and a native witness reports this development to The Phantom and to the Jungle Patrol, whose leader, Colonel Weeks, overreacts by sending 500 men (!) into the swamp with grenades to bring back the men. The Phantom, foreseeing disaster for the Patrol, sends Colonel Weeks a message, which evidently frustrates Weeks (I initially though he was insubordinately rejecting the orders of his superior, the “Commander J.P.”, but no, the Patrol bows out of the affair after receiving this unenlightening scrawl:
Back at the Swamp Rats’ camp, our two indentured servants briefly get the drop on their captors, but give up when they realize the thugs are willing to kill one of their own: “Sarge…they
can’t mean it—kill
their own man?” “Jones, in the Patrol, you learn to be logical! I think they
do mean it!” Doesn’t quite align with my meaning of “logical”, but as a computer engineer, I get pedantic about terms like that…
The Phantom and his dog, Devil, are making their way to the bad guys, and The Ghost Who Walks takes the opportunity to validate the cover scene:
The Phantom makes his way into their midst, ultimately taking the group’s leader, “Otter” at gunpoint. This stand-off is a little more difficult to resolve, since the men aren’t willing to kill their own leader, so Otter orders them to bring out the prisoners and shoot them, leading The Phantom to give up his weapon, but he still gets in some hand-to-hand with Otter, who finally realizes they are up against the legendary Phantom:
The Phantom appears to die when he’s thrown into quicksand, but escapes unobserved (Wait, is Devil still stuck in the muck back there? He disappeared after that panel!). The Phantom sneaks back to the Swamp Rats’ camp, frees the imprisoned Patrol men and tells them to hide in the bushes and start shooting at his call.
The Rats return to find many of their guns missing, along with their prisoners. The Phantom returns to beat them up, and Otter freaks out when he sees his opponent seemingly proving his reputation of being unkillable. The hidden Patrol men’s gunfire backs up The Phantom’s bluff that the Swamp Rats are surrounded, and he hands them an order of commendation:
Not a bad story, I’d say. A little padded, but it gets some credit for paying off on the cover scene, a few moderately dynamic shots of our hero punching villains (but he leaves his famous skull ring back at the cave for this adventure), and a couple of unnerving quicksand scenes. I’m one of the few kids of the 60’s who’s actually had the experience of stepping in quicksand. It wasn’t deep enough to be deadly, but my companion Lisa can tell you about the look of terror that immediately struck my face—I don’t think I’ve ever felt a sense of panic like that!
“Phan-Mail!” is the inaugural letter column, starting off with a letter from Brent Richards of Mogodore, Ohio, who suggests PHAN-MAIL! as the name for this department. Elsewhere on the page, the editor explains that this comic re-writes stories from the newspaper strip with new art by Bill Lignante. I'm not sure how much we should trust that
all of these stories are adaptations of newspaper stories, but it might be so. I'm not going to look up an exhaustive catalog of all of the strip's storylines to verify it.
Next up is King, Queen and Jack in “Rogue Elephant”. Here’s a backup feature I’d certainly never heard of. It stars a trio of white hunters in Africa: the elderly, walrus-mustached Francis Queen, the manly, virile Victor King, and the young Jack Forest. The backup began in issue 2, where Jack parachuted out of a failing airplane and landed with the experienced hunters, who took him in and trained him as a hunter. The feature concluded in issue 11, to replaced by “Safaris Into the Unknown”, which was retitled “Track Hunter”, after the name of the lead character, as of issue 13.
It's a short and simple story, with captions in first person plural. The trio are tracking a rogue elephant through thick bamboo. The bull flees at the hated scent of man, but circles back to begin stalking
them. The winds shift, and once again the humans are the hunters. They suddenly find themselves 20 yards from the animal, which charges Jack. Victor King raises his rifle and shoots the behemoth.
Examining the carcass, they discover a bullet had been lodged in the elephant’s sensitive tusk for years, and the pain had driven him mad.
“The Phantom’s Boyhood” is a 12 page look at the origins of this generation’s Phantom. We see the current Phantom’s birth:
His first word is “Phan-tom”, he’s taught the “three R’s” by his beautiful mother, grows up learning jungle life skills from the natives and firearms and hunting from his dad and, of course, the legacy to which he is heir:
Young “Kit” Walker ultimately is sent along with his native chaperone, Guran, to live with his aunt and uncle, first arriving in New York, where he shows off his already-formidable fighting skills against some rowdy sailors, then by plane to Watertown, where he will receive a civilized education:
One of the more novel aspects of The Phantom is the idea of the role being passed down from father to son, so it was probably a treat for the comics fans of 1963 to get a look at this part of the hero’s origin. Guran is not very effective as the comic relief, and doesn’t seem to be very helpful, being even more oblivious to the ways of the civilized world than Kit himself.
I don’t think I’d have registered this were it not for Mark Evanier recently discussing it in a series on his blog, but this is one of the Western Publishing comics that mandated all captions, word and thought balloons not touch the panel borders, with the word balloons rectangular with rounded edges. I also notice that the last story has no panel borders at all. I wondered if the intention here was to distinguish this story as a flashback, but glancing through later issues, some of the “Boyhood” installments have borders, others do not, and some of the “King, Queen and Jack” also lack borders. Evidently it was just something that Western did more or less at random. I remember noticing that as a kid, and that was something that turned me off of Gold Key comics (along with the sedate, old-fashioned looking art).
Gold Key’s PHANTOM is readable and competent, definitely not Jungle Junk but not a Jungle Gem. Lignante's was not the most eye-catching art, even by 1963 standards, but it's never a surprise when Western published pedestrian art--you always get the impression they didn't want to get their readers
too excited.
As was Gold Key’s policy of the time, the cover is reprinted on the back cover without the logo, trade dress, and blurbs as “The Phantom Pin-Up No. 5”. The scan I’m reviewing, though, has a bit of the Gold Key logo overlapping onto the pinup, resulting in a magenta-black-magenta strip in the upper right. That would have ruined it for me, because if there’s one thing I hate most about Gold Key comics, it’s their overabundance of magenta ink. I don’t know if there was something unique about Western’s printing presses and inks compared with the Sparta presses or Charlton’s facility, but I just didn’t see that vivid, somehow juvenile and unpleasant magenta in the comics I preferred. Perhaps DC and Marvel just (wisely) refrained from 100% magenta?
