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| - By some counts the first costumed Superhero in comics, the Phantom was created by Lee Falk in 1936 and has been fighting evildoers on Newspaper Comics Pages around the world ever since. In Darkest Africa, in a secret valley guarded by sinister blowgun-wielding pygmies, dwells the Phantom. Immortal, implacable, foe to all evildoers, pirates especially: criminals everywhere speak in hushed whispers of the Ghost Who Walks, the Man Who Cannot Die. Except that, well, he can. And has, repeatedly. The current Phantom is the 21st of the line, continuing a tradition begun four centuries ago when his forefather washed up on a lonely African beach, the sole survivor of a pirate attack, and was nursed back to health by the sinister pygmies (who are actually quite nice once you get to know them). He is just a normal man (well, Badass Normal), with no supernatural powers (save his 'skull ring', which forever leaves its imprint on anyone he, well, punches) - but, as Batman also realised some years later, criminals are a superstitious lot, and they're much easier to beat if they're already afraid of you before you even arrive... Begun in the dawn of comics' bright and breezy Golden Age, and written by a single author for over sixty years, The Phantom is a bit of a living fossil. Representations of women and minorities have become more sophisticated, but it never really saw the appeal of becoming darker and more 'realistic'. And we love it for that.
* His Secret Identity. He doesn't have one. Each man who takes up the mantle forswears all former attachments and becomes all-Phantom, all the time, from that day forth. When he needs to walk the streets as an ordinary man, he doesn't take his superhero suit off: he puts an "ordinary man" disguise on over it. The disguise has a name, "Mr. Walker", but is otherwise a cipher; if anyone asks him about himself he changes the subject. How he negotiates airline booking desks and customs checkpoints has never been revealed.
* His canine companion, Devil. Faithful, courageous, and intelligent, in the tradition of Rin-Tin-Tin (and pre-dating Lassie), Devil scores over them in one important respect: he is actually a wolf, thus enabling a Running Gag where some official informs the Phantom (or, more usually, "Mr. Walker") that he can't bring his dog in here, and the Phantom breezes past, saying "Oh, that's all right, Devil isn't a dog..."
* The ongoing soap opera of the Phantom's relationship with Diana Palmer, whom he met, rescued, and fell in love with on his first published adventure. Unlike most superhero romances, where the hero can spend years hesitating over whether a relationship is a good idea at all, or how much he should tell her, by the end of the first story arc the Phantom had already revealed his superhero identity and offered to show Diana around his secret lair, but the course of true love does not run smooth: she thinks she's been paralysed so she calls off the relationship, he thinks she's chosen the Romantic False Lead over him so he goes back to the jungle to brood, her mother disapproves, the latest Distressed Damsel wants him for herself, lather rinse repeat, he's afraid to propose in case she says no, he's afraid to propose in case she says yes and then finds out that the Phantom's wife traditionally stays in the Skull Cave doing housewifey stuff... After forty years of this, they finally got married in 1977; the series weathered the change much better than many series do. The Phantom has a big following in Scandinavia, where he has his own comic book (Fantomen in Sweden, Fantomet in Denmark and Norway, Mustanaamio in Finland), publishing new original adventures by other hands. Members of the Fantomen talent pool have also kept the newspaper strip going since Lee Falk's death in 1999. Australia is The Phantom's other fan stronghold, with Australian sales of The Phantom (a locally-produced comic book that reprints both newspaper strip storylines and translations of Fantomen stories) reportedly being ten times those of the top-selling Marvel and DC titles. The Scandinavia-made adventures in the 1970s had frequent anti-colonialist plot-lines, in which the Phantom took on the regime of for instance a badly caricatured Rhodesia (the "Republic of Rhodia," which has since become a more conventional People's Republic of Tyranny) and where real-life characters, such as bishop Abel Muzorewa, appeared in equally thin disguises. That reflected the widespread anti-apartheid sentiments in those countries. The Phantom also enjoyed a brief stint of immense popularity in India during the 80's and 90's, and was regularly published (including collected newspaper clips) by the now-obsolete Indrajal Comics, and later, by Diamond Comics of Mumbai. Indrajal's volumes from this period, including Phantom, are now rare collector's items. Although news of the 1996 Phantom movie initially boosted sales through the roof, after the actual release itself fans were not pleased. The film seems to have been the turning point leading to the character's decline in the region, and Phantom soon went zooming down to hit rock bottom in terms of obscurity. Indrajal's bankruptcy during that period didn't help. By mid 2000s, though you could still find further issues from Moonstone, the current publisher, those were rare, too expensive due to very low sales, and new releases were few and far in between. The Phantom has been adapted for film twice. A 1943 Film Serial starred Tom Tyler as the Phantom and Ace the Wonder Dog as Devil. Better known (if not better regarded) is the 1996 film starring Billy Zane as the Phantom, Kristy Swanson as Diana Palmer and Catherine Zeta-Jones as Sala. The Phantom has also inspired an animated TV series, Phantom 2040, was one of the Defenders of the Earth, and is the subject of a recent Sy Fy miniseries.
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