The Phantom - The Complete King Years!

Of all of the King Comics hero books, The Phantom was arguably the most consistent. That consistency didn't necessarily rise to greatness, but there was a modicum of quality issue in and issue out. The reason was artist Bill Lignante, a seasoned talent who had broached the Phantom on the strip itself after the passing of Wilson McCoy. When it was decided Sy Barry would take the helm of the venerable strip Lignante was shifted over to the comics. The comic books were then being published by Gold Key and underneath outstanding dramatic covers by George Wilson Linante's efforts were quite good. But then in the middle of the decade King decided they wanted to try and do comic books and took all of their characters then in comics and created their own brand. 

The eighteenth issue, the first of the King Comics issues, the work was decent but hardly stunning. To replace George Wilson, Sy Barry art was used for the covers. The Phantom had been involved in a range of stories at Gold Key, but it seems with his arrival at King the stories took on a smaller scope with nearly everything happening in or around the Deep Woods. "The Treasure of Skull Cave" is the debut King Comics tale and features some thieves who hear about a rumored trove in the Phantom's lair and plot to get access to it. There is much scheming but in-the-end, treasure can be defined a number of ways they discovered. 

There are of course some exceptions, but the Phantom of the King Comics era spent his time battling river pirates and smugglers and such and sadly few of these villains were all that memorable. "The Astronaut and the Pirates" has the Ghost Who Walks attempting to save a space man kidnapped by some scallywags. A second story titled "The Masked Emissary" acts as an official agent of the United Nations to bring down a wannabe dictator. 

One truly memorable aspect of the King Comics run was the debut in comic book form of the "The Girl Phantom". This was a rather silly story at its heart, but certainly one that made attempts to broaden the demographics of the strip. The Phantom of an earlier time, one hundred years or so, had a sister named Julie and when he was wounded for a protracted time, she took it upon herself to put on the mantle and act in his place despite the basic fact that no one ever thought she was actually the Phantom. "The Invisible Demon" pits the Phantom against Dr. Krazz, the agent of the underworld "Mytors" who give him strange powers so they can eventually come up and take over the surface world. 

One thing about the King year of 1966 was the new cover regime. Art was repurposed for the covers, sometimes quite effectively as seen above and in the several covers just below by Sy Barry. "The Treasure of Bengali Bay" has the Phantom battle another seeming haunt named "The Cutlass" who is keeping natives from getting a ship's sunken treasure so that wealth can be used to build a needed hospital. "The Terror Tiger" is about an Indian prince who trains a tiger specifically to hate and attack the Phantom. The Phantom must use a special knife with a strange secret to survive. 

"The Secret of Magic Mountain" gives us the story of a scheming witch doctor who uses a strange legend to gain power and pit himself and his tribe against the Phantom. They don't come out on top, as you'd likely already imagine. But this one is a two-part tale and it's all the Phantom can do to defeat this enemy fueled by superstition. 

In the story "Delilah" a woman of that name and her gang plot to pretend to be agents of the Peace Corps so they can gain access to the Phantom's treasure and plunder all of Bengali. Despite the use of a strange submarine designed to resemble an enormous crocodile their scheming still falls short in this two-part tale. 

We are treated to another tale of the Girl Phantom from Phantom lore as she takes on a strange and truly deadly witch of the dark caves trying to gain control of the local tribes. The Girl Phantom's name is Julie and she is assisted this time by native companion Maru who wears a cunning leopard pelt and her pet leopard named Fury. Another two-parter, these longer Phantom yarns are quite entertaining. 

As with all of the runs from King, the wheels slowly felt like they were coming off a bit as sales ended up putting the series into the famous plastic bags three a time. Another indicator is a different artist on the twenty-fifth issue. Senio Pratesi gives us another version of the Phantom in this story titled "The Cold Fire Worshippers" in which two gangs work together to enslave a tribe to get their diamonds. This is a reprint of an Italian story and there are some plot elements already underway when we begin this one. 

But still and all good stuff was being produced such as my favorite Phantom cover from the run seen above. "The Lost City of Yiango" sees the return of Bill Lignanate and once again the Phantom is working overtime to keep the trust of the local tribes when an idol in his keeping turns out to be a fake. The switch happened a generation earlier with is dad, but still our Phantom must find a solution. "The Pearl Raiders" sees the Phantom take on a disguise to find the thieves who have made off with the Black Pearl of Bengali. 

The Phantom was never bad in any real sense while King Features guided its destiny, but alas neither did it rise up and distinguish itself in any particular way. But they forged ahead with the origin of the Phantom's trusty steed in "The Story of Hero". Actually, Hero is hardly in this yarn after he saves Diana Palmer, and we learn what mission concerning the kidnapping of a royal heir the Phantom undertook which upon its success saw him gifted the valiant horse. 

The King Comics Phantom run ends with issue twenty-eight and the story "Diana's Deadly Tour" in which the lovely Miss Palmer finds herself the unknowing aid to spies trying to smuggle out secret rocket plans. "The Big Fight" wraps up the issue when the vain boxing champ gets humbled by the Ghost Who Walks. This is a good place to remind you that the covers of the King books didn't have much to do with the interiors. But some of them are quite dramatic. 

We also get four four-page Phantom stories used as back-ups in the pages of the first four issues of Mandrake the Magician. The stories are "SOS Phantom" about jungle drums used to save the day, "The River Pirates" where those same drums bring to justice some easily spooked villains, "The Magic Ivory Cage" bout just that which is used to try and capture the Phantom, and "The Girl Phanton" in which Julie uses her wits to stop a local slaver. All of these tales are drawn by Bill Lignante. 

These are good Phantom stories, perfectly fine, but not great ones for the most part. That would come later of all places at Charlton Comics. More on that next time. 

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Meet The Man Who Hated Laughter!

I am constantly amazed at what I uncover on the vast undiscovered country which is the internet. Popeye Meets The Man Who Hated Laughter was originally a TV movie of the week which offered up no less than most if not all of the famous King Features characters in one adventure.

Popeye is the captain of a cruise ship named "Hilarious" which takes the King Features funnies ( the casts of Popeye, Blondie, Snuffy Smith, Beetle Bailey, Tiger, Henry, Lil Iodine, Katzenjammer Kids, and more) on a vacation in the South Seas where they run afoul of an evil scientist assisted by Brutus who plots to eliminate laughter by ridding the world of comic characters.

Meanwhile Phantom, Mandrake, Lothar, Flash Gordon, and Steve Canyon work diligently to save their comic page comrades.

Even Prince Valiant shows up for a cameo. It's a wild brew of misadventure meant clearly to advertise as well as divert. It is a completely weirdo outing which turns out to be more entertaining than I imagined since it seems to have a rather ironic attitude toward its subject matter.

This earliest adventure of the "Defenders of the Earth" plus many is not available on DVD. More's the pity. To encounter this oddity, follow this link to YouTube.

It's a gem...of sorts.

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The Saturday Serials - Mandrake The Magician!

Mandrake the Magician is not one of the strongest serials every made, that's for sure. By the time of this serial, the formula for a serial was so ingrained that often the format overcame the specific details of the source material. That's certainly true in this one as for a show called Mandrake the Magician there is precious little magic, even of the hypnotic type that dominated most Mandrake outings. And then there's the hat, the problematic top hat once again meets an early demise and is replaced with standard head gear used by many an serial action hero. And finally there's the mustache, in that there is no mustache. Why they bothered to adapt such a well-known character and then proceed to ignore almost all of the visual details that defined him is beyond me, but it put me in a unimpressed mood as I watched the show which on its own ain't all that bad, though terribly generic.

Warren Hull is Mandrake in this show and he's okay, a capable enough actor with sufficient charisma to hold your attention, but most of the show you would be forgiven if you didn't realize he was Mandrake. Al Kikume as Lothar is an interesting choice, as it does avoid some of the more uncomfortable racial overtones, at least the more potent ones. Again I have to say, the story is such that poor Lothar has relatively little to do aside from helping out in the fisticuffs a few times. The other actors in the movie are perfectly adequate to the task at hand, sadly that task was not as well defined by the producers and directors as it might've been.

All in all Mandrake the Magician is a serial that is a dandy for folks who are fans of serials in general, but Mandrake fans might be disappointed. There has been some serious surgery done to this movie's soundtrack also and the version I saw offered up some pretty indifferent replacements on sections where the sound was missing. In fact I'd have to say that lack of quality made the original elements more impressive by comparison. 

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Marvel Selects - Mandrake The Magician!

How and why Marvel began to publish King Features material in the middle of the 90's is elusive. The properties had bounced around over the decades from Gold Key, King, Charlton and most recently to DC. In only the King Comics iteration was there produced a Mandrake the Magician comic book. Both the Phantom and Flash Gordon got reasonably heavy development in the Silver and Bronze Age comic books but rarely did Mandrake the Magician.

Maybe the concept of a magician and his noble savage assistant roaming the landscape helping the needy and solving both mysteries and crime was deemed old fashioned. Perhaps the very idea of a white man assisted by a black man was too touchy a pairing in the years of the growth of civil rights for minorities. But I think it was the hat.

Mandrake the Magician was as stage act, and so he sported a tuxedo along with a shiny top hat. Somewhere in the latter years of the Silver Age younger artists lost the power to properly draw hats. Before that time a hat on a man was such a commonplace that every working comic artist was facile with the depiction, but as the 60's whirled on the wearing of hats was all but finished with. So with no immediate models artists lost the skill. Drawing a hat in such a way as to convincingly suggest its firmly on a noggin is deceptively difficult and like drawing horses, it ain't for everyone.

For some proof of my hat theory I put for the two issues of Mandrake published under the Marvel Selects brand in 1995. Mandrake ain't got no hat. Despite the painted artwork on this series, we get no hat nor a tuxedo really. This is a Mandrake for a new age, a Mandrake who is hip and modern, a Mandrake without a hat. Sadly it's also a Mandrake story without an ending.

In this fully-painted comic book yarn Mandrake is chasing after a scroll (one of many) found in a Mayan temple which seems to give the baddies some power. A cat named the "Black Wizard" leads a gang which steals the gem and leads Mandrake and the woman who found the gem originally on a chase to a land called "Theruga" ruled over by a vintage Mandrake nemesis named "Octon". In the first chapter Mandrake gets the most attention and in the second Lothar shows up and is far from the stereotyped sidekick he'd been before. As a king he is able to bring both tech and troops to the battle. The story ends on a cliffhanger and sadly is never finished to my knowledge. Two of three issues published and the third lost in the mists of time. A particularly bad outcome for Marvel in a particularly bad time for the company.

They did much better with the other King Features characters as we'll see tomorrow when The Phantom is selected...almost.

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King Comics - Mandrake The Magician Part Two!

Now Hermes Press has done some yeoman work in getting the vintage Lee Falk strips The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician back into print. But it doesn't come cheaply to have them since Hermes saw fit to make two Mandrake volumes, each at fifty bucks. And on that they padded the second tome with a Dell Mandrake comic. Glad to have it, but clearly all of the Mandrake run could've been put between two covers. That said the books in this volume show the decline of the series.

I've always liked this Mandrake cover because it looks like nothing so much as the mighty Magician is suffering a massive headache. Still this drawing by Fred Fredericks does make you curious about the insides which are by the team of Gary Poole on script and Ray Bailey on art. It's solid if not exceptional stuff.

Lothar is featured in the next issue which has a dandy Fredericks cover. Bailey is again on the art, at least part of it and Poole delivers a story which takes Mandrakes loyal comrade back to his roots. Lothar is a king of his people but being one in absentia can create all sorts of issues. Lothar is a complicated element of the Mandrake saga, a respected black man who nonetheless is saddled with broken English dialogue and a somewhat ridiculous hat. I noticed that in the first issue of the series Don Heck dispensed with the fez on the cover at least.

Next is my favorite Mandrake cover. The outsides though are handsome but the interiors are getting ramshackle at best. European stories are being repurposed here and the art looks pretty strained.

Things go from bad to worse in the next issue with the artwork suffering profoundly from being repurposed. The plot makes little sense and has aliens, some who resemble Prince Valiant and some who look like Clayface.

In the final King Comic's Mandrake the main story improves somewhat with the return of Poole and Bailey and featuring a tiny tale of a haunted hotel. But there's little of Mandrake in this issue. Brick Bradford, the regular back up takes a few pages and Rip Kirby sucks up as much space as Mandrake. This is the end of the series and it ended with a whimper.

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King Comics - Mandrake The Magician Part One!

Of the "Big Three" from King Features, Mandrake the Magician has had the most lackluster comic book history. Reprints of the strip appeared regularly, but new material just for comic books didn't happen until a single appearance in a Dell Four Color issue. It wasn't until King Comics became an entity that Mandrake got a comic book series to call his own.

The first issue has always been a desirable for me because it featured the artwork of Don Heck, one of the stalwarts of Marvel in the most magical of eras for that company. In the debut issue Heck's artwork is pretty subdued, and he's at his best on the cover which features some nifty overlay effects. But aside from some back up stories in the pages of  The Phantom this is all the work that Heck did.

Dick Wood who had written the debut issue stays on board but after Heck's departure Andre LeBlanc takes the artistic helm. He had inked the first issue.

LeBlanc stays on board for a few more issues. The adventures are decidedly humdrum with Mandrake, as always decked out in his definitive top hat and cape stage costume roams both city and dale finding troubled folks and mild mysteries which require intervention.

The problem with these stories is that Mandrake the Magician rarely uses any magic. He's a hypnotist first and foremost but the events of the series rarely give him a chance to apply that skill and he demonstrates no other magical talents.

By the final issue of this first collection from Hermes, Gary Poole has taken the writing helm and Ray Bailey brings a decidedly Caniff-like style to the doings. Despite riotously funny covers such as the one above (perhaps my favorite in the whole King Comics run) the stories fall on the side of blase.

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The King Comics Gambit!

King Features had some of the most popular characters in all of the funny pages and always seemed eager to find new venues for their heroes and such in which to prosper. But despite the huge popularity of Flash Gordon, Mandrake the Magician and The Phantom, only the latter had found any significant footing in the comic book realm. Flash had a few runs at Dell and Mandrake had been featured in a single self-titled comic for the same outfit. They'd had plenty of their comic strip adventures reprinted here and there and about, but getting new talent to create new stories for just the comic book market had not been a success nor perhaps a priority. The Phantom had scored overseas and had found a niche at Gold Key but little beyond that. 

Then the Batman TV show made comic books and costumed heroes all the rage and everyone wanted a taste in that white-hot year of 1966. King Features I guess felt that they might be able to merchandise their heroes better than others had been able to do and so in the heat of the fad "King Comics" was born. Brand new adventures of Flash Gordon, Mandrake and The Phantom hit the stands along with some of the funny stuff such as Popeye, Blondie and Beetle Bailey. Before it was over in 1967 even King hard luck hero Jungle Jim rated a single issue, though it was a reprint of a vintage Dell outing. 

But it didn't last. One year and out was the record, then the properties began to find homes in other homes, specifically Charlton Comics. But that's another story. 

For one year King Comics existed to sell its own and they did it on the newsstands and later in plastic bag featuring three comics for less that three dimes. They struggled with content, resorting to reprints at times, but even so there were some might awesome stories told in that year. This week I want to take a glance at that "Kingly" year. 

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Kings Cross!

I swore off Dynamite's bizarre adaptation of the King Features characters after the last series which was light on story and exceedingly indifferent if not weak on art. The whole magilla felt like a lot of fluff with little or no pay off, and what emotional involvement was planned was squandered by shoddy execution. So I said no more. But then I saw the ads for Kings Cross which operates under the Flash Gordon title. Written by Jeff Parker (my favorite modern writer) and drawn by Jesse Hamm, this series seemed to be a throwback, a flavorful classic.

As our heroes are back on Earth after their last excursion onto Mongo, they are suddenly confronted with Ming the Merciless's latest scheme, the use a network of teleportation portals to transport an entire chunk of Mongo into the Pacific Ocean (creating earthquakes and tidal waves of course). The heroes (Flash Gordon, Dale Arden, Hans Zarkov, Lothar the Phantom, the girl Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, Prince Valiant and the plant king Jungle Jim) gather and go to check out the threat and end defacto on Mongo again fighing again Ming's animal-men hordes.

What makes this one work for me is the artwork by Hamm, which reminded me very much of the best of Ernie Colon. The characters have a light touch but stop just short of being too humorous. To get  a sense of what Hamm does with these characters take a glance at the cover gallery below.

As much as it surprises me to say this, I actually recommend this one.

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Mandrake The Magician - King Me!

One thing I have learned after years of dealing with Hermes Press is not to get in a hurry. The proposed publication dates for their collections are never accurate and usually off by several months if not years. Such was the case with the second Mandrake the Magician volume which reprinted the last of the King Comics renditions of the character from the later 60's. It's nice to finally have all of this King Comics material available in easy-to-read formats. Admittedly the volume is pretty highly priced relative to other tomes of its kind. Getting all the Mandrake stuff in one volume would've been prodigious but two volumes makes for two somewhat skimpy ones. Along with the final five issues of King's ten issue run we get the earlier 1956 Four Color outing from Dell Comics. Of all of the King Features characters, Mandrake has had the least success in the comic book world. His top hat and tails look has become a cliche and Lothar is a problem of course, at least visually.  But I'm glad to finally have the whole run, and maybe later I'll find time to sit down and read them all.

Here are the covers of the issues contained in this second volume.

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