Sometimes you luck out when you see a cool looking cover in a bargin bin and end up buying a Jim Aparo drawn issue of Charlton’s The Phantom.
This is actually some of Aparo’s earliest work, from just before he became a mainstay at DC Comics. He had actually attempted to join EC Comics in the fifties, but had been rejected and did advertising work until Dick Giordano brought him to Charlton. When Giardano moved on to DC, so did Aparo.
I’ve always had mixed feelings about Aparo’s art: I disliked much of his work in the eighties and nineties on Batman and the Outsiders and the core Batman titles. Yet his earlier work on Brave and the Bold and especially Aquaman I love, possibly because I read much of it in black and white Dutch reprints. Certainly the colouring in the deluxe Outsiders series did his art no good. Or maybe it was the improved paper quality that ill suited his artstyle. His art here is gorgeous though, with no qualifications. I like his Phantom, a bit beefier than I’m used to.
Not that I’ve read many Phantom stories. As you might know, The Phantom started out as a Lee Falk created adventure newspaper strip, about “the Ghost Who Walks”, a vigilante in a fictional African country who has been keeping the peace for centuries, withthe mantle of the Phantom being handed over from father to son for generations. He got a few serials back in the days, the inevitable radio show, a nineties blockbuster movie when Batman was the rage and Hollywood though any old pulp hero would be as big. As well as a lot of comics adaptations over the years. For some reason The Phantom was incredibly popular in Sweden and they did their own version there. Here in the Netherlands he never quite made it. There have been a few reprints of American comics over the years but that was it.
Over the years bought some of those when I found them secondhand, mainly because he was another superhero than for any intrisic interest in the Phantom as a series. The notion of a great white protector of an African country is rather old fashioned and somewhat orientalist after all. On the other hand, the idea of an unbroken lineage of superheroes 21 or 22 generations long is great. Just the setting is a bit sus…
No Comments