The Phantom Unmasked by Kevin Patrick

The Phantom is a long-running newspaper comic strip that first appeared in the New York Journal in 1936.  He was a pulp-adventure hero who protected his jungle home while fighting piracy and crime around the world. His unique twist, at least visually, was his outfit of tights and trunks, with a domino mask to obscure his features. More than a year before the appearance of Superman, the Phantom was dressing like a superhero.

In parts of the world, people consider the Phantom to be the very first superhero. Though he persists in American newspaper pages, he has not been very popular in the U.S. in comparison to similar characters. In other part so of the world, notably Australia, Sweden and India, he is possibly the most well-known and followed comics characters. How did a middling American adventure comic become so popular overseas? Comics scholar Kevin Patrick wrote a dissertation about it, and has since turned than dissertation into his book, The Phantom Unmasked.

It started with the general popularity of newspaper comic strips in the United States. As the American market became saturated, the features syndicates that distributed comics sought to expand by marketing to foreign publishers. While they faced objections in some markets, they had the advantage of being cheap and plentiful. In addition, the American syndicates worked with local syndicates or publishers to adapt their comics to local tastes and customs. This included The Phantom.

Lee Falk, writer of the strip, conceived of a character who was likely to be popular by taking ideas from popular jungle stories and hero pulps. He noted that he took inspiration form Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes (serialize in All-Story magazine) and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. The name of the Phantom is suggested by The Shadow, one of the most popular pulp magazines. The Phantom marked his enemies with the stamp of his skull ring, similar to the signet of The Spider, who more often left his mark on a corpse than a living foe. The skull-mark itself may have been inspired by the death’s head ring of Operator 5; though that ring was loaded with an explosive charge.

Patrick traces the spread of The Phantom from the United States to overseas markets, especially Sweden, which would become a center of oversees Phantom media production, India and his homeland of Australia. While he considers the features of the strip that make it popular in these countries, he also explores the marketing and publishing practices of the features syndicates in America and abroad to show how The Phantom was a financial as well as a popular success. The Phantom Unmasked is as much a business history as it is a comics history, though the two have always fit closely together.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

Mr. America by Mark Adams

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

The Peerless Peer by Philip Jose Farmer

Why Comics? by Hilary Chute

Patrick, Kevin. The Phantom Umasked: America’s First Superhero. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017.

The Dawn of Innovation by Charles R. Morris

Over the course of the 19^th Century, the United States transformed from a frontier nation dependent on trade with former colonizing nations to a leading manufacturer and exporter of goods. Charles R. Morris describes how America accomplished this change in The Dawn of Innovation.

The forces that led to the development of an American system of manufacturing were practical and cultural. There were labor shortages, especially for skilled labor. Americans in every field were interested in mechanizing work to get it done with the people and skills available. Americans were also largely middle class, at least in their way of thinking. They had to have the means to cross the Atlantic, and once here wage pressure and the availability of resources quickly made many people middle class. The middle class valued improvement and economic independence. In the U.S. they were free from the limiting class structures of Europe.

The middle class were also consumers. They were interested in the goods and lifestyle associated with wealth, but at prices they could afford. And there were a lot more of them that the handful of rich people who were the consumers of traditional luxury goods. Americans wanted to produce, market and distribute goods on a mass scale that was hard for Europeans of the time to even imagine.

The cloth-making industry was one of the first to bring together the aspects of modern manufacturing: specialization, organization of work flow, mechanization and automation. American cloth makers took—sometimes stole—these things from the British. A leap that the Americans made, but not the British, was to apply these same concepts to all kinds of production.

The organization of work was especially helpful in the U.S., where the skilled workers needed for precision machine making were few. Morris uses the arms industry as an example of American leadership in the transformation from craft piecework to an organized workflow with uniform standards.

Morris also undertakes some myth busting. Eli Whitney is associated with first rifles—really the first manufactured goods—to have interchangeable parts, which is a hallmark of modern manufacturing. Whitney and others promised interchangeability to win contracts with the Army, but he never achieved it; it took him a while to even become a good gun maker. It took decades of work by others to achieve interchangeable parts. This was both a matter of organizing work and developing more precise machining equipment.

Morris shows how innovations accumulated over time to create American manufacturing leadership. He shows how the culture and natural environment were incubators for such development.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Gentleman Scientists by Tom Schachtman

Mayflower by Nathaniel Philbrick

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

The Society for Useful Knowledge by Jonathan Lyons

Waste and Want by Susan Strasser

Morris, Charles R. The Dawn of Innovation: The First American Industrial Revolution. New York: Public Affairs, 2012.

The Apparitionist by Peter Manseau

Photography was introduced to the United States at around the same time that a new religion was born in the nation. Spiritualism promised a connection to the dead in their realm through human mediums, and some thought photography might capture physical manifestations of spirits. Peter Manseau tells the story of the first spirit photographer in The Apparitionist.

The man who captured the first supposed spirit photograph was an amateur at the time. William Mumler thought he had made in error in cleaning the glass on which the photonegative was captured when a faint image appeared in a self-portrait he shot in 1862. He was using the photo studio owned by Hannah Stuart. The married photographer, soon to be widowed and soon after that to be Mrs. Mumler, was a Spiritualist, and she convinced him that the image was not an error, but an apparition. The photos caught the attention of the Spiritualist press, first in the New York-based Herald of Progress, then in Mumler’s hometown of Boston in the Beacon of Light, which published the address of the Stuart studio.

Soon the studio was producing many spirit photographs; they even took orders by mail from across the country. Bostonian Spiritualists compared photos and found evidence that Mumler was faking the images. Discredited, the Mumler’s moved to New York to quietly offer spirit photographs again. Their practice there let to criminal prosecution in 1869. Photographers knew of ways to produce such images, but no investigators could figure out what Mumler was doing. Though the judge gave did not suggest the photos actually captured images of spirits, he rejected the prosecution’s case because it did not adequately support the charges of fraud and similar crimes.

Even with such tepid vindication, the atmosphere in New York was too hot for the Mumlers, so they returned to Boston. Though Mumler continued to take spirit photos, he had developed a much deeper understanding of the art and science of photography. He developed a process that allowed for the direct reproduction of photos on newsprint; founded the Photo-Electrotype Company of Boston and licensed his process to companies in other cities. This allowed newspapers and magazines to less expensively reproduce images without preparing an engraving first.

Manseau also discussed the development of photography in the United States after the art was introduced here. This includes American pioneers of photography such as Samuel Morse, also inventor of the telegraph, and Civil War battlefield photographers Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope

Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson

Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Enchantress of Numbers by Jennifer Chiaverini

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

The Man Who Loved Books too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

Scan Artist by Marcia Biederman

Super Attractor by Gabrielle Bernstein

Manseau, Peter. The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Underground by Will Hunt

Will Hunt has been fascinated with underground places since his childhood discovery of an abandoned tunnel in his hometown. Perhaps abandoned isn’t quite right; Hunt found signs of occasional human occupation in the old tunnels. He pursued his interest in underground places and the way people used and experienced them around the world. He describes these experiences, and what these hidden chambers mean, in Underground.

Hunt’s explorations took him into both manmade spaces and natural caves. He retells adventures from the Paris catacombs and a trip across the city that was almost entirely underground. He entered mines and saw shrines miners created for the spirits (or monsters) that live in them, beings that are sometimes generous and sometimes dangerous. Perhaps these are relatives to the spirits, strange creatures and gods reputed to live in natural caves.

Caves and tunnels are important to varying degrees to almost all religions. Shamans, priests and philosophers have long traveled under the earth to seek insight or communication with other worlds. Hunt ties this to the hallucinations and distorted sense of time humans experience when they are deprived of sensory stimulation. He does not denigrate these experiences, but sees them as something universally human. The altered state of consciousness one might enter in the utter darkness of a cave is simply another way the mind works, and possibly the root of all religion.

People did not always understand what was underground, and we are still making discoveries. Even two centuries ago, the world under our feet was a mystery. As a fan of Missouriana, I was attracted to Hunts telling of the life John Cleves Symmes. A St. Louis-based trader and former Army officer, Symmes was a proponent of a hollow earth theory. We were not living in the inner world, but he imagined there were worlds within ours existing on a series of concentric spheres. From 1818 until his death in 1829, he traveled the country lecturing on this theory and raising money to mount an expedition. He never made that trip to inner worlds, but he was an inspiration to the authors of hollow earth stories such as Edgar Allen Poe, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Frank L. Baum.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor by Cathryn J. Prince

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kiernan

London Under by Peter Ackroyd

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

Road to the Sea by Florence Dorsey

Second Chronicles

The Water Room by Christopher Fowler

Hunt, Will. Underground: A Human History of the World Beneath Our Feet. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2018.

Investigating Lois Lane by Tim Hanley

Lois Lane is one of the most recognized names among superhero comic book characters even though she is not a superhero. The intrepid reporter made has been around for more than 80 years, and her history is recounted by Tim Hanley in Investigating Lois Lane.

Lois was not in the original Superman stories created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. As they worked and reworked the character, setting and supporting cast in an attempt to come up with something that would sell, they took inspiration or the girl reporter movies of the time to add a love interest for the man of steel. Several popular movies in the mid-1930s featured smart, tough, fast-talking, blonde female reporters such as Torchy Blane, a character that premiered in 1937’s Smart Blonde.

Schuster’s innovation was to make Lois brunette. He took inspiration from Jolan (Joanne) Kovacs, a high school student in Cleveland who advertised herself for modeling.  Schuster was apparently smitten with her—she was his model Lois, and all his other heroines resembled Lois—and they stayed in touch as she moved around the country pursuing her modeling career. They met up again in New York after World War II. He invited her to a ball—even rented a gown for her. Jerry Siegel was there, too, and she left with him. Siegel left his wife and young son to marry Kovaks.

Not only was Lois a career woman, an unusual thing when she premiered with Superman in 1938, she was also headstrong, cunning, independent and determined to become a top reporter. However, the writers of Lois’ stories were men; the first Lois Lane story written by a woman, Tasmyn O’Flynn, was published in 1982.  Though she remained a working woman, she was often depicted as a damsel in distress or a love-struck cheerleader for Superman.

Depictions of Lois changed over time as the status of women changed in American society. Sometimes she was at the forefront, as she briefly was in the women’s liberation movement during the 1970s. Other time she lagged and reflecting traditional role for women, or Superman and others shamed her unfeminine ambition. Too often she was simply a background player in Superman stories, even though she was more than able to carry a story on her own in the hands of writers who cared.

Such ups and downs will likely be Lois’ fate for a while. We can hope that she get the treatment she deserves with stories that let her shine.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer

The Caped Crusade by Glen Weldon

Comic Book Nation by Bradford W. Wright

The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics by Dennis O’Neil

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

Reading Comics by Douglas Wolk

Reckless by Chrissie Hynde

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore

Seduction of the Innocent by Max Allan Collins

Suggestible You by Erik Vance

The Supergirls by Mike Madrid

Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Why Comics? by Hilary Chute

Hanley, Tim. Investigating Lois Lane: The Turbulent History of the Daily Planet’s Ace Reporter. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014.

Comic Art in America by Stephen Becker

Cartoons did not originate in the United States, but Americans were innovative in the art, and its artists invented the newspaper comic strip and comic book. Stephen Becker wrote a survey of American comics of all types from their origins until his book was published in 1959: Comic Art in America.

Becker covers every type of cartoon in the book. Comic strips get a lot of attention because that is where a lot of the development occurred and gave rise to something distinctly American. Though comic strips are a thread throughout, Becker devotes chapters to editorial cartoons, single-panel humor and even animation.

Many of the comics Becker discusses are still published today, such as Beatle Bailey and Blondie. Others are well-known because of their former popularity or lasting influence: Krazy Kat, Terry and the Pirates, Flash Gordon. Others are largely forgotten, even if they were pioneers of their time that shaped the work of others or the popular taste. Fans of particular types of cartooning may notice omissions that seem glaring, at least in hindsight; the chapter on comic books makes no mention of Will Eisner, though perhaps his fame stems more form later work.

Of course, the intent was not to be exhaustive. It’s a single volume, not an encyclopedia. As a survey for a general audience, it works very well. At the time, it probably reminded readers of old favorites that had fallen out of print. It might introduce modern readers to those old masters for the first time. Necessarily it does not address some of the great work that came out after it was published; I suspect Becker would have been delighted by Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, as many of us are.

Becker was primarily a fiction writer. Comic Art in America is very informative, but it is not primarily an academic book. Neither does Becker come off as entirely fan-ish, though he certainly has the tone of someone who enjoys comics and finds them interesting, especially humor and editorial comics from newspapers and magazines. He mixes commentary with history and spices things up gossipy tidbits.

The book was published in a larger format to accommodate reproduction of comics that originally appeared in an even larger broadsheet newspaper. Though it has the look of a coffee table book, it is not dominated by images. The images are an accompaniment to the text. Even so, one can enjoy it for the comics reproduced in it, though many are of their time and may not make much sense without the context provided by Becker.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

American Splendor (Film)

Kirby by Mark Evanier

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

The Spirit by Darwyn Cook

Why Comics? by Hilary Chute

Becker, Stephen. Comic Art in America: A Social History of the Funnies, the Political Cartoons, Magazine Humor, Sporting Cartoons and Animated Cartoons. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959.

Metering for America by Alfred Leif

Metering for America is something you’re unlikely to see published today. It is a company history in the form of a hardback book.

I’m not especially interested in The American Meter Company. I’m a professional interested in the natural gas industry.

Author Alfred Lief gives attention to the wider gas industry throughout the book, from the early gas light companies that used gas manufactured from coal (or sometimes other things), the competition with electric lighting, expansion into gas for cooking and heating and finally the expansion of a national natural gas infrastructure.

Of course, there is plenty to be said about American Meter along the way. The second half of the book is arguably more about the company than about the gas industry in general.

Even so, I found the book fairly interesting, especially the discussions related to the development of gas up to World War I. It’s probably not of interest to a broad audience or widely available. I found my copy at a used book store in Omaha, Nebraska.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Contents Under Pressure by Sylvia F. Munson

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

Mr. America by Mark Adams

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Leif, Alfred. Metering for America: 125 Years of the Gas Industry and American Meter Company. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1961.

Unimaginable by Jeremiah H. Johnston

What would the world be like if Christ had never come and the Christian church had never been create? New Testament scholar Jeremiah J. Johnston imagines it would be a bleak place. He describes why he thinks so in Unimaginable.

Johnston contrasts the Christian worldview, and its results, with cultures where non-Christian worldviews were dominant. The first of these is the pre-Christian era, especially Greek and Roman culture in the centuries shortly before and after the ministry of Jesus Christ. The second is the 20^th Century political regimes that opposed Christian mores if not religion altogether: Nazism, Fascism and Communism. Adolf Hitler and Bonito Mussolini imagined a return to a pre-Christian, pagan age of Aryan or Roman dominance. The Communists were opposed to any religion; the state operating on behalf of the workers was the dominant force. These movements in some ways were reversions to the morals that predated Christian influence.

The gods of Greece and Rome were immoral characters who had little concern for humanity. The Caesars, god-kings, were largely selfish and self-aggrandizing. In contrast, the Christian God proclaimed His love for people. He demonstrated his benevolence in Jesus, son of God and king of kings, who lived a humble life of service and sacrifice.

Life was cheap in ancient Greek and Roman culture. For instance, babies who were diseased or deformed, or simply girls, were often abandoned to die. In contrast, Christians believed that human life was inherently valuable.

Women were not considered equal to men in pre-Christian times. In contrast, women were present at the major events in Jesus’ ministry and were often acknowledged in the New Testament for their leadership in the early church.

Women were considered of little worth in the ancient world. In addition, slavery and racism were common in the in the Greek and Roman Empires. The superiority of some people was considered plain, and it was appropriate for them to dominate, control and enslave lesser people. Jesus taught that there was no meaningful difference between races (Jews or Greeks), free men and slaves, or the sexes.

There was not religious freedom in the Roman Empire. The Jews were tolerated because of the antiquity of their religion, but others were required to worship the major Roman gods and to acknowledge the divinity of Caesar. Christians were considered atheists for their refusal to acknowledge Roman gods.

Johnston describes an opening of the door in the late 19^th Century to anti-Christian ideas and morals. Philosophers and scientists of the time such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Friederich Nietzche and Sigmund Freud were committed to a materialistic view of the world. Humans were not special creations; they were simply sophisticate animals that arrived from the same undirected happenstance that brought for every other thing without purpose. Religion and morals were inventions of people, not revelations from a higher authority.

These influencers, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, challenged Christian morals. They opened the door to devaluing human life, devaluing women (Nietche was explicit about his belief that women were inferior to men), justifying racism with science along with subjugation of “lesser” races, and the elimination of religious freedom, or even individual freedom. The likes of Hitler, Mussolini and Josef Stalin put these ideas into practice, leading to impoverishment, oppression, and death for millions of people.

Some would lay a lot of suffering at the feet of Christianity. Johnston argues that Christianity has alleviated a lot of suffering and paganism and atheism have much greater sums of human misery on their accounts.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Language of God by Francis S. Collins

Maus by Art Spiegelman

The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark

Johnston, Jeremiah H. Unimaginable: What Our World Would Be Like Without Christianity. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2017.