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

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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 Big Roads by Earl Swift

Swift, Earl.  The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

The American interstate system is often thought to be a product of the Eisenhower administration.  It’s named for him.  However, the nearly 47,000 miles of interstate were conceived largely before Eisenhower’s presidency.  Even as he observed the Army’s 62-day, cross-country convoy of 1919, engineers were laying the political and technical foundations of national highways.  Earl Swift tells this longer history of the interstates in The Big Roads.

When Americans began calling for better roads, the typical road was mud.  The loudest calls for better roads at the beginning of the 20^th Century were cyclists, especially the colorful Carl Fisher.  Fisher’s most famous work is the Indianapolis Speedway, where a popular 500-mile race continues to be run.  His promotion of the Lincoln Highway, the first coast-to-coast highway (at least on paper), provided an important antecedent to the interstates.

The Lincoln Highway Association operated on a system that informed later highway development.  Rather than build a huge new highway, it selected existing roads for improvement, joining them together in a highway.  New roads were built only if necessary.  The association, a private organization that raised private funds for road improvement and route promotion, was a model for later systems in another way.  The Lincoln Highway was built and improved in pieces by a number of local and state agencies.  The association provided a route, coordination, promotion, encouragement, and sometimes funding, but the road improvements were mostly local works.

Thomas MacDonald, an Iowa highway engineer, was using a similar model as he worked for that state.  He worked with city and county road departments to coordinate improvements leading to a statewide system of decent roads.  When he became director of the Office of Public Roads, he brought this model to the federal highway program, institutionalizing it in the Federal Aid system that began in 1916.

Of course, the U.S. highways that developed under this system were not like modern interstates.  They were open to anyone along them.  In rural areas, they might have been and often still are long ribbons of pavement crossed by the occasional farm road.  In cities, they became crowded with business, especially restaurants and gas stations, that slowed traffic to a crawl.  This problems gave rise to the concept of a limited-access highway, first proposed by Benton MacKaye, the conservationist who conceived the Appalachian Trail.

MacDonald and his engineers began working the concept.  His office produced a report, authored primarily by Hubert Sinclair Fairbanks, that laid out most of the current interstate system in 1938.  Fairbanks supported that idea that better roads might solve problems related to slums and blight in cities.  The recommendations of this report and a follow-up commission were largely implemented in law in 1944, when the term “interstate” first appeared in legislation.

The plans for an interstate system languished during World War II and the years immediately following.  Eisenhower comes into the picture at this time because he strongly supported funding for the interstate system.

Highway engineers saw themselves as providing a good and giving the people what they wanted.  Along the way, as Fairbanks suggested, they could clean up the cities.  As they began to implement their plans in earnest, opposition arose.

Swift gives particular attention to two interstate opponents.  Critic Lewis Mumford provided the intellectual and philosophical foundation for the Freeway Revolt.  Joe Wiles, a black professional and veteran, organized opposition to Interstate 70 in Baltimore which resulted in changes to the plan and help unite the white and black communities in that city.  The federal and state governments began to take seriously the possibility that interstates could have a negative impact on the communities near them

The intestate system, finally completed in the 1990s, is the largest public works project in history.  Now that it is built, it needs to be maintained.  It will be expensive: $225 billion a year for the next 50 years to keep it in good shape.  That is more than twice what we’re spending.  In addition, improved fuel efficiency and reduced driving prompted by the economic downturn has reduced gas tax revenues for the Highway Trust Fund.  In the near future, we may need to find new ways to pay for maintaining our transportation marvel.

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

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

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Road to the Sea by Florence Dorsey

James B. Eads was a prominent 19^th Century civil engineer who was based in St. Louis most of his long career. The mark of his work can still be found on the Mississippi River more than a century after his death in 1887. Florence Dorsey’s 1947 biography, Road to the Sea, recounts his life and accomplishments.

Eads came to St. Louis with his family in 1833 at the age of 13. They were coming by river from Louisville, Kentucky, to set up shop in greener pastures ahead of his father, Col. Thomas Clark Eads, who moved westward from one failed venture to the next. The ship that carried them caught fire just as they arrived in St. Louis and all their possessions burned up with it.

The family needed the support of the enterprising boy, so he had no opportunity to go to school. He read voraciously, though, borrowing books from an employer, Barret Williams, whose collection included many books on scientific and mechanical subjects.

Eads decided to stay in St. Louis when his family moved upriver to Iowa. He was on his own at age 17, but maturing into a man who would have success as an engineer, businessman and builder.

Eads career began to flourish when, at age 22, he designed and had built a boat with a diving bell. He eventually launched a fleet of bell boats that supported his salvage business. He salvaged wrecks and cargo from the Mississippi and its tributaries. He spent a lot of time in the river and began to know it very well.

By the time the Civil War broke out he had retired from salvaging and enjoying his wealth, but he risked his own fortune to secure the Mississippi River for the Union. He built ironclad gunboats to guard the river and attack Confederate fortifications. America’s military leaders weren’t sure what to make of them at first, but as the war progressed his ships were in great demand.

Eads found it frustrating to deal with Washington politicking and bureaucracy, especially in the U.S. Army. In his post-war endeavors he regularly had opposition from the Army Corps of Engineers and its chief, Andrew A. Humphreys.

These ventures were daring feats of engineering that were aimed at improving the commerce of the Mississippi valley. He built the world’s first steel arch bridge at St. Louis that would connect the city to the east by railroad (and got soaked by his contractor, Andrew Carnegie, while he was at it). He opened a route through the mud at the mouth of the Mississippi River that gave passage from the middle of the country to the ocean and helped make New Orleans a major port. In both these efforts he faced opposition and meddling from the Corp of Engineers.

In his last days he proposed to build a railroad across Mexico’s Tehuantepec isthmus to permit shorter passage from the Atlantic (i.e., the Mississippi) to the Pacific Ocean. His proposal was a serious alternative to Ferdinand de Lesseps’ Panama Canal. Though others took up the cause, Eads’ ship railroad proposal practically died with him. The Panama Canal didn’t fare much better at the time; the United States didn’t take over the project until 1904 and it didn’t open until 1914, de Lesseps’ plan for a tide-level canal with no locks having been abandoned.

As an engineer and Missourian, I’m fascinated by Eads and his extraordinary career.  I would recommend Dorsey’s book to anyone looking for an interesting and little-known bit of history.

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

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

The Great Bridge by David McCollough 

Katy Depot Historic Site edited by Deborah Biermann

Miss Mizzou by J. B. Winter

On the Mainlines by William B. Claycomb

Rising Tide by James M. Barry

Steam by Andrea Sutcliffe 

Dorsey, Florence. Road to the Sea: The Story of James B. Eads and the Mississippi River. New York: Rinehart & Company, 1947.