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.

Depreciation Systems by Frank K. Wolf & W. Chester Fitch

Depreciation System, by engineering professors Frank K. Wolf and W. Chester Fitch, describes methods for estimating depreciation for utilities. Rates of regulated public utilities are usually based on balancing the public need for affordable rates with then investor’s need for a reasonable rate of return. While it is only one factor in setting utility rates, a reasonable accounting of depreciation is needed to determine the rate base and assure that the capital of the investors is recovered.

Depreciation can be estimated in several way, some more practicable and popular than others. Wolf and Fitch present these methods in a systematic and orderly fashion. They present a system of classification by which methods can be compared or contrasted using a handful of more basic concepts or methods. This permits them to be thorough, though the result is sometimes tedious. Fortunately, they do not give equal attention to every possible combination of elements because some are not used or are not very workable.

Some of the methods they describe have been in use for more than a century, but the book was written in the early 1990s, so the authors assume the readers will be using computers. Because this is mostly a matter of spreadsheets, the computerized calculation methods hold up even after 20 years. However, depreciation methods do not change rapidly; many depreciation professionals are still using software that was developed in the mid-1980s, which is still considered current (at least from a methodological point of view).

Like most references or textbooks, this does not make for interesting reading. I undertook the task for professional reasons. It is a good reference, though. In some cases it may be a little too complicated for someone new to the profession. In general, the authors try to focus more on the concept than the more complex details (you can’t write a reference that prescribes a solution to every problem a depreciation professional might face), while still presenting thorough descriptions, with examples, of the major methods in use.

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

Public Utility Depreciation by NARUC

Wolf, Frank K., & W. Chester Fitch. Depreciation Systems. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1994.