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.

Walking with God by John Eldredge

Eldredge, John. Walking with God. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008.

Walking with God is a book for Christians who want, really need, an intimate relationship with God. This is not an abstract walk, but real, daily communication with the real, living God in which we not only send up our prayers, but in which He talks to us.


This is not a how-to book. It is a series of stories, incidents and anecdotes from about a year of Eldredge’s life that are meant to illustrate what it is like to walk with God.

It’s not easy. The Christian who desires to abide in Christ will find many things that come against him. Much of it is just facing the tiring trials of being an imperfect human in a fallen world. It is also difficult be cause we have an enemy who’ll do everything he can to prevent us from having the relationship to which God is calling us. The vignettes of walking with God are also pictures of spiritual warfare.

At the beginning of the book, Eldredge breaks from the memoir format to make the case that God still talks to his people personally. It’s not a theological dissertation, but it is an argument from the Bible that makes that case that God does want to relate to us intimately and communicate to us directly. This in no way diminishes the role of the Bible, but goes hand and hand. The book presents the case that revelation and wisdom are needed to effectively hear from God.

In some of his other books, Eldredge talks about people being wounded and are in need of healing that only God can provide. In those books, he writes about inviting Jesus into those wounds, into those parts of our live and experiences where we’ve been hurt. I found it to be like getting a diagnosis without getting prescription. That may be unfair to his other books, but I thought Walking with God does a much better job of showing what it is like to bring Christ’s healing and redemptive power into the hurts of life.

Other books by John Eldredge:
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