Pulp magazines (or pulp fiction; often referred to as “the pulps”) were inexpensive fiction magazines. They were widely published from the 1920s through the 1950s.

The name “pulp” comes from the cheap wood pulp paper on which such magazines were printed. Magazines printed on better paper and usually offering family-oriented content were often called “glossies” or “slicks”. Pulps were the successor to the “penny dreadfuls”, “dime novels”, and short fiction magazines of the nineteenth century.

penny dreadfuls

Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines are perhaps best remembered for their lurid and exploitative stories, and for their similarly sensational cover art.

pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters such as the Shadow, Doc Savage, and the Phantom Detective. However the pulps were aimed more at adult readers whereas comic books were traditionally written for children and adolescents.

Pulp covers, printed in color on higher-quality (slick) paper, were famous for their half-dressed damsels in distress, usually awaiting a rescuing hero. Read the rest of this entry »

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before Superman and Batman there was

The Phantom

the very first and true costumed super hero (Crime Fighter)

The Phantom is an adventure comic strip created by Lee Falk. it stars a costumed crimefighter operating in the jungles of Africa. Falk originally envisioned the Phantom’s alias as rich playboy Jimmy Wells, fighting crime by night as the mysterious Phantom, but halfway through his first story, “The Singh Brotherhood”, he moved the Phantom to the jungle. He had tweaked with the idea of calling his hero The Gray Ghost after thinking there were already too many Phantoms in fiction, such as The Phantom Detective and The Phantom of the Opera. But he could ultimately not come up with a name more suiting than The Phantom

Falk’s lifelong fascination with such myths and legends as that of El Cid and King Arthur, and such modern fictional characters as Zorro, Tarzan, and The Jungle Book ‘s Mowgli,

Zorro

el Cid

Tarzan

help shape the vision of the ghost who walks.

The story of the Phantom started with a young sailor named Christopher Walker (sometimes called Christopher Standish in certain versions of the story). Christopher was born in 1516 in Portsmouth. His father, also named Christopher Walker, had been a seaman since he was a young boy, and was the cabin boy on Christopher Columbus’s ship Santa María when he sailed to the Americas.

Christopher Jr. became a shipboy on his father’s ship in 1526, of which Christopher Sr. was Captain.

In 1536, when Christopher was 20 years old, he was a part of what was supposed to be his father’s last voyage. On February 17, the ship was attacked by pirates of the Singh Brotherhood in a bay on the coast of Bengalla. The last thing Christopher saw before he fell unconscious and fell to the sea was his father being murdered by the leader of the pirates. Both ships exploded, making Christopher the sole survivor of the attack.

Christopher was washed ashore on a Bengalla beach, seemingly half dead. He was found by pygmies of the Bandar tribe, who nursed him and took care of him.

A time later, Christopher took a walk on the same beach, and found a dead body there, whom he recognized as the pirate who killed his father. He allowed the vultures flying around the body to eat its meat, took up the skull of the killer, raised it above his head, and swore an oath: “I swear to devote my life to the destruction of piracy, greed, cruelty, and injustice, in all their forms! My sons and their sons, shall follow me”.

After learning the language of the Bandar tribe, Christopher found out that they were slaves of the Wasaka, a tribe consisting of what the Bandars called “giants”. The Bandars who had found him was only a small group of people who had managed to escape from the village of the Wasaka. Immediately, Christopher walked into the village of the Wasaka, and asked them to set the Bandars free. He was taken prisoner, and laid before the Demon God of the Wasaka, Uzuki, who was supposed to decide his destiny. Christopher was tied up and laid on an altar made of stone, where vultures surrounded him, the Wasaka allowing them to eat him. Christopher was quickly saved by a group of Bandar before the vultures or the Wasaka could do him any real harm. They managed to escape from the village of the Wasaka unharmed.

Christopher later learned about an ancient Bandar legend about a man coming from the ocean to save them from their slavery. He made a costume inspired by the look of the Demon God of the Wasaka, and went to the Wasaka village again, this time with a small army of Bandar armed with their newly discovered extremely poisoned arrows, capable of killing a man in a few seconds. The Wasaka, shocked at seeing what many of them thought was their Demon God come alive, were fought down, and the Bandars were finally set free, after centuries in slavery. This resulted in a dedicated friendship between Christopher and the Bandars, which would be brought on to the generations to come after them.

The Bandars showed Christopher to a cave, which resembled the look of a human skull. Christopher later carved it out to make it look even more like a skull. This Skull Cave became his home.

Wearing the costume based on the Demon God, Christopher became the first of what would later be known as the Phantom. When he died, his son took over for him; when the 2nd Phantom died, his son took over. So it would go on through the centuries, causing people to believe that the Phantom was immortal, giving him nicknames as “The Ghost Who Walks” and “The Man Who Cannot Die”.

unlike other costumed heroes the phantom did grow old and die, and was replaced by his son and so on. this is very different then the mordern comic superhero who has the ability to live forever.

also the simulatries of the Batman and the Phantom are quite close right down to the costume that strikes fear into the hearts of their enimies. the cave, the skull cave and the bat cave. also the fact that their fathers where killed and they seek to avange the deaths

Lee Falk once said that ,

the phantom was suppose to be in a red costume

but due to a printing error he was turned purple.

Throughout the publishing history of the Phantom however, various comic book publishers have taken tremendous licence regarding the color of his uniform. For example, the color was red in France, Italy, Spain and Brazil, almost a bluish-silver during the early years in Scandinavia and a yellowish-brown in New Zealand.

this next section was taken from the kings feature site

Before Batman, before The Shadow, before The Green Hornet, before The Lone Ranger, the comics’ first masked mystery-man hero had long since been striking fear into the dark hearts of the wicked.

Indeed, by the time the world-famous adventures of The Phantom were first recorded in print more than six decades ago, the grim champion of justice had already been around for nearly 400 years.

Such is the riveting, myth-freighted legend of The Phantom — “The Ghost Who Walks,” “The Man Who Cannot Die,” “The Guardian of the Eastern Dark.” In the beginning he had been a half-drowned sailor, flung ashore on the terrible, blood-drenched Bengalla coast after pirates burned his ship and slaughtered his mates. The gentle Bandar pygmies, taking him to be a sea god of ancient prophecy, nursed him back to fitness and became his everlasting friends — as the castaway faced his destiny, donned costume and mask and was reborn as the first of the Phantoms, scourge of predators everywhere.

“I swear to devote my life to the destruction of piracy, greed, cruelty and injustice!” he cried as he formally took “The Oath of the Skull” by firelight. “And my sons and their sons shall follow me!”

And in time there was a son. In time that son begat another, and thereafter that son begat again. After a while, there arose a dynasty of Phantoms, one after another, born into the legend then reared and rigorously drilled in the disciplines and the duties.

Through the generations these eerily identical jungle lords have prowled an evil world in the cloaks of many identities, and none today but the Bandar and a handful of other secret souls know that all are not one and the same.

The modern Phantom is the 21st of the line. Since Feb. 17, 1936, he has been the law in his dangerous part of the world, a one-man police force, a silent avenger who appears and vanishes like lightning. His home is the fearsome “Skull Cave,” deep in the heart of his jungle. His only intimates have been the faithful Bandar, his great white horse Hero, his savage gray wolf Devil, and his lovely American sweetheart Diana Palmer. Even the men of the Jungle Patrol, the paramilitary peacekeeping squad an ancestor had organized some years ago, have never seen the face of their mysterious commander in chief.

From thieves and smugglers to cut-throat harbor rats to crazed dictators seeking to enslave free men, all have met the Phantom over 60 thrilling years, and all have tasted his wrath. Always changing with the whirlwind times around him, he has increasingly come to function as something of a United Nations troubleshooter-at-large, a shadowy trench-coated figure slipping in and out of modern Third World political intrigue.

But never far from the Phantom’s stage are the great emperors and brigands of yore, in the shining tales of his 20 heroic forebears, recounted in the epic Phantom Chronicles. In more than 60 years of daily newspaper stories and 58 years of Sunday-only yarns, “Phantom” creator Lee Falk has meticulously fleshed out the most minute details of a fabulous dynastic pageant, illuminating the lives of the Phantoms of old whose blood courses through the veins of the modern Ghost Who Walks. Many of them have swashbuckled their way through the famous newspaper comic strip in grand flashback sequences — one early Phantom is known to have married Christopher Columbus’ granddaughter; another is known to have married Shakespeare’s niece; still another took a Mongol princess as his bride.

The fifth Phantom crossed swords with the pirate Blackbeard in the early 1600s. The 13th Phantom traveled to the young United States and fought alongside Jean Lafitte in the War of 1812. The 16th appears to have put in some time as a Wild West cowboy.

And succession is assured.

The current Phantom and Diana Palmer were wed in 1977, and today their scrappy young son, Kit, is in training to someday take the sacred “Oath of the Skull” and become the 22nd Phantom. (Phantom 2040, the futuristic television series that in 1994 spun off from Lee Falk’s classic comic-strip legend, posits a 24th Phantom, apparently Kit’s grandson.)

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Lee Falk

Leon “Lee” Falk, is the creator of two of the most successful and longest-running action-adventure strips in the history of comic art: “Mandrake the Magician” and “The Phantom.” He began his career that resulted in the creation of these two classic fantasy comics as a 19-year-old college student. “Mandrake the Magician” was the first action-adventure strip in which magic was the main theme.

Lee Falk was born April 12, 1911, in St. Louis, Mo. On his first trip out of his native Midwest, a dapper Falk arrived unannounced at the offices of William Randolph Hearst’s King Features Syndicate in New York City in 1934. He had with him a comic-strip dramatization of a hypnotist who used his powers to right wrongs by combating criminals and enemies of his country. It was the platinum Era of Comics, and the myriad young men who appeared at King Features with their work were told to leave their comics for review. But Falk used his movie-star good looks and deep, theatrical voice to persuade the receptionist to allow him to see the top comics editor.

It was a year of explosive growth for the comics business as the familiar gag-a-day funnies gave way to popular new action strips for an eager audience. “Mandrake the Magician” arrived in the same exciting era that witnessed the births of “Flash Gordon,” “Jungle Jim,” “Secret Agent X-9″ and “Terry and The Pirates.” Today, the tuxedoed, mustached magician remains one of the most famous characters in the comic-strip medium, his adventures appearing in more than 125 newspapers worldwide.

Falk still had two years of college to complete when “Mandrake” went into syndication. To allow time for studies, he collaborated with Phil Davis, a commercial artist who lived in St. Louis. Davis drew the strip until he died in 1965. Falk found working with an artist agreeable and decided to continue under that situation. Fred Fredericks has drawn “Mandrake” since 1965.

Falk’s mysterious magician was immediately a worldwide sensation. Mandrake, who always uses his legendary powers of hypnotism and illusion to combat crime, has worked his debonair magic to find a place in the hearts of comic strip buffs everywhere. “Mandrake” is also the first comic strip with a racially integrated cast of crime-fighters. Mandrake’s partner in adventure is the gigantic Lothar, one of the few African-American heroes to appear regularly in the comics. Mandrake is also aided by his girlfriend, the lovely and exotic Princess Narda.

Just two years later, Falk developed still another blockbuster. “The Phantom” made its debut in newspaper comics pages on Feb. 17, 1936. Falk combined his love of epic poetry, fairy tales and stories of chivalry to create the riveting, myth-freighted legend of the first costumed super hero, ‘The Phantom,” also known as “The Ghost Who Walks,” “The Man Who Cannot Die” and “The Guardian of the Eastern Dark.”

“The Phantom” became a lodestar for what has become practically an industry built around supernatural men and women. King Features distributes “The Phantom” today to more than 500 newspapers. It is translated into 15 languages. Ray Moore was the original artist for “The Phantom.” From 1947 to 1961, Wilson McCoy drew the strip. Sy Barry took over in 1962 and continued drawing “The Phantom” until he retired in 1994. Since then, George Olesen has been the artist for “The Phantom.”

“The Phantom” was an instant international hit, inspiring comic-book collections around the world from Italy to Australia even before the first comic-book version appeared in the United States in 1938. Falk often recounted with deep satisfaction the fact that his Phantom character provided inspiration to the resistance fighters in Norway during World War II. Particularly in Scandinavia as well as in Australia, the Phantom continues to inspire countless devoted fans today, having achieved widespread popularity through fan clubs, strong publishing and licensed merchandise sales and Web sites.

Falk likened creating a comic strip to writing a play: “I think the art of writing a comic strip is closer to the theater and to film technique than any other writing I know. When I create stories for ‘Mandrake’ and ‘Phantom,’ I write a complete scenario for the artist in which I detail the description of the scene, the action and the costumes. If new characters are being introduced, I write their descriptions along with the dialogue for each panel. With such a scenario in front of him, a cameraman could take this and shoot it or a comic artist can take the scenario and draw it.”

Hollywood came calling for the first time in 1942 when Columbia Pictures Corp. filmed Falk’s “Mandrake the Magician.” By 1944, “The Phantom” was one of the world’s top action heroes, and Columbia Pictures Corp. released a cliffhanger serial. In 1986, “The Phantom” emerged as a King Features Entertainment television property in an animated series titled “Defenders of the Earth.” The series starred three more of King Features’ famous comic-strip characters: Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant and Mandrake the Magician. In 1994, Hearst Entertainment produced “Phantom 2040,” an animate series set in a grim world nearly 50 years in the future. In 1996, Paramount Pictures released a new theatrical version of “The Phantom,” starring Billy Zane it the title role.

Lee Falk was a graduate of the University of Illinois. He spent four years writing copy and directing radio shows for an advertising agency in St. Louis. Once he was comfortably situated as the producer of two of the most sensationally successful features in daily newspapers, Falk took to globetrotting. For many years the adventures of both “The Phantom” and “Mandrake” were as often as not set to paper in hotel rooms in one of the world’s great capitals.

The inexhaustible stories continued to come one after another even as World War II intervened. Immediately after Pearl Harbor was attacked, the patriotic Falk took on duties in secret intelligence operations with the Office of War Information and became chief of its radio foreign language division. In 1944, Falk enlisted in the United States Army.

And the stories continued still as, after the war, Falk increasingly turned to playwrighting and theatrical production. For many years, he was the owner of summer theaters in Massachusetts and a winter theater in Nassau, the Bahamas. The Paul Robeson-Uta Hagen production of “Othello” was first presented in this country at Falk’s Cambridge Summer Theater. Falk produced more than 300 plays, presenting such talents as Ethel Waters, Sylvia Sydney, Chico Marx, Marlon Brando and Ezio Pinza. Of these productions, he directed about 100, featuring stars such as Dame May Whitty in “Night Must Fall,” Ann Corio and Karl Malden in “Sailor Beware,” and Charlton Heston in “Bell, Book and Candle.”

Falk also wrote nearly a dozen plays and two musicals, “Happy Dollar” and “Mandrake the Magician and the Enchantress.”

Up until the time of his death, the expert storyteller still roamed every corner of the globe and continued to mastermind the daily and Sunday newspaper adventures of both “The Phantom” and “Mandrake the Magician.”

“Lee lived a life as spectacular as those of the characters he created,” Jay Kennedy, King Features editor in chief, said. “He was a central figure behind the emergence of adventure comic strips in the 1930s. The popularity of that genre extended to comic books as well. Fans of his strip, in particular, and comic book fans everywhere owe Lee Falk a debt of gratitude.”

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