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About

The Phantom is a newspaper strip created by Lee Falk in 1936. Since its debute the strip has never been out of print and has spawned many comic book series, tv shows, movies, video games and, of course, collectables.

I first read The Phantom when I was in the first year of primary school. I was one of those kids for who reading was quite the challenge; I was taken out of regular class to attend special reading lessons. However, the material in these lessons was less interesting and Parliment questions time, so I was pretty unenguaged with it. Seeing this my dad gave me heap of his old Phantom comics hoping the art in them (I was arty even at that young age) would grab my interest. It did, and it wasn't long before I was reading them myself and then graduating to "real" books. I've been a huge fan ever since.

If you'd like to learn more aboit The Phantom, I plan on adding a shrine soon. Until then, please enjoy checking out the items in my collection.

Index

Apparelle & Accessories

Items of Note:

Cards & Stickers

This sections is very much incomplete. I plan to get better images of the full card sets and so on I have in my collection, but until then this will give something of an idea.

Publications

Avon/ Hermes Novels

In 1972, American publisher Avon released a series of 15 prose novels based upon The Phantom strip stories. Of these, Lee Falk himself wrote five while the remaining ten were written by comics historian Ron Goulart. The last of the novels was released in 1975 and remained out of publication until 2016 when publisher Hermes Press began to release facsimile editions of the novels.

I've a complete run of both the original 1972 novels as well as the Hermes reprints in my collection. Also included is a German edition of novel 5 The Golden Circle (last image).

Diaries

Beginning in 1993 and published almost annually by Mallon in Australia, the Phantom diary has become something of a staple for Aussie Phantom phans at Christmas time. The series began as oversized hardcover editions containting lots of background information and trivia about The Phantom.The 1998 edition moved to spiral binding and instead concentrated on cover art, reproduicing art from Phantom comic covers from around the world. 2005 then combined these two ideas together with ring binding and a hard cover. These editions also saw the return of trivia.

The last diary I purchased was 2016 as I had moved to England the year before and, in 2018, Mallon moved to a mail-order system which made it quite hard to precure them internationally. There were no diaries produced for 1999, 2001, 2002 or 2019.

One other diary was produced in Australia, this time to tie in with the Phantom movie (see last image below). Produced by Trielle, it contained lots of stills and background information on the film.

Defenders of the Earth Books

Fan Club Newsletters

Here we have several newsletter from two different Phantom fan clubs. The first is The Official Phantom Fan Club of Australia which began in 1991 in celebration of Frew Publications' 1000th issue, and ran until 1999 due to King Features not renewing the licence. It was run by a gift/ novelty company known as Famous Faces that also ran fan clubs for Elvis Presley, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and others. A newsletter was sent out to all members with a total of 15 being produced, although the last of these was released in January of '98.

The second is an American club called Friends of The Phantom which was produced by Phantom historian, consultant, writer and legend within the Phantom phan community, Ed Rhoades. Begun in 1993, the club ran until 2002 and released a total of 23 newsletters.

Various

Items of Note: