The Phantom: The Graham Nolan Sundays, Volumes One and Two
Written by Claes Reimerthi, Tony DePaul, and Graham Nolan; Illustrated by Graham Nolan
Moonstone
$16.95
I keep telling people that I first discovered the Phantom when I saw the Billy Zane movie, but that’s not quite true. We didn’t have Phantom strips in my hometown newspaper, but my grandmother did and whenever we’d go to visit her for Christmas or something, I’d check out the funnies and see what the Phantom was up to. I was never able to follow a story for more than a week or so, so I didn’t understand much about the character, but I loved the idea of a costumed superhero who spent most of his time in the jungle. It was Tarzan and Batman combined and I thought it was genius.
The movie filled me in on a lot of details about the character and I’ve been following Moonstone’s monthly series pretty faithfully, but there’s still been this kind of enigma around the newspaper strips that never have found their way into my local papers, regardless of where in the country I’ve lived. Because the Phantom was created as a newspaper strip, I’ve always felt like I’ve been missing out on something essential about him by not reading him in that format. Enter The Graham Nolan Sundays.
I’d love to see Moonstone eventually release a collection of Lee Falk’s work on the character, including the dailies, but until then, The Graham Nolan Sundays is a great way to visit the Phantom in his natural habitat. Nolan illustrated the Sunday Phantom strips from 2000 until earlier this year and his crisp, clean, dynamic style was perfect for the action-packed adventure strip. Nolan draws a powerful Phantom, convincing animals, beautiful women, dastardly villains, and evocative backgrounds equally well. Just flipping through the book is exciting.
The first volume (at least my copy) has some pages that are printed out of order, but the second volume is perfect. The stories cover great, high-concept ideas like an angry jungle god, a young girl looking for her archeologist father, a snake goddess, a mysteriously appearing Viking fortress, and a train that’s run by the undead. None of the stories are re-edited for a graphic novel format, but are reprinted like they originally appeared, including the “drop off tier” of panels that’s sometimes left out by newspapers trying to fit more strips on a page.
The execution of the various stories is remarkably consistent in terms of quality. The focus is always on the plot, so there’s little characterization or advancement of a meta-story, but that’s exactly what you want from a weekly strip. It’s really rather amazing that not only do the strips entertain as much as they do collected, but that they also maintain such an internal consistency as they progress. What you get then is a collection of great, authentic, pulp-adventure stories for the curious and a couple of handy, archived albums for the fans. None of the stories are designed to make you think or change your world-view, but if you’re looking for an entertaining way to spend an afternoon with a classic superhero and some fun jungle adventures, these are your books.
August 21st, 2007 at 12:23 pm
All copies of the first volume were printed with some pages out of order (and since no replacement copies were ever made available, this helped dampen my enthusiasm for buying the second volume).
Nolan did some very good work on the strip, and I didn’t know he’d left it early this year. I hope he’s found something interesting to work on, he’s quite talented.