Tony DePaul on The Phantom Future’s Past
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Tony DePaul on his, more-or-less monthly these days, blog chimed in on the just ended Wrack and Ruin:
On Phantom matters (which I’m always ambivalent writing about here), the dual-timeline Wrack and Ruin series came to a close last Saturday, after seven chapters and 32 months. It ended with Jeff Weigel’s Phantom reflecting for a week on various journeys the characters had walked in both the Mozz prophecy and the present.
Tony teased us about writing an extended commentary about the story:
I might write about the series here at some point … That said, condensing the Wrack and Ruin series, 465 pages of script, more than 1,500 images, packaging that in a way a non-Phantom fan (most readers here) might appreciate, that’s a heavy lift. It would easily take a week of daily posts, a chapter per day, an introduction, a continuity primer, nine posts…?
More from Tony:
In this new story that started yesterday [link added], Bret Blevins and I are revisiting a Lee Falk/Wilson McCoy tale from 1953. Our story shares the title of the original yarn, a conspicuous outlier in the canon. Falk wrote the Phantom as a boor, a manbaby, selfish, cranky, petulant, obnoxious (who does that sound like?). This 1953 Phantom is someone we don’t recognize. He’s wrong on personality, maturity, character, moral compass, how he talks to his wife—the works.
… Bret and I are going to deconstruct the original story, put a different lens on it, create a different way of thinking about it …
The moral of the story is patience – here’s a >spoiler alert< summary of the original tale – a virtue us fans of Tony DePaul’s Phantom have come to appreciate.
feature image by George Wilson
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