A Magical and Mysterious Tour Through the Comic Strip World
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The Strange Case of Merlin’s World of Marvels
This week saw Andrews McMeel Syndication (AMS) drop Merlin’s World of Marvels from their lineup. There is an amazing dearth of information about the feature. The Wayback Machine shows it was available from AMS since at least 2019, but an Andrews McMeel Universal pdf “fact sheet” shows it available in 2009. It is seemly a British comic from Knight Features. Knight Features credits it to Ian Anderson about who I also find very little information. Paul Hudson’s A to Z of British Newspaper Strips includes an Ian Anderson as the second artist of Shuggie and Duggie which ran from the 1980s to the 2010s. But the book doesn’t list Merlin’s World of Marvels.
So… Merlin’s World of Marvels by Ian Anderson; weekly; British import?;
U.S. run: 2009? -2025 (though I can find no newspaper or magazine that ran the feature).
Ghost Who Walks Walks With Ghosts?
This current Sunday story we’re into, The Ungraved, is centered on a time anomaly. A Boeing B-17 has lain wrecked in the Bangallan jungle since the 1940s, and now the Wambesi people have started seeing it in the air every night. The phenomenon manifested after a couple of Wambesi kids used a metal detector to uncover war artifacts: a sidearm, uniform buttons, medals and the like.
So that’s one mystery, and here’s another the Phantom has just detected: How did Nazis come to crew this American warbird?
Replacing the earlier surmising of What The Phantom is Happening we now have The Phantom comic strip writer Tony DePaul himself giving us some background on the perplexing plane puzzle.
These two planes, the real and the imagined, are alike in many ways (similar wingspan, both have four engines…) but Jeff’s drawing a Flying Fortress while the photos I sent him are of a C-54 transport. Two weeks after D-Day, 1944, the aircraft wandered off course on narrative’s famously dark and stormy night. Bound for Washington, DC from England, it got lost in the maelstrom and crashed into Fort Mountain, killing all seven men aboard.
Nostradamus, or a Close Facsimile, Predicts
According to Francesco Marciuliano and Jim Keefe there will be “cozy mysteries” and ‘horrifying oversights” taking place in The Sally Forth Summer Story.
Death Stalks The Funny Pages
Way back in John Byrne’s run on The Fantastic Four, he had Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman adopt secret identities to try to raise their child Franklin in a “normal” household. They bought a place in Belle Porte, Connecticut and created the identities of Reed and Sue Benjamin, and eventually had a house warming to invite all their new neighbors over in FF #276 [March 1985]. And, if you weren’t aware, their neighbors are largely residents of the newspaper funny pages…
Sean Kleefeld helpfully identifies the newspaper comic strip characters invited to Reed and Sue’s house:
That’s Hi and Lois at the door (as you can see, they’re specifically identified by name). Going clockwise from there, we have Joe and Ann Palooka (from Joe Palooka), Dick Tracy (from Dick Tracy), Henry Mitchell (from Dennis the Menace), Herb Woodley and Dagwood & Blondie Bumsted (from Blondie), and Loretta & Leroy Lockhorn (from The Lockhorns). In the center are Skeezix (from Gasoline Alley) and Jiggs (from Bringing Up Father). Although Skeezix does look a bit more like Uncle Walt to me, Byrne himself has identified the character as Skeezix.
But this is a superhero comic book where death and destruction visit every issue, and some of those comic strip characters do not survive. Sean Kleefeld at Kleefeld on Comics tell us who they are.
The Start of a Beautiful Relationship
Thorn: Tales From the Lantern is a rare 1983 collection that represents the earliest incarnation of Jeff Smith‘s Bone saga. Thorn originated as a daily comic strip in the Ohio State University’s student newspaper, The Lantern, while Smith was attending there. This proto-Bone work, as it has been called, introduced early incarnations of characters and story elements that would later appear in Bone. Widely considered one of the most important indie comics of the past several decades, this earliest glimpse at the Bone saga, published in book form in Thorn: Tales From the Lantern, is a combination of rare and important that has led to impressive prices on the collector market. The small handful of higher-graded copies that have surfaced in recent years have sold in the $10,000+ range. There’s a FN+ condition copy of Thorn: Tales From the Lantern (Jeff Smith, 1983) currently up for auction in the 2025 June 26 – 29 Comic & Comic Art Signature Auction at Heritage Auctions.
Mark Seifert at Bleeding Cool doesn’t just inform us of the rare 1983 collection of Thorn comic strips by Jeff Smith up for auction, he tells the entire early history of the Bone comic.
The first Thorn strip appeared in The Lantern on September 20, 1982. The strip mixed lighthearted humor with fantasy adventure, and includes early versions of now-familiar characters like Fone Bone, Phoney Bone, Gran’ma Ben, the Great Red Dragon, and Thorn.
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