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DePaul and Weigel to Continue The Origin of The Phantom

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D. D. Degg Published: December 19, 2025 Updated: December 19, 2025 1 minute 0 comments

“For those who came in late.”

But what happened between those two panels of survivor and oath?

We have occasionally had hints.

Earlier this year DePaul and Mike Manley gave a two week treatment to what led up to the man who was to become the first Phantom ending up on that Bangalla shoreline.

At the end of that two week Origin of The Phantom Part One there is a bit of what happened afterward.

Now Tony DePaul says he and Jeff Weigel will expand on the Origin of The Phantom:

The man who becomes the first Phantom is marooned on a foreign shore. Next thing you know, he’s creating a legend, pledging his life to the legend—pledging his sons’ lives. How exactly did that happen? Falk left us to assume the man was all-in from day one, never entertained a passing thought of trying to get home.

Next up, in February, the Sunday newspaper strip will get into the space between these two classic panels. Therein lies a world that Lee Falk left blank—inexplicably blank. In 63 years of writing the strip seven days a week, he never got around to showing us how this 16th-century man he created got from A to B.

The retelling of the origin will follow modern sensibilities:

Not incidentally, this story will bear, too, on my policy of benign neglect on obsolete lore. We needn’t feel bound by stories that have fared poorly on the test of time.

Following that same line of thought, Readers will see, in the new year, that what happens in 1536 overturns events depicted in The First Phantom, a Sunday story published in 1975. Overturns, ignores, neglects… whatever term you care to use. We’re leaving it there, in the past, Falk’s depiction of the enslaved Bandar as a helpless people awaiting a savior. I’m sure it wasn’t his intention, but the story validated what his critics had long said: that the strip was a timeworn relic of colonial attitudes.

Read Tony DePaul full exposition of the coming Origin of The Phantom Part Two (our title, not his).

_{The Phantom © King Features Syndicate}