Menace

Watching Billy Zane prance and skip through 1996's Phantom movie set me to thinking (again) how fundamentally stupid the character is. Honestly, I find it inconceivable that the strip has lasted long enough to become an institution: the concept is a hopeless muddled mess.

Oh, the individual components are promising enough. But there are so many of them, in such a seemingly random combination, that the character is left with no clear center. Dig:

• The Phantom is "The Ghost Who Walks," believed to be immortal, because he's been active for some 400 years. In fact, however, it's a family business, passed down from father to son for twenty generations.

  That's a pretty cool hook—cool enough for William Goldman to steal it for The Princess Bride's Dread Pirate Roberts. But moving on...

• He wears a ring that leaves the imprint of a skull when he socks a villain in the jaw...

  Neat! Okay, so it's stolen from the pulp hero The Spider, but still...

• ...lives in the jungle and is served by a local tribe...

  Uh... aside from the queasy colonialist underpinnings, it's, ah, uncomfortably similar to Tarzan, isn't it? and how does that jibe with the ring and the...

• ...is a crack shot and rides a super-intelligent white horse...

  Now wait a minute...

• ...has a trained wolf...

  ...in the jungle? What in the...

• ...and fights pirates...

  ...you WHAT? Isn't that a little—arbitrary? Why not "lives in Sherwood Forest and fights ninjas," fa chrissakes?

• ...oh, and he wears a purple body-stocking and a hood. And a mask.

  To those unfamiliar with the character: I swear I am not making this up.

Jon Morris has talked about the characteristics that make for a bad superhero. He uses Bee-Man as an example of a character who just too tightly focussed —(from memory) scientist Barry E. Eames, an expert on bees, is attacked by radioactive mutant bees commanded by extraterrestrial bee-people and becomes a humanoid bee able to communicate with bees, and he lives in a hive, and eats honey, and steals gold because it looks like honey... you know, there's only so much you can do with a character like that.

The Phantom has the opposite problem: because he's such a crazy-quilt of secondhand attributes—aside from the Spider and Tarzan, there are bits of the Lone Ranger, Doc Savage, and even Sgt. Preston in the mix—that in the end he fails entirely to make an impression. To me, he was a perpetual third-stringer—just something fill space between Hi & Lois and Marmaduke. The strip has become "beloved" simply by refusing to go away.

I mean, apparently The Phantom does have fans. Admittedly, as Chu says, "You could write a comic called 'Piece of Shit Comic' that starred a turd that sat there for 6 panels doing nothing, and you would have 100 'fans' of that comic suddenly materialize to start complaining should it be canceled."

But there's supposedly a big European following for this character. I don't understand it. Then again, I never understood how, say, .38 Special could be someone's favorite band. You wouldn't change the channel if they came on the radio, but neither would you rush out to buy the record.

The Phantom, though, has an actual fanbase, to the point that some folks feel hard-done-by re: the Zane movie—witness this Swedish guy on the IMDb, sniffily intoning that "This is not what Lee Falk intended... I have always regarded The Phantom to be kind of a 'serious' super hero adventure."

Which can only lead me to think that they don't get many American comics in Sweden.