More thoughts on The Phantom. I'm not one of those comics readers-slash-wannabe writers (or wannabe slash-writers, for that matter) who seemingly cannot read any comic without nattering on about how they would have done it better: it's just that, when I look at The Phantom, I want to strip away all the elements that don't work—of which there are so many—and strip the thing back to a manageable core, so that I can know what I'm looking at, and what it is that keeps bugging me about it.
My key came in the way the Billy Zane movie depicted The Phantom's jungle kingdom. The comic is set in Africa, but the movie's tribesmen seemed vaguely South American. Turns out, though, that the movie's jungle scenes were shot on location in Thailand.
This, quite naturally, made me think of another movie that moved its source's African setting to Southeast Asia—and I realized this about the Phantom:
He's Kurtz.
The Ghost Who Walks is Kurtz triumphant, a dynasty of Kurtzes; the white freebooter who comes upriver into the jungle and sets himself up as a god-king, ruling his native subjects by mystery and terror; a vortex around whom a hundred supernatural rumors swirl; a colonialist nightmare of white man's magic and superstitious dread.
The Phantom sits at the Heart of Darkness, and neither cheerful purple suit nor embarrassing fanboy devotion can mask the stink of patrilineal corruption and madness that pulses from him like a fever.
Mistah Walker—he dead.
Long live Mistah Walker.
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