Phantom turned 70 last week but is it a slow death for the Oath of the Skull?

In Sarnath Banerjee’s debut graphic novel Corridor, his protagonist, a lanky Bengali from Calcutta, reminisces how he would spend lazy afternoons reading from the nine leather-bound volumes of Phantom - The Ghost Who Walks till his friend Bambi makes off with Volume Four. “Phantom by Lee Falk influenced my life. The protagonist in Corridor and I share a history of such a grandfather and such a passion for Phantom,” smiles Banerjee, 36, who remembers reading his first Phantom comic in Bengali, at age seven. “I was in the Congo recently traveling through Phantom country. My friends who grew up reading the comic like I did joked about how I might be received by Guran, chief of the pygmy tribe and Phantom’s best friend,” adds Banerjee who quietly tells me that it would have been nice to meet Diana, Phantom’s curvaceous wife instead.

Phantom turned 70 last week on May 28. There was not a word from the publishers, comic book aficionados or bookstores about this unforgettable comic hero. But long ago, when the first regular series of Phantom comic books in India were published by Bennet Coleman under the name of Indrajal Comics from March 1964, the superhero without superpowers captured the imagination of a nation’s youth. “I used to draw comics as a child and my biggest influences were Tintin, Phantom and Mandrake the Magician. The setting of the story fascinated me and it drew one into the actual location,” says Orijit Sen, 46, renowned comic book illustrator. “The jokes about Devil being a wolf and not a dog, stories of the first Phantom were all so familiarly entwined in the childhood of that generation. That is not the case today,” says Sen.

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