What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Did Captain Savarna have kids with The Phantom? May – July 2022

That is the surface implication of the 24th of June’s strip. We see The Phantom, about to go to North India to search for his estranged son again, kissing goodbye to a quite pregnant Savarna Devi. This is normal dramatic shorthand for someone bidding farewell to their spouse. Mozz tells us that this is the last time The Phantom will see the Deep Woods. However, Mozz has warned The Phantom that he would lie about his prophecy to keep The Phantom from bringing wrack and ruin to his line. And he’s thought, to himself where only we can see it, that he has to, now. Of course he may have thought that to deceive us but I don’t expect the comic strip to operate on quite that level of narrative experimentation.

Yet a theme of the Imaginary Story going on in Tony DePaul and Mike Manley and Bret Blevins and Scott Cohn’s The Phantom weekday continuity has been paying attention to what is said versus what is implied. So let’s all slowly come to understand Mozz, and DePaul, in not going beyond what the evidence is.

This should get you up to speed on The Phantom weekday continuity for early August, 2022. If you’re interested in the separate Sunday continuity, or you’re reading this after about October 2022, a more useful essay may be at this link. I hope this is a useful essay anyway.

Also, let me sort out the art credits. Mike Manley was, and is again, the regular artist for the strip. During Manley’s recent health problems Bret Blevins and Scott Cohn took over art duties. Scott Cohn has been good enough to share his art on his DeviantArt gallery, for those who’d like to see the striking uncolorized originals. (Daily comic strips are, for obscure reasons, colorized by people generally not working with the original artists.)

The Phantom (Weekdays).

16 May – 30 July 2022.

The current story, the midpoint of DePaul’s massive project, has Mozz telling the story of Phantom’s End. This is his grim prophecy of what happens should Kit Walker, as he plans, go to Gravelines prison to save Captain Savarna Devi from death row. Complicating any recap of this is that we cannot trust Mozz.

Previously in the prophecy, The Phantom rescues Savarna from Gravelines, he’s wounded. While delirious he reveals that Kit Junior is in the Mountain City, somewhere in Arunachal Pradesh, India. And that the local constable is the man who’d enslaved the young Savarna and killed her family. She journeys to the Mountain City and kills him. Understandable but a terrible mistake. The unnamed Northern Invaders see the murder of the constable, their man in town, as provocation. When they can’t assassinate monastery leader Kyabje Dorje or his understudy Kit Junior they bomb the city into ruin. In the disaster Kit Junior takes the phone from a person he couldn’t save and calls his parents.

Tony DePaul and Mike Manley’s The Phantom for the 27th of May, 2022. Kit Junior makes a fair case, that between this and the experiences of the 11th and the 16th Phantoms — who had also trained at the same monastery, and whose reincarnation Kit Jr presented himself as being — he was aimed at this. It also seems it would be remarkable if he were the first in over twenty generations of Walkers to want to go away from the direct main line of the family business. But there’s a lot of room for side stories we haven’t seen yet.

He explains he can’t be the 22nd Phantom. His life, he knows now, has lead him to be here and to protect these people. And hangs up, going to his new life alongside Manju, daughter of the tea shop keeper. The Phantom goes to India to seek him out, but that whole legend of how you don’t find The Phantom, he finds you works against him. All he can find is the tea shop keeper, who won’t help someone she fairly suspects of being sent by Jampa’s friends. She begs out of this drama, but asks that if he finds Kit Junior that he send Manju home. It’s like that all over, and The Phantom’s first search for his son fails.

With this failure, Kit Senior’s home life falls apart. Diana leaves the Deep Woods; Heloise leaves for the United States, too, eventually never to tell her children of The Phantom. Sometime later, Savarna finds a broken, brooding Phantom. That there is this clear legend that no one finds The Phantom, he finds you, suggests this is where Mozz starts falsifying his prophecy. If “falsifying a prophecy” is a meaningful concept. But Savarna is an exceptional person, and acknowledges in text that she might be the only one who’s ever looked long enough.

Tony DePaul, Bret Blevins, and Scott Cohn’s The Phantom for the 28th of June, 2022. I mean, she is literally the lone survivor of a pirate attack that killed her family and shipmates who devoted her life to saving others from similar fates. The only piece her life is missing from the story of Christopher Walker, the First Phantom, is swearing the Oath of the Skull. In Mozz’s prophecy, Savarna swears off vengeance and — perhaps — she lives up to it after killing Jampa. The 1st Phantom’s oath swore vengeance against the pirates who’d killed his shipmates, and that vengeance was dropped after he did kill those pirates.

Years later, The Phantom leaves for another trip to India, hoping to reunite Kit Junior with his mother and sister. He bids farewell to Savarna, never see the Deep Woods again, says Mozz. But we learn he’s not the last Phantom; merely the last of the Walkers to be The Phantom. Savarna’s descendants take up that role. It’s a twist I hadn’t thought of, but that’s obvious in hindsight, to split the Walker line from the Phantom line. It’s another of many steps the strip has taken to diffuse the colonialist white-savior stuff baked into the premise, too. It’s also got an interesting metatext. In the comic, Bangalla had started out as a vaguely located South/Southeast Asian land before becoming a vaguely located East African land. This adds to how Savarna’s life echoes without imitating The Phantom Origin Story. I imagine that’s the sort of happy coincidence you can arrange when you have ninety years of backstory that fans have got pretty well indexed for you. It’s still a neat bit of business to line up.

The Phantom’s second trip to India gets much closer to Kit Junior, and (as promised by Mozz), “in a manner of speaking … he finds you”. If we can trust Mozz on this point. But now Kit Junior is a respected, loved, skilled guerilla leader. His fighters suspect, with reason, that The Phantom is another would-be assassin. The Phantom enters the landscape where he encountered the flaming skeleton of his dead father in 2020’s story The Llongo Forest. Before he can nope out of there he comes under fire, from gunmen in at least three positions. This isn’t too much for The Phantom, but it’s a close-run thing. He hopes to stall until nightfall when he can escape.

Tony DePaul and Scott Cohn’s The Phantom for the 21st of July, 2022. THe second panel was the funniest comic the day of publication. Possibly that whole week. Also a reminder of what a wonderful vein of gallows humor American pop culture lost when the Service Comedy stopped really being a thing.

Kit Junior’s soldiers ask him for help with this extraordinary man, who can’t be shot but who can hit everything he tries to. He doesn’t recognize his father’s signature. He hasn’t got the time to divert from planning an operation for the next day. But he can spare Manju, now a very effective sniper. Her fire can pin him down. With a half-hour until sunset, someone hits Kit Walker Senior, fracturing his leg. Things look rather dire for The Ghost Who Walks, must say.

Next Week!

I’m sad to say we have no more Morgan Le Fay, and Comics Kingdom still has not fixed their web site so Sunday pages are visible without going to extra effort. But I’ll recap almost three months of Mark Schultz and Thomas Yeates’s Prince Valiant, if things go as I hope. See you then.