Once again, not to spoil things, but the man who cannot die. But people are very interested in the current, yearlong-and-still-going, story in which Mozz foresees and tries to prevent The Phantom’s death. And the wholesale destruction of his family’s heritage. Let me start off by sharing the five most popular things published in August, for the month of August:
- What’s Going On In The Phantom (Weekdays)? Did Captain Savarna have kids with The Phantom? May – July 2022
- Why I Am Angry at Funky Winkerbean, Yes, Again
- What’s Going On In Dick Tracy? Why can’t Dick Tracy neutralize the Moon People’s superpowers? May – August 2022
- And Then I Noticed Something About Funky Winkerbean
- What’s Going On In Prince Valiant? Where is King Arthur that Arn and Maeve are regents? May – August 2022
Also ranking high were earlier essays about what was going on in The Phantom. I trust that’s from old links or imperfect Google matches. I’m sure everyone found their way to something useful, sooner or later.
Comic strip recaps remain my most popular feature here, though. Let me share my plan for those comics for the next couple weeks. It’s to cover these, at these times:
- Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel’s The Phantom (Sundays) (13 September)
- Terry Beatty’s Rex Morgan, M.D. (20 September)
- Henry Barajas and Rod Whigham’s Gil Thorp (27 September)
- Francesco Marciuliano and Mike Manley’s Judge Parker (34 September)
As for readership totals? Those were doing pretty well in August. All that Phantom trade, I’m sure. There were 6,375 page views here in August, well above the twelve-month running mean of 5,109.1 views per month. It’s even farther above the twelve-month running median of 4,702.5 views in a month.
There were more unique visitors too. 3,292 unique visitors stopped in over the course of August, which was a dogleg left under some lovely shade. The running median is 2,742.8 unique visitors, and the median 2,682.5. I was even better-liked: the number of likes given was 206, way above the mean of 148.7 and mean of 147. It was chatty on top of that, with 61 comments, compared to a mean of 46.8 and median of 47.
85 countries or their equivalents sent me any views at all in August, up from 81. 19 of them sent a single view, barely down from 20. Here’s the roster of all the origins of my viewers:
| Country | Readers |
|---|---|
| United States | 4,378 |
| Australia | 527 |
| India | 221 |
| Canada | 195 |
| United Kingdom | 157 |
| Italy | 104 |
| Brazil | 73 |
| Germany | 47 |
| Nigeria | 42 |
| Bahrain | 41 |
| France | 41 |
| Sweden | 40 |
| Ireland | 39 |
| Spain | 37 |
| South Africa | 33 |
| Philippines | 23 |
| Romania | 22 |
| Malaysia | 20 |
| Finland | 18 |
| Mexico | 17 |
| Netherlands | 15 |
| New Zealand | 15 |
| El Salvador | 14 |
| Indonesia | 14 |
| Japan | 14 |
| Austria | 13 |
| Kenya | 13 |
| Saudi Arabia | 11 |
| Denmark | 10 |
| Portugal | 10 |
| Belgium | 9 |
| Serbia | 9 |
| Singapore | 9 |
| Czech Republic | 8 |
| Norway | 8 |
| Switzerland | 7 |
| Bangladesh | 6 |
| Greece | 6 |
| Thailand | 6 |
| Turkey | 6 |
| Russia | 5 |
| Taiwan | 5 |
| Trinidad & Tobago | 5 |
| United Arab Emirates | 5 |
| Estonia | 4 |
| Iraq | 4 |
| Argentina | 3 |
| Chile | 3 |
| Ecuador | 3 |
| Egypt | 3 |
| Israel | 3 |
| Poland | 3 |
| Slovenia | 3 |
| Sri Lanka | 3 |
| Ukraine | 3 |
| Vietnam | 3 |
| Colombia | 2 |
| Croatia | 2 |
| Honduras | 2 |
| Kuwait | 2 |
| Lebanon | 2 |
| Montenegro | 2 |
| Pakistan | 2 |
| Peru | 2 |
| South Korea | 2 |
| Uganda | 2 |
| Albania | 1 |
| Bahamas | 1 |
| Barbados | 1 |
| Belarus | 1 |
| Cameroon | 1 (*) |
| Cook Islands | 1 |
| Costa Rica | 1 |
| Côte d’Ivoire | 1 |
| Dominican Republic | 1 |
| European Union | 1 |
| Guam | 1 |
| Guatemala | 1 |
| Hungary | 1 |
| Libya | 1 |
| Liechtenstein | 1 |
| Madagascar | 1 |
| Morocco | 1 (*) |
| Namibia | 1 |
| Zimbabwe | 1 |
Cameroon and Morocco were the only single-view countries in July also. No country is on a three-month streak.
WordPress figures I posted 19,115 words in August, which is my chattiest month this year. It brings my word total for the year to 138,526. Since the debut of the original Card Sharks to the start of September I’ve posted 3,499 things here. They’ve drawn a total of 314,034 views from a recorded 177,643 unique visitors.
If you know someone who could be my elusive reader from Greenland, please let them know about the RSS feed for my essays, the most convenient way to read anything online. Or that they could get essays e-mailed them as I publish them, once a day, slightly later each day of the month, before I fix the typos. Or they can click the “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” button in the right column of this page, and add the page to their WordPress reader. If you don’t know anyone in Greenland, I’m not surprised. I don’t either.
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Another Blog, Meanwhile 
This story feels like 1001 Arabian Nights without the happy ending. The Syndicate has pulled the plug at the end of this story, and the strip disappears in railroad blues when it ends. Look for Beatty to drag it out to Halloween.
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And yes, I again mixed up Tony DePaul & Terry Beatty. As New Gil Thorp would say, the sun got in my eye.
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And checking out DePaul’s blog, he says they dug up a sub for Manley because he was afraid if he sent it into reruns, the strip would never come back. So, ouch.
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It’s a reasonable fear, especially if Manley were unavailable for a prolonged time. Mandrake the Magician ended mid-story when Fred Fredericks got too ill to keep up the strip and it never emerged from reruns. But, then, the syndicate had quite recently scrambled to find a replacement for James Allen. I know that the comic strip is only one slice of The Phantom Intellectual Properties LLC, but it’s a slice of a surely larger pie than Mark Trails is.
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I wasn’t going to say anything if you weren’t. Anyway, I believe DePaul has said the plan was for this whole story to run about a year and a half, in five major chapters. Since this all started in late May 2021 that around three more months. I wouldn’t take that too literally, though; we are in the fourth of the projected five chapters and while a new one appears to be starting soon, that could easily run twenty or so weeks without being abnormally long.
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