The World's first superhero, The ghost who walks - The Phantom (predates superman by 2 years) first debuted on 17 February 1936 in a format of newspaper comic strip. The character was created by Jewish American writer, theator director and cartoonist Leon Harrison Gross ( best known as Lee Falk). Lee Falk is also the creator of Mandrake the magician (first debuting in 1934). You can know more about the phantom from the article published previously on Assam Tribune. From it, you can learn more about the phantom's origin story and more info of the character from it. In this article we will have a look at the history of the phantom's publication in India (Phantom is widely published in India and has a lot of fans, he remained the most popular character in India from 1950s to 1990s although his recent popularity is not the same). Let's look at all the publishers below.
Indrajal comics
Indrajal comics was a comic book series in India launched by its parent company, who is also the publisher of Times of India, Bennet, Coleman & Co in March 1964. The first 32 issues contained Lee falk's the phantom stories, but thereafter, the title alternated between various King features characters,including Lee falk's Mandrake, Alex Raymond's flash Gordon and Rip Kirby etc. When The Phantom comic strip by Lee Falk grew very popular in India, Anant Pai and others in Indrajal Comics collected them and published it as a comic book. The first 10 issues devoted 16 pages to The Phantom, many of the stories were edited to fit this format. Twelve pages were devoted to general knowledge and other stuff. The next 19 issues were 20-24 pages. Beginning with issue #29, Indrajal chose to devote 32 page to the comic strips. The series switched to fortnightly from issue 35. Mandrake made his first of many appearances in #46 (15 Jul 1967). Indrajal Comics changed to weekly from issue 385. The series once again returned to a fortnightly schedule with 36 pages each. The cover artwork for the first 50 or so issues of Indrajal Comics was done by Govind Brahmania, with the back cover featuring a pin-up poster. Govind's painted covers are highly regarded amongst Indian Phantom fans, and are on par with those of George Wilson for the Gold Key series and the Avon novels from the USA. The Indrajal Comics were a full-colour production from issue 8 onwards. The earliest of the covers were drawn and painted by different artists. Later on they were drawn by artists like Shehab, Shekhar etc. The cover art started including original artwork from the strip apart from the ones drawn by artists themselves like in Govind Brahmania's covers, or even Shekhar's early covers. Names of some places and people were changed while publishing stories of The Phantom like 'Bengali' was changed to 'Denkali' to avoid confusion to Indian readers, 'Bangalla' was changed to 'Dangalla', the 'Singh Brotherhood' were changed to 'Singa pirates' etc. English,Hindi & Marathi versions were introduced from the very beginning i.e. from issue 1 published in 1964, Gujarati & Tamil versions were introduced on the next year with issue 11 published in 1965, The regional version came in Bengali from 1966 and Indrajal comics issue 23 was issue 1 in Bengali. Publisher's decided to cancel the series in their 27th year of production. The last issue was #805, published on 16 Apr 1990. It is said that the reason of the cancellation of the series was because of the increment of copyright cost.
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Diamond comics
Diamond Comics is a series printed by Diamond Comics in India. Diamond Comics was started in 1978 by late Gulshan Rai. After indrajal comics ended in 1990, Diamond comics bought the copyrights for phantom from King features syndicate to print the character in a format of digest which contained atleast 2 or more stories of phantom. Running from 1990 to 2005 with over 110 digests, It was released in English, Hindi and Bengali on a monthly basis. Before 1990, Diamond comics published a novel series of about 6 novels of phantom originally written in India. It is unknown whether the series was officially made or just uncopyrighted material. The series was published by Diamond comics under the name of 'Rajeev Bal Vikas' series. Diamond comics has also published 3 issue mini series of phantom digests in Assamese language in 1996. In first starting covers of the series, you can for sure spot that covers were jumbled a lot. The cover artists were never mentioned in the covers or Inside of the comic. the only artist that could be identified is Adil Khan who introduced a very muscular version of the phantom in India on the covers he drew for Diamond comic's series of Phantom digest. Diamond comics covers were sometimes messed up with the inside story, Like in a cover you can Spot Phantom with a giant monster which is copied from a comic of an Indian superhero comic from 1980s. In a cover you can spot phantom and Flash's villian namely the trickster, also Two Face, Man bat and Timber wolf. Despite these negative points of Diamond comic's presentation of phantom covers, the owner late Mr. Gulshan Rai was a very generous man. I personally knew him, ones he sent me a phantom digest by mistake, when I informed this to him he told me to keep it and he didn't even mention for a return or payment. Diamond comics also printed phantom mini digests which were a freebie of Kellogg's cereal box, Crayon colour box etc. Diamond also made its own phantom comic book story which is featured in Big Babol issue 11, this story is a short story or you can say an advertisement comic story. It promoted big Babol with the use of phantom in the short story. Diamond comic's last phantom digest is said to be 'Phantom : the game' while some say its 'Phantom : the urban forest' because the serial order of the series was stopped with digest 86. Diamond also printed phantom stories in their anthology comic series namely comic digest and comic World (not in all issues).
Egmont India / Euro Books
In the late 2000, Egmont India began to publish phantom in english. They published 30 different stories of the phantom which was published previously by Egmont in Sweden. Those stories were originally created in Sweden by Team Fantomen. It is said that Ulf Granberg was also an assistor of the series published by Egmont India. Their first series consists of 24 issues (The first 3 issue has no numbering and has 3 different stories, original count began in issue 4 marked as issue 2). The first series ended in 2002, later it was reprinted by Egmont India as second series in February 2003. This series consisted of the previous stories published in the first series. Most issues, but not all, featured stories that had already been published in the first series, but with new cover art and new issue numbering. It is said that there was a third series, but nobody knows it exactly. Egmont India also published another series namely 'the phantom action adventure series' which was two stories per issue in 2001, Although the actual comics were in a larger format, the size of the comic pages was the same as the former series, and the rest of the page was filled with a black border with grey skull logos. The next series was published by Egmont India was 'The adventures of the ghost who walks' in 2003. The Adventures of the Ghost who Walks reprinted all stories from the comic book series The Phantom, but in a larger album format and with two stories per issue. The first eight comics were reprints of The Phantom Action Adventure Series with new covers. The other comics featured team Fantomen stories that had not previously been published in India. It also had the same kind of border as it is in previously published series. Egmont changed to Euro Books and reprinted this series in 2007 with new covers. They also published a 6 in 1 special collector edition comics which contained the same stories as it is in 'the adventures of the ghost who walks' 15 issue series. It was again reprinted in 2011 by Euro Books, this reprint consisted all the 2 in 1 series of 15 issues with new covers, and also the 6 in 1 series of 5 books with new covers. This series of 30 team Fantomen stories were never reprinted again. Instead Euro Books released another single story series in 2011 which were based on the daily strip stories. They published 24 different titles in this series. There were also 8 comics which were 3 in 1 that collected stories from three single issues of the main 24 issue series. Later this 24 issue series was reprinted in 2014 in a 12 issue series with each issue containing 2 stories of the 24 stories. Also in 2014, a two book format comic containing 12 stories each from the 24 issue series were published by Euro.
Regal publishers
Established in 1976 by Jacob Varghese, Regal publishers originally published comics in Malayalam language. They published phantom in Malayalam (which will be discussed in phantom's history in Kerala). In August 2020, Regal Publishers started publishing Phantom comic book series containing 2 stories each in full colour in english. All stories that they publish are either Sundays or dailies. In May 2022, Regal Publishers released their first Trade Paperback titled ‘Terror of The Python – The Chatu Saga’ containing 256 glossy pages in full color. 9 Phantom stories from the dailies and Sundays which are featured in the trade paperback. written by Tony DePaul with illustration by Graham Nolan, Late Paul Ryan. Regal also publishes Lee Falk era stories with new modern colour work.
Shakti comics
Shakti Comics is a comic book house who publishes comics on Phantom, Flash Gordon and Mandrake. Shakti Comics has been publishing their comics in English, Hindi and Bengali. Shakti Comics motive is to bring back the era where Phantom, Mandrake and Flash ruled the comic industry in India as it used to in the late 20th century. In the future, we might see more characters be- ing published by them as Indrajal used to publish other characters of King Features Syndicate such as Buz Sawyer, Rip Kirby, etc. Shakti comics is the first Indian publisher of phantom who brings out Variant covers for phantom comics.
(Written by Talha Amin )