In the back pages of the Egmont comic (22-23/2018) released on Thursday there is an announcement that is taking the concept of a Phantom jam to whole new exciting level!
For the past three years, Frew Publications in Australia have released Jam Covers featuring five or six artists doing a cover together.
Egmont have stepped up the concept to a new level in a massive logistical undertaking with eight artists collaboratively drawing the one story.
The eight (8) artists are:
Sal Velluto
Heiner Bade
Alex Saviuk
Joan Boix
Kari Leppänen
Carlos Pedrazzini
César Spadari
Rafael Ruiz
The jam story, due for release on November 22 and titled Blood Rain (24/2018), was conceived and written by Andreas Eriksson, and edited by Mikeal Sol. Andreas has a long history with the Phantom as editor for Egmont, advisor for Frew and long time phriend of everyone at CC.
Phans with long memories may remember some Facebook posts by Sal Velluto and other artists as long as 15 months ago, back in July 2017. Throughout this article are the sneak peaks as originally posted by Sal on his Facebook for the cover and its progress, as well as the internal pages he completed.
Where did the idea come from? In our research and discussion with the creative team, we can find several attempts of this including a 1985 X-Men jam comic titled Heroes for Hope (Wiki page here) and a 1981 Spirit comic (more information here). Interestingly, Frew's own Dale Maccanti actually holds the world record for the most contributors to a single published comic book with his The Perilous Plights of Peter Pumpkinhead, published in 2016.
Perhaps the closest we have seen to this concept in a Phantom comic is the first Moonstone Phantom Annual published back in 2007. However this featured five separate stories / parts which were released together. Blood Rain is one story about one Phantom, not in chapters like Five Days of the Dragon or Mystery of the Golden Rune.
An easy way to achieve this concept might be to have a story featuring eight different generations of Phantom with the story separated into sequences, but the one clue we have been given is that this is not how it's been done :)
In the same advertisement announcing the Jam Story the same issue will feature another Fantomen Kids story line with a red Phantom and a Skull Cave poster. This is an issue to hunt down and ensure is in your collection.
Fantomen subscribers usually get their copies a few days prior to public release but the rest of us will be able to get our copies from the local shops from the 22nd November (24/2018). It seems likely that Blood Rain will feature in a Frew comic eventually, but completist collectors may want to organise a copy prior so they can see the story themselves. We would recommend finding a Swedish Phantom Facebook phriend and get them to organise a copy for you.
Team CC will try and organise a Video Review as soon as possible.
Preliminary and Process work on the Cover of the story, by Sal Velluto:
Thanks goes to Stefan Lundin for his Facebook post, the team at Egmont for the details and Sal for the sneak peak of his drawings of the Blood Rain cover & story.
