On the back of Mythos from Brazil committing to publish the Phantom in 2019, another publisher called Regal Publishers from India has also started the year off with a positive start. Not only have they published the first licensed Indian Phantom comic for many years, they have also published comics from Lee Falk's other character Mandrake at the same time with more promised to come regularly.
India has such a rich history of the Phantom with the comic being published in comics, newspapers and magazines all the way back as far as 1940. It is good to see the Phantom back being published in this country.
Like Australia, many Indian phans see the Phantom as their national hero which is something we will have to explore more. We have touched upon the love of the character in India before with two past podcasts with Kevin Patrick and his book The Phantom Unmasked (Podcast link) and Abir Roy (writer, director, editor) and Sagardeep Roy (actor - Choloman) for the Bengali fan-made Phantom film Cholomon Oshoriri (Podcast link).
This new comic has the Sunday Story The Lookout by Lee Falk and George Olesen / Fred Fredericks and is interestingly most famous for featuring a pair of roughnecks called Quill and Drax - the same names used for the villains from the 1996 movie The Phantom.
We have been informed that a number of these comics have found their way into Australia and will soon be available through Phantom's Vault, or you can contact the publisher themselves from their Facebook page.
The obvious question is about the regularity of the comic being published. We have been in contact with Regel Publishers who have informed us that the regularity of the comic all depends on the demand by the phans.
At this stage we have not decided as to whether the Phantom comics will be published weekly, fortnightly monthly. In the next 8 to 10 months as the comics are released, we will analyse the market situation and the customer demand. Based on the analysis, we will decide whether the series are to be published weekly, fortnightly, monthly or every two months.
This is not the first Phantom comic Regal Publishers has published the Phantom. Back in 2012 they released a one-shot comic featuring a beautiful cover by Joe Jusko which was originally used for the 1996 Phantom movie trading card series. The story featured in this comic was The Jungle Olympics by Lee Falk and Wilson McCoy. You can purchase this comic from Phantoms Vault for $7.50 (GST Exc).
Regal has marketed this throughout India and at comic book conventions, along with their other comic character they are known for: Tarzan. Below are two of the marketing brochures plus a photo from one of the conventions.
Swaroop Chand, a phriend to many in the Phantom community, has been kind enough to review the comic which you can see in the video below.
Our thanks to Regal Publishers for keeping us up to date over the publication of this comic and the ongoing series and Swaroop Chand for the review.
