The Best Fantomen Cover of 2018 has just been announced by the Swedish publisher, and it must be said that the winner comes as no surprise to the Chronicle Chamber crew.
In Fantomen 16/2019 released July 25 2019, it is announced that the famous rainbow flag cover for Fantomen 9/2018 The Golden Eagle, by Swedish artist Henrik Sahlström, was voted by the phans as the best cover of the year.
The chance to cast your vote was back in February.
This cover initially caused a huge stir all over the Internet, receiving both positive and negative feedback. There was a lot of love and support from phans (and non phans) around the world; meanwhile the Fantomen Facebook page was hacked by spammers and angry Polish right-wingers took to the airwaves on Telewizja Republika to decry the issue.
In episode #116 of X-Band: The Phantom Podcast, Mikael Sol talked glowingly about Sahlström's rainbow flag cover, and the impact it could likely have decades down the track.
Back in April 2018, we posted an expose on the cover and The Golden Eagle storyline, which you can read here.
Fantomen 16/2019 has included all the votes for the poll, and with over 300 voters from around the world it was basically down to two top contenders, and only four covers receiving more than 40 votes.
The Golden Eagle cover received 76 votes .
Indeed, Henrik's work ended up taking the top two places, with the cover of Fantomen 25-26/2018 Hero coming in second on 70 votes.
Third was the famous Blood Rain (Fantomen 24/2019) cover by American artist Sal Velluto and Eugenio Mattozzi, reviewed here by Mikael Lyck and discussed here in greater detail. Blood Rain received 48 votes.
Fourth was another cover by Henrik Sahlström, this time for the story Flame (Fantomen 2-3/2018), which received 41 votes. This cover was a re-imagined version of Fantomen 14/1980, as a tribute to the great Rolf Gohs.
The next best only received 17 votes, with the remaining covers only receiving roughly a third of all votes. See the full count in the image at the bottom of this page.
If you are one of the 320 odd people who entered in the competition you have a 1 in 3 chance of getting a bag with the winning cover on it as your prize. When / if you receive it in the mail, make sure you share on Facebook or one of our other social media platforms.
Thanks goes to Andreas Eriksson and Henrik Sahlström for the information about this announcement. Congratulations to Henrik and Sal for their places in last year's competition.
