The Echo Newspaper is a local Thursday Newspaper sold in Dublin with over 30,000 readers and from April 18, 2024 they have been featuring a weekly comic page supplied and eventually will be worked on by the students from the new Tallaght Academy of Sequential Art. The comic page at the moment are not created by students but this will happen later in the year when their classes start.
The first weekly newspaper comics page feature strips Flash Gordon by Dan Schkade, translated into Gaeilge by Gary Moloney with lettering by Rob Jones. The Phantom's Origin as retold by Cormac Hughes that is a remake of the first Phantom Sunday page and was first introduction in a 2017 Lightning Strike Comic. The last comic to feature in the comics page is Popeye The Sailor Man by Randy Milholland.
From April 25, 2024, the Phantom newspaper story that is featured in the newspaper is the last completed Sunday Phantom newspaper story "Return to the Temple of the Gods" by Tony DePaul and Jeff Weigel. We assume the stories will continue from here and will run a few years behind.
I feel this venture benefits everyone involved with the newspaper getting some great comics in their paper and we all know the benefit of that - it fits nicely with the puzzles included. The Phantom, Flash Gordon and Popeye also get great exposure to 30,000+ new readers and the students will get real life experience working on comics and a newspaper.
While a newspaper picking up the Phantom is good news, in my opinion King Features should look at providing a cheaper service and encouraging other newspapers and sequential art colleges to work together with their licensed products. Surely everyone comes out of this a winner.
Lightning Strike publisher Eoin McAuley is one of the men behind the new Tallaght Academy of Sequential Art school located in Dublin, Ireland. This news is on the back of Frew and Fantomen reprinting their stories and Lightning Strike creating new Phantom stories which Frew will be publishing.
I must admit the positioning of the strips on the comics newspaper page has me a little confused. I can see the point of cramming the three Sunday stories on one page to get your value for the one page but the orphan panels on the last line can be a bit jarring at first.
For the record I do love the inclusion of retelling of the Phantom origin story on April 18 2024. It is a great starting point for potentially 30,000 new readers.
Below you can see the comics page plus an article about the new feature.
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