Tony DePaul answers the phans' questions

To celebrate our 300th X-Band: The Phantom Podcast, we had the chance to host a bunch of phans asking newspaper creators Jeff Weigel and Mike Manley a bunch of questions. Due to Tony DePaul having some health battles, he was unable to attend but he gave those phans a chance to ask specific questions to him.

What follows if his replies to those (and our own) questions. It will take you some time to read it all but these opportunities do not always come up and you will not be disappointed. We thank again Mike Manley, Jeff Weigel and Tony DePaul for their time and willingness to answer some tough questions.

I missed out on the February 8 recording of the Chronicle Chamber’s 300th podcast. That was day 3 of a year-long chemo regimen, and day 1 for the addition of a second med that has its challenges. My partners Mike Manley and Jeff Weigel did a great job, as always. It was an interesting and fun talk. My thanks to the Chronicle Chamber blokes for this opportunity to take a swing at the questions I missed.

—Tony DePaul, February 27, 2025

What is the process behind the creation? Do they receive a full script from Tony, send him the initial sketches etc? Or is it like when Sy Barry was the artist, when Falk essentially left the art to the artist? (Question by Ross)

Both things are true, Ross: Every story is fully scripted and the art is entirely up to the artist. You can see a script sample here. I write about 350 pages a year for Mike and Jeff, something over 8,000 pages on my run so far.

I write in Final Draft, the screenwriting app. The script gives the artist a full understanding of the narrative, panel by panel: what the characters want, the tone they strike in what they’re doing, thinking, feeling, saying, a description of the setting, all that.

My background is in journalism, so you might think of the script as a reporting job on the Who, What, Why, When, Where and How. It’s a fully formed continuity. As visual storytellers, Mike and Jeff very capably take it from there. They bring to life flat words on a page. They might add panels or delete panels to serve the art; as long as the same narrative work’s getting done, that’s fine with me. The artists have composition issues to solve. In that, my role is abstract and strictly on the front end: Keep the word count down so as not to restrict the artists’ options.

As far as work flow, Jeff likes to send me his roughs in case there are details we might want to talk about, and Mike copies me on his pencils and inks when he files with our editors in Orlando. It’s a good system. Until halfway through Paul Ryan’s run I didn’t see the art until the day it was published. Lots of little errors (and a few big ones) got by us.

How difficult is it to balance the legacy of such an illustrious character with such a long history against the desire to advance the story in new directions? (Question by MonoChromeMike on Reddit)

What to leave in, what to leave out, that’s always the question, Mike. The strip is a living thing. Like us, if it’s not growing, it’s dying. It needs to change and adapt with the times. With this caveat: It must never change at the expense of the character. The world around the Phantom is always changing but the character is never diminished. That’s the balance. He remains a classic hero. He’s not going to suddenly become an antihero, that modern man done to death in comics and other popular fiction: cynical, angry, stunted, vengeful, self-pitying, and finally uninteresting.

If you'd been given a choice, would you have preferred taking on the strip with the Phantom as a husband/father, or as a younger man still courting Diana? (Question by Ross)

We have both narrative opportunities before us, Ross, the best of both worlds.

The 21st Phantom is as vital as ever, easily a dozen years shy of the prime of life (I think of him as 42, tops) and the presumed 22nd Phantom-in-waiting is coming into his own at 17, pursuing his secondary education overseas, courting Manju in the Mountain City, and, in the weeks ahead, maybe something will develop with Kadia Sahara in Mawitaan. Diana wants to see Kit with Kadia because it thwarts the Mozz prophecy. Heloise, who doesn’t know the prophecy, hopes to spark a romance because Kadia, a troubled soul, is her best friend and she thinks Kit would be good for Kadia. And, naturally enough, she misses her brother. She doesn’t want him to return to his studies in Asia. She wants him home in Africa.

If you had the chance to reboot the Phantom to get rid of some of the more questionable parts of the character's history, would you? (Question by Joe Douglas from Reddit)

No, not at all, because we are rid of the old embarrassments, Joe. We’ve dealt with the early years.

Now, I think, the way forward is one of benign neglect for things best left in the past. When I dealt with 1953’s wrongheaded version of The Chain, I felt we had finally placed a marker between the past and the present; we got it on record and are free to move on without being burdened by every last obsolete aspect of another time; no need to feel obligated to keep scrubbing away at things as they once were. That felt like the responsible way to do it. The reboot is, far too often, the mark of the demolition man. All of a sudden, everything is up for grabs.

In the past, KFS inexplicably allowed a licensee to, shall we say, dynamite the works, rendering the Phantom ghastly and unrecognizable. That particular reboot struck at the very heart of the character. That’s the danger. Epictetus said it in the Enchiridion: Once you exceed the measure, there is no limit. I’m against reboots in the way that Edna Mode is against capes.

Do you think if you could go back in time and speak to Lee Falk, would you suggest he kills off Phantoms every 30-40 years?

No, I like that the 21st Phantom inhabits an eternal present that began in 1936. As long as the daily and Sunday strips are in production, he lives on. If we were to bind the strip’s timeline to the real world, supporting characters would come and go without ever having much chance to become established. They’d be constantly burning through time off-narrative, leaving the universe a much poorer place for it. I feel certain the strip would have been finished in 1966 if Falk had killed off his title character after a 30-year run. Many readers would have stopped reading. Many newspapers around the world would have cancelled.

How do you try to work around the subject of things like racist tones in stories while trying to simultaneously satisfy the purists and acknowledging the sensitivities.

We’re in a good place on this score. The ugly race baggage of the early years is a fact of history—but it is history. The Phantom's no lawgiver, he rules over no one. He’s an African with African roots going back nearly 500 years. Jeff and Mike bring the tribal peoples of Bangalla to life with all due dignity; the tribes are never made to look ridiculous, ignorant, savage or subservient. We have lots of conservative readers, but I won’t believe what they pine for in the past is Falk’s demeaning treatment of the tribes. I’d sooner think there’s a fuzzier old nostalgia at work there. In short, I don’t feel any tension at all between leaving the past where it is and writing tales that our Falkist friends can find as engaging as any other sort of reader.

The twins are basically at the age to be taking over the role of the Phantom. Do they have to be frozen in age now?

Yes, I think so. Kit and Heloise are 17, I don’t expect them to get much older on my watch. Unless the strip is canceled. We know what happens then insofar as Old Man Mozz is concerned. Readers may choose to think actual events would take some other trajectory for reasons unrevealed to Mozz, but, for those who accept the prophecy, the Walker line ends with the death of the 21st Phantom and the subsequent battlefield death of his son, and a Devi line of Phantoms continues the adventure into a future we won’t witness.

When does "suspension of disbelief" come into effect and when does it not? (Question by Mozz)

It’s always in effect! Comics are preposterous. Done well, they’re preposterous in a way that delights or intrigues the reader, who willingly slides up or down the suspension-of-disbelief scale as needed. If a man greets the day in a cave, gives his intrepid mountain wolf a pat on the head, dons a purple costume and rides off on a white horse, that’s already an easy 3 on a suspension-of-disbelief scale from 1 to 10.

The Sunday story Jeff and I are working on, The Ungraved, is more like a 9, on the order of, say, Falk’s little people from outer space flying around the jungle saddled on birds. I wouldn’t call The Ungraved fantasy, but it’s not something you see every day or would ever expect to see. It runs on the same suspension of disbelief we bring to Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, or The Outer Limits.

What is the future of newspaper stories?

The future of Phantom newspaper stories in newspapers? That’s over. Everything hangs on the uncertain online future. Of course, sometimes things seem to be unfolding in a certain way even if they’re not. In 2020, Hearst took KFS out of the Entertainment & Syndication Division and made it a part of Hearst Newspaper Group. I wondered then if Hearst wasn't looking to unload the newspaper group, comics and all—and I hoped it wouldn’t be to Gannett, sharks known for gutting everything they buy. That was five years ago, hasn’t happened yet.

I see your question in two parts, really: Will the strips exist? And if so, will they be produced by professional artists and writers? I’d like to think Mike and Jeff and I aren’t the last of our kind, but we probably are. We’ve been professionally employed in the arts our entire lives but none of us earn our living on the Phantom. That suggests to me that newspaper strips, if they survive online, will be written and drawn by amateurs, or might become a thing that only financially independent professionals can afford to do; professionals who will write and draw the Phantom for short money because they love the character and the work.

Independent film is like that nowadays; producers and directors who inherited vast sums of money take on projects of artistic merit that can't find a home in the commercial market. In many cases that’s a good thing. My plan is to enjoy writing the Phantom in the moment and not dwell on opaque business matters that a private syndicate properly holds close to the vest. We’ll all know the future when it gets here.

What do you think the effects of public domain will have on the Phantom?

Given that Falk introduced Diana even before the Phantom, things could get interesting. There’s a lot of good grist in the debut year, 1936. The Singh, the Sky Band, all that. I won’t be surprised if independent writers and artists move in on the material and test the limits of what’s legally up for grabs.

What do you believe will be your main contribution to the Phantom's legacy when you finish? (Question by Glaucio.)

As Captain Walker of the carrack Matilda would say—God’s teeth! Did you really just ask a man in chemo for a preview of his eulogy?

You've created two of the greatest antagonists the Phantom has ever faced: Chatu and Nomad. The last time we saw them, they were incarcerated, but you left a cliffhanger that someone knows where Chatu is (The Rhodian Column). Are there any plans to bring these two villains back? Perhaps in a final showdown between them and the Phantom? Could this be an opportunity to see the rise of the 22nd Phantom? (Question by Glaucio)

Every scenario I’ve had in mind for the Python and the Nomad gets them killed off, Glaucio, which I would hate to do. I have no doubt the Python and the Nomad will be back one day, maybe teamed up against the Phantom, but, until then, they’re going to have to keep pacing their cages in Guantanamo Bay and Wambesiland.

For reasons said higher up, the Python and the Nomad won’t have anything to do with the death of the 21st Phantom.

If you were in charge of KFS, what would you do? (without saying something that will see you cancelled)

Got into this a little bit a few questions back. If I were running the show, creators would be paid more, not just for the work we do but in recognition of how the quality of the work supports the company’s licensing and merchandising revenues. Phantom merch is up! The trend line is good. What Mike and Jeff and I do clearly supports this growing commercial interest in licensing the IP.

That said, the syndicate is a black box, I know as much about it as you do. I have no idea what it has for resources, what’s feasible, what’s a nonstarter. This may be counterintuitive, but the fact that Hearst is privately held may be one reason why the Phantom strips are still in production. If Hearst were public, accountable to outside shareholders and analysts demanding the last greasy buck, the strips might have gone into reprints years ago.

For all I know, a family member high up in the Hearst empire is sentimental about the Phantom and that’s part of the reason we’re still paid to do what we do, albeit not as much as we know we’re worth. At the same time, Hearst and KFS have both cut jobs deeply in recent years and the Phantom’s still standing—so bravo to that.

From my POV as a 25-year freelancer who has been in the building exactly once, I know this for a fact: Every working stiff I know in Orlando and New York is dancing as fast as they can. Under high-stress conditions, they give readers their best every day.

Why did you want to create a story in which the 21st Phantom dies?

I’ll refer you to these 3,800 words on that.

Why was it important to show the Phantoms eyes as he dies?

An end-of-lore narrative is an extraordinary departure from the expected. Extraordinary things will happen in a story like that.

Will we see a Kit Junior story where he is shown as being a good candidate to take over from 21. Heloise was shown as being capable with her battle with the Nomad but what about Kit Junior? (Question by Bill)

That time is approaching, Bill. Until a few weeks ago I might have told you it was here. I outlined a sequence like that years ago and just recently thought about wrapping it into The Spark, the new daily story Mike and I are working on. It suddenly felt wrong, as if it were running counter to what The Spark is all about. It was pulling in too many elements from other adventures and just felt wrong to me. Kit’s debut as a Phantom is a story in its own right. It’ll happen.

How do you find the balance of reflective stories you have brought to the newspaper strip with more action stories many of us read and enjoyed in the 1960’s and 1980’s?

It depends on how we define action, really. I hope readers see a lot going on in every story, even if the Phantom isn’t running around, jumping, chopping, shooting, and bruising brains with that punishing right cross. I think Falk was aware, too, that the real action in the Phantom universe is mystery, intrigue, atmosphere, narrative; it’s not primarily violence, and certainly not frenetic violence.

You’ll remember those montage panels of the early tales: in a single panel, the faces of two or three thugs deform to the impact of the Phantom’s fist. I see that as Falk’s way of saying, okay, let’s hit this beat and move on. You could stretch that single panel into weeks of script but it would be as dull to write as it would be to read. Memory plays tricks on us, in any event. Readers tend to remember the early stories as full of action, but go back and read The Hanta Witch or some other memorable yarn. You might be surprised at how little “action” there is.

Can you explain why you are comfortable to make changes to some elements that fans enjoy and are used to like the Unknown Commanders office? and or The Chain?

Well, again, the strip doesn’t exist to remain static or to coddle readers in their comfort zone. AI could write fan service, every story written off a template as if focus-grouped to a fare-thee-well. With a natural language interface I’m sure I could write that algorithm in about 90 minutes and a computer could generate endless versions of the same comfortable story forever. Maybe some fans would be happy with that, I don’t know.

Me, I wouldn’t write fan service if I were starving. I’d clean bus station toilets first. Falk, as you may know, was bombarded with criticism when the Phantom and Diana married in 1977. He was upsetting a familiar pattern. Insisting that nothing should ever change is a not-uncommon way of looking at the world, but it’s one that guarantees disappointment in life with a lot more than just comic strips.

For me, the measure is always: Does something new that I’m considering add dimension, add narrative complexity? If it does, that’s a good thing. If it merely subtracts, then it’s change for the sake of change. The new office isn’t about a physical space at all; it’s about expanding and enriching the Unknown Commander’s relationship to the Jungle Patrol. You’ll see that develop in the stories ahead. Maybe some readers will long for the old days of an empty room with a single object in it; a single object with a single purpose, that of serving a timeworn sight gag: Worubu opens the safe, he takes papers out, he puts papers in, he wonders how papers appear, he wonders how papers disappear. If some readers feel they need to see that again and again and again, there are 88 years of old stories that can scratch the itch. But the strip has moved on, as it must.

I am interested in Tony DePaul's perspective of an aspect of the "wrack and ruin" prediction. He has been clear that if the Phantom comic continues forever then the 21st Phantom will always be the present Phantom, never dying, but that if (which given the comic industry and the Phantom's niche market, may well be the possibility) the Phantom went out of print that Mozz's prediction is the "canon" death of the Phantom. Tony DePaul indicated that the destination is decided, but the route to get there may change. My question is, in Tony DePaul's opinion, how much around the Phantom's death is set in stone? Already the Phantom has changed how some events played out, so if he were to die, how much of the wrack and ruin has to come true with it? A noble death in the mountains, yes his destined fate - but could his son avoid becoming a killer who abandons the Phantom role? If so, are there some other parts of the prediction that are set in stone but by a different path? If a Devi line of Phantoms is set in stone for example, could this not be reached via a Devi-Walker lineage of the 21st Phantom's son Kit instead? It raises interesting possibilities that are more than just an inevitable slowly-approaching loss of everything the Phantom holds dear.

This is the reader I write for! The close reader, the participating reader. The only thing carved in stone is what the reader chooses to carve in a considered reading of the text and the art. I love that the narrative has the reader’s imagination working along these lines.

With the Phantom's creation now being more explicitly linked to a Bandar prophecy, and the credence seemingly given to Old Man Mozz's ability to foresee possible futures, is the Phantom strip one in which the supernatural is now acknowledged by the main characters? For example, could we expect the Phantom to be skeptical when confronted by seemingly supernatural forces, or would he potentially approach each instance with an open mind?

An open mind, certainly. Whether the Phantom’s able to solve a mystery or must simply accept it, he’s not the sort to prejudge matters from the start. He’s seen too many inexplicable things happen. The Phantom seems at his most interesting when he’s dealing with the unknown, working through challenges without full knowledge.

You mention prophecy as an example. Is prophecy supernatural? I don’t know the answer to that. To some, time as a dimension of space might be a supernatural concept if they’re otherwise inclined to a metaphysical outlook. And quantum physics—there’s a world as far from natural experience as you can get! Whether a mystery is supernatural or not is up to the reader. To me, the mysteries that confront the Phantom seem not supernatural but more like the undiscovered natural; mysteries that can either be solved or must simply be accepted as extraordinary events in an otherwise unknowable natural order of things. The Visitor comes to mind. Some readers saw the entity as supernatural. I’m not so sure.

Given that the Bandar prophecy underpinned important elements of the Phantom's creation/lore (in terms of creating a champion who would 'always live on', live in the skull cave etc) is it likely we'll see one day see a discussion between the Phantom and Diana and/or his children on this subject?" Or similar discussions with Guran (or other Bandar)?

No, I think that happens in a real-time exploration of life in the Deep Woods in that first year after the destruction of the Matilda. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, might even end up writing it as Jeff’s next Sunday tale. Not sure about that yet.

What was going on in Kit Walker’s head in 1536-1537? There must have been a Bandar man or woman who tutored him in the language, the culture, in tribal mythology. Does Kit think about making his way back to England? When he swears his oath to fight piracy, greed, injustice, cruelty in all its forms, we assume he means to do so in Bangalla. We assume it because we know the future. He didn’t. All he knew was the present moment of his predicament.

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Thank you to Tony DePaul for his time to answer these questions while receiving treatment for an ongoing battle. We wish you the best with this new adventure. Again thank you to Jeff Weigel and Mike Manley for their time during the 300th X-Band: The Phantom Podcast. Next up will be Jeff Weigel who will answer some extra questions that were asked of him after the podcast.