At the risk of stepping on the toes of the excellent blogger Joseph Nebus, there’s a plot development in The Phantom Daily strip that I just need to comment on.
It’ll be easiest to follow my thoughts if you’re at least loosely up to date with the epic seven-part Wrack and Ruin series that is entering its final stages, with an estimated eight weeks to run at the time of writing.
In recent weeks of what I'm calling Chapter 7: The Journey Home (Daily 264), the Phantom and Diana have returned home to the Deep Woods and the Skull Cave with the liberated Savarna Devi ... liberated from Gravelines, liberated from her revenge lust, and liberated from her clothes.
Boyish titillation achieved, and for some readers it sparked up the memory of almost this exact same scene ahem dialogue from Chapter 2 of the saga, The Chronicle of Old Man Mozz from December 2021.
If you’ve missed ALL the other clues that Tony De Paul has been planting along the way, you couldn’t possibly miss this! The prophesy of Old Man Mozz is still very much in play.
Which brings me to the point of this post – a little theory I’ve developed if you will. Follow me as I connect some dots...
We know that the chain of events that Mozz originally foretold has changed. The Phantom did not deliriously reveal Kit’s whereabouts and so Savarna has not stormed off to Tibet, a path that leads to the death of Phantom 21 and the end of The Phantom line. She might go still, but hasn’t yet.
But there was another possible ending given in Chapters 4 & 6 – one where Diana leaves and it seems that Savarna steps in, fulfilling her erstwhile fantasy of connecting with Phantom 21 and producing Phantom heirs of her own.
But is all as it seems? Here’s my theory, a guess really, at yet another twist in the tale. I wonder if Savarna and Kit Jr becoming an item might fit within Mozz's prophesy of her becoming The Phantom's wife. Maybe, just maybe, Savarna ends up marrying Phantom 22.
I wondered about a possible romantic attraction between Savarna and Kit Jr when they interacted with each other as she arrived at the Skull Cave before being pulled apart by his parents a week or so ago.
Now of course that seemed like Phantom and Diana had recognised a little of the prophesy emerging from Chapter 3 Death in the Himalayas January 2021:
But now on the day of writing, Tuesday 21 November 2023, it seems that the attraction between them might be at least a little bit more adult.
Now, the natural assumption we readers made back when Mozz was prophesising was that Savarna became part of the Phantom lineage by replacing Diana, but maybe she's actually destined for Kit....
There is another clue indicating that this could be a good hunch. Turning again to Death in the Himalayas, in that pesky alternate and disastrous timeline, we learned that Kit has always had a crush on the femme fatale in this clever flashback-within-a-foretelling. So maybe there is a chance at love here?
Is this actually where the strip is going? Probably not, but who knows. Let’s entertain the possibility for just a moment. Could this pairing of characters work? Savarna is clearly Kit’s elder. But how much older?
Personally, I've probably always assumed she was a good 10-15 years older than the twins. But with the way they’re shown in the above panel she could be even 20 years their senior. Mike Manley’s depiction in that flashback panel "could" have the twins somewhere between 10 and 14 years old, while she could easily be early-mid 30s.
Savarna has had a romantic interest in Phantom 21 since she was first introduced into the Phantom universe back in 2009 (Crocco Island West Daily 225). She has appeared in a total of twelve Daily stories (admittedly six of those are in this saga) and has consistently had a bit of an old-school flirty relationship with him.
As a result, for mine she has always seemed to be about the same age as Phantom 21, something I probably just assumed. That’s part of why it seemed plausible for her to "replace" Diana in the prophesy. Not palatable perhaps, but plausible.
So – Savarna as “the older woman” becoming the mother of Phantom 23? If we go long and say she’s 20 years older than Kit Jr, who’s 19-20 now, simple biology says they’d need to hook up soon in order to have that child. But it’s possible.
Plenty of phans might say that’s not any more agreeable than Savarna taking over Diana’s side of the bed, especially given the apparent age difference. There’s certainly more than a few regular readers hoping that Kadia, Heloise’s best friend and daughter of a past Phantom foe Eric “The Nomad” Sahara, might be Kit Jr’s future bride.
But – it’s certainly possible within the current story trajectory. In fact, if you go back and look at that the two “Savarna’s pregnant” sequences from earlier in the story and put Kit Jr behind the mask as Phantom 22, it still makes sense and only requires the prophesy to be incorrect or altered by one Phantom generation.
Chapter 4 Phantom's End June 2022:
Chapter 6 Dungeons Undone March 2023:
Kit Jr could be under the cowl, and Diana could be upset that her son is going to end up with someone who's been a bit of a thorn in her side for quite a while now.
Is Savarna hooking up with Kit Jr what I want as a reader? Probably not (#TeamKadia all the way!) but with all the twists and turns in the Wrack and Ruin saga, I won’t be discounting the possibility … at least not until next month when I am almost certainly proven incorrect and have connected the dots in all the wrong ways.
Many thanks to Jermayn Parker for assistance in researching.
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