Superheroes on World Screens

Rayna Denison, Rachel Mizsei-Ward

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781626746749
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Superheroes such as Superman and Spider-Man have spread all over the world. As this edited volume shows, many national cultures have created or reimagined the idea of the superhero, while the realm of superheroes now contains many icons whose histories borrow from local folklore and legends. Consequently, the superhero needs reconsideration, to be regarded as part of both local and global culture as well as examined for the rich meanings that such broad origins and re-workings create.

This collection stands out as the first concentrated attempt to think through the meanings and significance of the superhero, not only as a product of culture in the United States, but as a series of local, transnational, and global exchanges in popular media. Through analysis of mainly film, television, and computer screens, contributors offer three challenges to the idea of the "American" superhero: transnational reimagining of superhero culture, emerging local superheroes, and the use of local superheroes to undermine dominant political ideologies. The essays explore the shifting transnational meanings of Doctor Who, Thor, and the Phantom, as these characters are reimagined in world culture. Other chapters chart the rise of local superheroes from India, the Middle East, Thailand, and South Korea. These explorations demonstrate how far superheroes have traveled to inspire audiences worldwide.

SECTION ONE

Not Just the American Way

Rethinking the “Americanness” of US Superheroes

THE TRANSPLANTED SUPERHERO

The Phantom Franchise and Australian Popular Culture

KEVIN PATRICK

In December 2008, comic book fan sites and online media outlets were abuzz with the news that an Australian company, Sherlock Symington Productions, had purchased film rights to the American comic strip character the Phantom. Aside from announcing that the script was penned by an Australian filmmaker, Tom Boyle, few details about the project—titled The Phantom: Legacy—were confirmed. But the company’s spokesman, Bruce Sherlock, felt confident enough to predict that the film, budgeted at $130 million, would go into production by the end of 2009. “I think we did it okay before,” he added, “but I really honestly feel we can do it better. A lot better” (quoted in Clayfield 2008).

The Phantom: Legacy would be Sherlock’s second encounter with the superhero popularly known as “The Ghost Who Walks.” Almost twenty years beforehand, Sherlock had made similar pronouncements as the head of an Australian consortium that bought the film rights to the comic strip, a deal which—nearly a decade later—culminated with the release of The Phantom (1996), starring Billy Zane. However, the character’s marginal status as a comic strip “superhero,” coupled with the film’s lackluster box office performance, has meant that The Phantom has received scant attention. Yet the story behind the making of the first Phantom feature film (dotted by a string of coincidences) is a remarkable case study of how the internationalization of film production has meant that commercial and creative genesis for ostensibly “American” film projects can emanate just as easily from peripheral sites, like Australia, as they can from the traditional filmmaking epicenter of Hollywood.

However, the pronounced level of Australian involvement in the production of The Phantom only hints at the character’s intriguing cultural status “Down Under.” This chapter will explain how The Phantom has resonated with generations of Australian readers since the mid-1930s, by charting the series’ successful transition from popular women’s magazines to comic books. It will be argued that Australian publishers’ deliberate efforts to mask the comic strip’s American origins played a significant part in encouraging Australian audiences to appropriate the Phantom as an “indigenous” superhero. Both in print and on screen, The Phantom offers unexpected and telling insights about the global circulation of the superhero phenomenon far beyond its American homeland.

Who Is The Phantom?

The Phantom comic strip, created by author Lee Falk, debuted in the New York Journal on February 17, 1936. Midway through the first story, titled “The Singh Brotherhood,” Falk created an epic legend around the Phantom, revealing that he was the twenty-first descendant of an English nobleman who, in 1525, on the skull of his father’s murderer, swore an oath “against all piracy, greed and cruelty.” He further pledged, “As long as my descendants walk the earth, the eldest male of the family shall carry out my work.” And so began the unbroken dynasty of the Phantom, who many believed was immortal and thus came to be known as “The Ghost Who Walks—Man Who Cannot Die” (Falk and Moore 2010 [1936], 115).

Clad in a skin-tight costume, his face concealed by an eye-mask and cowl, and sporting a distinctive skull symbol on his gun belt, the Phantom was the first costumed crime fighter to appear in American newspaper comic strips and became the visual prototype for the costumed superhero, predating the debut of Superman in Action Comics (1938). Yet the Phantom also bore many of the hallmarks of the pulp-magazine heroes of the early 1930s, such as The Shadow (1931) and Doc Savage (1933). Like them, the Phantom lived in a secret locale, known as the Skull Cave, and had a loyal band of followers, the Bandar pygmy tribe, who alone knew the secret of the Phantom dynasty. He relied on his physical strength and, occasionally, his Colt .45s to defeat his adversaries, instead of using fantastic powers that defined the next generation of comic book superheroes. The Phantom also fought the standard retinue of pulp magazine-era villains, such as gangsters, pirates and feudal warlords, instead of the costumed super villains typically found in superhero comics. For these reasons, Peter Coogan has argued that, although he “laid important groundwork for the superhero genre,” the Phantom did not represent a seismic break “from the conventions of the [pulp magazines’] mystery man” formula, and thus failed to generate the same level of popular imitation caused by the debut of Superman, who instigated the vogue for costumed superheroes in American comic books throughout World War II (2006, 184).

There were other aspects of the Phantom’s fictional scenario that made him a problematic superhero. Whereas most superheroes’ adventures took place in recognizably urban American settings, such as Batman’s Gotham City, the Phantom’s earliest exploits occurred in the sort of faraway locales found in pulp magazines, such as the Himalayas and the Netherlands East Indies, before Lee Falk eventually reassigned him to the quasi Afro-Asian region known as “Bengali” (later “Bangalla”). The Phantom’s ancestry was even more porous than the geographical boundaries of his jungle realm, as his forefathers had wed Scandinavian maidens, English actresses, Indian princesses and Native American tribeswomen (Falk and Barry 1990 [1989–1990], 7–9; Falk and Barry 1991 [1979], 258). According to Lee Falk, the Phantom’s colorful lineage was a key reason for his enduring popularity:

My stuff translates very simply because it’s not American in background, or necessarily in temperament. . . . They’re international strips. The Phantom is not even American. . . . He’s multi-cultured. (Quoted in Murray 2005, 49)

The factors that arguably militated against the Phantom’s popular acceptance in his American homeland—such as his lack of superpowers, or recognizably American origin or setting—did much to enhance his international appeal. King Features Syndicate (which held copyright ownership) sold The Phantom to newspaper and magazine publishers in Italy (1937), France (1938), Turkey (1939), and Sweden (1940) soon after the series’ American debut.¹ And nowhere would The Phantom enjoy a more ardent following than in Australia.

Making The Phantom “Australian”

The Phantom made its antipodean debut in The Australian Woman’s Mirror on 1 September 1936, where it was promoted, not as a juvenile comic strip, but as an “exciting picture serial” intended for an adult audience (Australian Woman’s Mirror 1936, 49). Such a publication may seem an unlikely venue for a masked adventurer, but the inclusion of The Phantom in the Woman’s Mirror was driven by commercial urgency. Launched in 1924, the Woman’s Mirror was pitched squarely at Australian housewives, who were awarded prizes for contributing recipes and household tips to the magazine. By 1925, this successful editorial formula helped the Woman’s Mirror achieve the highest circulation of any weekly periodical in Australia (Rolfe 1979, 290). However, the magazine’s once unassailable market dominance was challenged by the arrival of The Australian Women’s Weekly in 1933. This sophisticated, upmarket rival posed a direct challenge to the “homely” and “dowdy” Woman’s Mirror (300). The Women’s Weekly had begun boosting its already impressive circulation with the addition of Lee Falk’s first comic strip, Mandrake the Magician, in December 1934 (O’Brien 1982, 55). The Woman’s Mirror was therefore understandably keen to purchase the local serial rights to Falk’s newest comic strip from its Australian licensor, the Yaffa Syndicate.

The Phantom’s lengthy tenure in the Woman’s Mirror—where it remained until the magazine’s closure in 1961—cemented the character’s popular status within Australian print culture. Appearing in a respectable publication like the Woman’s Mirror meant The Phantom was deemed acceptable “family entertainment” and could be read in households that would not otherwise admit disreputable, American-styled comic books. The character’s exposure to a large, predominantly female readership may also explain why the present-day edition of The Phantom comic book retains a strong following among older Australian women.

More significant, however, were the magazine’s deliberate attempts to promote The Phantom as an Australian, rather than American, comic strip. References to American dollars were changed to sterling currency, while American spelling and slang was replaced by their “correct” Australian equivalents. Diana Palmer, the Phantom’s long-suffering fiancée, was referred to as a “young Sydney girl” (Falk and Moore 1938 [1936], 5), while the setting of the opening episode was changed from New York Harbor to somewhere “off Sydney Heads” (9). Although such devices were later abandoned, they helped foster the widespread belief among Australian readers that The Phantom was a home-grown comic strip.

The Phantom became an undeniably popular feature for the Woman’s Mirror and appealed to all members of the family, particularly children. Keen to exploit this ancillary market, the magazine’s publisher released The Phantom comic book in 1938, compiling previously published episodes from the Woman’s Mirror in a single edition, but its success was cut short by the imposition of wartime newsprint rationing in 1940. Nonetheless, Australia became the second country in the world—after Italy—to issue The Phantom in comic book format. By comparison, The Phantom had to wait until 1962 before receiving its own, self-titled comic book in the United States.²

The Comic Book “Cult” of The Phantom

The ongoing presence of The Phantom in the Woman’s Mirror proved beneficial for Frew Publications, a small Sydney firm which acquired the rights to produce a brand new edition of The Phantom comic book, commencing in September 1948. The character’s weekly exposure in the Woman’s Mirror served as free advertising for the series, which gradually achieved a monthly circulation of ninety thousand copies by 1950 (Snowden 1973, 6). By the late 1950s, however, Australia’s comic book industry was facing competition from the introduction of television broadcasting in 1956 and the re-admission of imported American comics in 1960 (Patrick 2012a, 166 and 170–71). Frew Publications was not immune to these disruptions and drastically cut back its publishing output to just a handful of comics by the early 1960s. Yet contemporary press reports noted that The Phantom continued to exert a “phenomenal grip on the juvenile market” (The Observer 1960, 6).

Nor did the demise of the Woman’s Mirror deny any further publicity for Frew’s flagship comic book hero. In 1960, Australian Consolidated Press (publisher of the Women’s Weekly) acquired the Woman’s Mirror, before merging it with Everybody’s, a youth-oriented weekly dedicated to “show business and pop culture” (O’Brien 1982, 143). The Phantom duly reappeared in Everybody’s, where it remained just prior to the magazine’s closure in 1968. By this time, Yaffa Syndicate was selling The Phantom comic strip to growing numbers of regional and metropolitan newspapers throughout Australia, thus maintaining the character’s public profile (Shedden 2006). For example, the wedding of the Phantom and Diana Palmer in 1977 received considerable (albeit tongue-in-cheek) press coverage in Australia (Cook 1978, 12; Gardiner 1982; Kennedy 1980, 35), culminating in a satirical sketch performed by the future star of Crocodile Dundee, Paul Hogan, on his top-rated television program, The Paul Hogan Show, in 1978. The Phantom enjoyed an unusually high media profile, with reports noting the character’s popularity among politicians and sporting celebrities (Jones 1986, 130–31), the high prices paid by collectors for old Phantom comics (Stretton 1985, 16), and how his devoted readers came from all walks of life, from stockbrokers to fire fighters (Brown 1988, 25–26). That such levels of media coverage were rarely extended to any other comic book character attests to the Australian public’s enduring fascination with the character.

However, by the mid-1980s, Australia’s remaining comic book publishers, including Yaffa Publications and Federal Comics, gradually left the field, unable to compete with color television, videocassette films and computer games (Porter 1981, 30). Only Frew Publications remained, with The Phantom still reportedly selling forty thousand copies per issue, making it the last “Australian” comic book left standing (Henderson 1986, 14). Despite the local comic industry’s straitened circumstances, The Phantom continued to command astonishing loyalty, even as its readership grew progressively older. Ian Jack, an expatriate Australian fan, recalled The Phantom’s popularity among his white-collar workmates:

A lot of accountants I know followed [The Phantom]. Every second week, when the book came out, the accountants would disappear from the office and take up watch at the newsstand, waiting for the new issue to appear. (Quoted in Benjamin 1985, 73)

When set against this historical backdrop, it now becomes easier to understand why the impetus for developing The Phantom feature film came, not from American, but Australian producers, who were nevertheless Hollywood “outsiders.”

The Crocodile Dundee Connection

Bruce Sherlock would have perhaps identified with Jack’s former colleagues, as the founder of Lion Insurance Brokers freely admitted to being “a Phantom freak.” So too were many of his clients, who Sherlock noticed wore Phantom “skull rings,” observing that “the Phantom has this great facility for taking . . . serious [business] people back to their childhood” (quoted in Jacques 1988, 25). Among Sherlock’s clients was Peter Sjoquist, production manager on the Australian film Crocodile Dundee (1986), who put the idea of co-producing a new film to Sherlock. Casting around for ideas, Sherlock bought a copy of The Phantom and, wondering why no one had yet made a film about his favorite comic book hero, suggested to Sjoquist that they approach Lee Falk to see if the film rights were available (Ward 1989, 12).

Crocodile Dundee turned out to be the perfect calling card for the aspiring producers. The film was already on its way to becoming the highest grossing domestic film in Australian box office history and would eventually break US box office records for a foreign film (Goldsmith, Ward and O’Regan 2010, 53).³ Falk invited them to meet him in New York, largely on the basis of Sjoquist’s association with Crocodile Dundee, later declaring that “Crocodile Dundee was exactly the tone and class” that he wanted for The Phantom (quoted in Clark 1988, 3). Once negotiations were concluded with King Features Syndicate, Falk was retained as a story consultant and visited Australia in March 1988 to discuss his initial concepts with the production team’s newest member, Ken Shadie, who co-wrote the screenplay for Crocodile Dundee. Sherlock was undoubtedly convinced about the potential audience interest in the film, claiming that The Phantom comic strip was followed by an estimated one hundred million readers worldwide (Jacques 1988, 25; Ward 1989, 12). While Shadie declared that his script would portray “a 1990s Phantom [who would be] a modern-day hero” (quoted in Watson 1989, 83), Sherlock maintained that the film would remain loyal to Falk’s vision of the Phantom as a deeply moral hero. There would be “no blood and guts on the screen,” insisted Sherlock, adding that it would be a “mixture of [James] Bond and Raiders of the Lost Ark” (quoted in Sydney Morning Herald 1988, 3). The comparison with Steven Spielberg’s retro-styled adventure film would turn out to be both prescient and, ultimately, ill-advised.

Hollywood on the Gold Coast

Sherlock’s acquisition of the film rights to The Phantom coincided with the American film industry’s growing pursuit of “runaway” film production opportunities—a tren...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• – Section One – Not Just the American Way Rethinking the “Americanness” of US Superheroes
• – Section Two – Superheroes on World Screens From Local Productions to Transnational Blockbusters
• – Section Three – The Politics, Morality, and Socio-Cultural Impact of Superheroes on World Screens
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index