Do you know who the first superhero was?
It wasn’t Batman, it wasn’t Superman and it definitely wasn’t Iron Man. The first superhero came many, many years before Tony Stark. He was some guy who wears purple (by mistake, mind you), has a wolf called Devil and adorns his finger with a very famous skull.
I’m of course talking about The Phantom (the hero pic for this article kinda gave it away, didn’t it?).
This masked vigilante is responsible for a hell of a lot more than just a comic strip in a newspaper in New York. He’s the (fictional) man that started it all. He helped push along the Nazi resistance movement, movements that fought against fascism, and even helped the FBI coin the term ‘serial killer’.
The Phantom is the topic of a new six-part podcast, The Phantom Never Dies. Hosted by Maria Lewis under the Nova Entertainment brand, The Phantom Never Dies explores the untold story of the world’s first superhero.
But why should you care? I asked Lewis just that.
“There’s lots of reasons,” she said. “Some of those reasons include how this character undermined the Nazis during World War II, to how this character connected with the people who went on to shape modern cinema.”
It was a loaded question. Lewis has dedicated an entire podcast series to why The Phantom is so important and how, without him, many of us would be entirely different people.
As a young woman in the tech/pop culture journalism scene, Lewis is someone I can’t help but look up to. She’s written books, columns, articles, pieces for television and film – you name it, she’s mastered it and she’s nothing but a champion for the stuff we’re all interested in. The stuff once thrown in the nerd pile and discounted as a proper interest. I’m talking anything that falls within the pop culture bracket – comic books, geek movies, horror movies, science fiction books.
If there’s one thing you all have no doubt noticed over the last couple of years, it’s the mainstreamification of this stuff that once was the source of bullying for many of us.
We’re living in the age of superheroes. In fact, that’s how Lewis opens the podcast’s first episode.
“The most dominate form of film and television, at the moment, is the superhero blockbuster,” she says.
She’s completely right. Your everyday person knows the difference between Marvel and DC as brands, footy players are draped in superhero-themed jerseys while playing at Marvel Stadium. Geek culture is popular culture now.
Within all of this, however, is one Phantom-sized hole. The masked vigilante that started it all.
A bit of history
The Phantom first hit print on February 17, 1936 (the Australian Woman’s Mirror even began publishing the strip in that same year). That means that in just 15 years, superheroes will have been around for a century.
The Phantom resides in the fictional African country of Bangalla and, unlike many others that followed him, he has no superpowers, relying solely on his strength, intelligence and the myth of his immortality to take action against the forces of evil.
Lee Falk literally wrote history when he penned the first The Phantom comic. But before The Phantom there was Mandrake the Magician, which, when you start to get into the story of how Falk started this all, is just utterly fascinating.
The first episode of The Phantom Never Dies goes into this in a lot more detail (I couldn’t do it justice here, even if I tried) but be warned you will be consumed by the story – I may or may not have burnt my pasta while listening.
The Phantom and the term ‘serial killer’
I briefly mentioned The Phantom was behind the term ‘serial killer’. Well, without totally spoiling the second episode which airs on Tuesday, famous FBI behavioural scientist Robert Ressler in 1974 coined the term widely used to describe a person who murders three or more people.
The term used to describe murderers was ‘sequence killer’ but Ressler felt that wasn’t quite fitting. As Lewis explains, Ressler got a little bit nostalgic, returning to the old The Phantom serials that would run prior to a movie at the theatre.
“You would go to the movies and before the movie played (and sometimes it would be a few serials tied together) they would have these 10 to 15 minute mini episodes of a wider story,” she explained.
“And The Phantom one, which came out in 1941 – right in the middle of World War II, America’s just about to get involved, it’s sort of the height of anything that’s ‘patriotic’, right when the idea of being suspicious of foreign people was quite popular – this Phantom serial comes out.”
These serials would pick up week after week. Lewis said it was from that Ressler determined that it was exactly what these killers were doing.
“And that’s where the term serial killer came from,” Lewis added.
Enter Maria and The Phantom Never Dies
But why The Phantom? It’s been done before, however, not like this.
“I wanted to tell a story about why pop culture was important, and The Phantom was one of the best vessels for me to do that,” she told me.
Once we got chatting, it was clear there was a need to share The Phantom’s message. Why is it he doesn’t have the recognition that his now peers have? It’s not because he isn’t popular, it’s that he’s not popular in the market that shapes the direction for pop culture (read: the United States).
The Phantom has a massive following when you leave the shores of the U.S. In fact, Lewis told me one of the largest ongoing fandoms for The Phantom is in India, and this masked vigilante is celebrated massively in Papua New Guinea, too.
At the end of our chat, I asked Lewis again, why is a show like The Phantom Never Dies important? This was her answer.
“Why I think the show is important is because it’s A) history, and it’s B) pop-cultural history,” she said. And that matters for reasons that cannot be condensed into a sound bite, truly, but if you listen to the show you will understand.
“These characters literally inspired the Nazi resistance movement … Now, would those movements have gone on to exist anyway? Maybe, but the inciting incident for a few of them, particularly in Norway and Sweden, was this character in an all-purple suit who has a pet wolf called Devil and a stallion called Hero.
“That’s a direct line to something that really shaped our history in a weird and specific way.
“A character who inspired the word serial killer, from just this one, tiny, little morsel of pop culture – all these tendrils are able to spread and impact people.”
There are so many more examples like this across time. Pop culture infiltrates every aspect of modern life in ways that are big and small, and in ways that people don’t necessarily realise.
While the underdog story of superheroes has kind of dissolved now every Tom, Dick and Harry has watched Marvel’s entire catalogue, there’s something in this story being delivered by a woman, and hearing from people that have previously been excluded from the conversation, that is magical to me about The Phantom Never Dies.
You can catch The Phantom Never Dies wherever you get your podcasts, or via the Nova Entertainment website.
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