Dear Community
I consider myself as INDRAJAL COMIC LOVER. Well that I think I am, but after reading the following article TODAY - after 14 Years, I find that I have to still learn a lot. By most humbly reserving this space to
Mr. KAI FRIESE, this is my dedication to him and Late
Mr. LEE FALK. The following article is adapted in original from :-
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?207314
FOR those who came in late...Lee Falk, creator of The
Phantom a.k.a. Kit Walker, the Ghost Who Walks...the man who cannot die—well,
he died last month.
Some 35 years ago, Bennett & Coleman began to
publish the Indrajal Phantom comic books that dominated the misspent afternoons
of my childhood. It was a quieter, gentler time. Mrs G had not yet become She
Who Must Be Obeyed, a car was still an Amby, TV was Chitrahaar at a neighbour's
house, and Coke was it.
And my friends and I were a cargo cult. The products of phoren
that washed up on these shores were marooned here without their global
marketing strategies or moulded plastic packaging. So we hoarded, borrowed and
rented Superman, Batman, and even Aquaman when we could. But The Phantom had
come in on an earlier tide. He was a castaway on our side of the pond. The
production values had a familiar local crappiness. Phantoms had matte covers
and no ads for Amazing Incredible Sea Monkeys or the Inflatable Raquel Welch
Doll.
But the currents of international
commercial and cultural transmission have since been charted. Surfing the
Internet last week I was rewarded with this jetsam: the original Phantom recap
from 1936:
For those who came in late: Four
hundred years ago, a man was washed up on a remote Bengal shore. He'd seen his
father killed and his ship scuttled by Singh pirates. He swore an oath on the
skull of his father's murderer "to devote my life to the destruction of
all forms of Piracy, Greed and Cruelty." He was the first Phantom, and the
eldest male of each succeeding generation of his family carried on... As the
unbroken line continued through the cen -turies the Orient believed it was
always the same man!
Bengal Shore! Singh Pirates! I
could hardly believe my Oriental eyes! And there was more. In 1944 Phantom even
fought the Imperial Japanese Army when they "invaded his jungle lair in
Bengali". But the Phantom of my boyhood lived in the Denkali Woods in the
Republic of Bangalla (cap: Mawitaan) which as everyone knows is in Africa. Now
it can be told: his imaginary domain was really Darkest India .
In fact, the Phantom began life in
1936 as an urban American playboy who stalked criminals by night—a precursor of
Bruce Wayne. But then something happened. As Lee Falk tells it: "In the
middle of the first story I suddenly got the other idea. I moved the Phantom
into the jungle and decided to keep him there."
The "other idea"
probably cost the Phantom his place as an icon of the American century. Before
long, Superman, Batman and other costumed crusaders would step into his chaddis
as the international policemen of Truth, Justice and the American Way. But the
Ghost Who Walks had chosen the old road, perhaps it was because Falk was a
literature student with a thing for Kipling. At any rate it wasn't a deadend,
the Empire still lived, and the Phantom soon found a regular slot as an émigré
crimefighter in the colonies. He acquired a following in Australia, New Zealand
and of course in India where The Illustrated Weekly began to publish the strip
as early as the 1940s. He had moved to the Jungle and he stayed there.
But the Jungle had been stirring,
the natives, as always, were restless. And back at Phantom Inc's corporate HQ,
otherwise known as King Features Syndicate, the editors had made certain
changes over the years to accommodate the sensibilities of their Indian
readers: Bengal had become first Bengali...oops, and then Denkali/Bangalla. The
villain Rama (slayer of Phantom's father) had become Ramalu. The Pirate Singh
Brotherhood, the Singa Pirates. Until only one diminutive trace of our hero's
original landfall remained—the Phantom's pygmy friends, whose tribal name
'Bandar' Falk had lifted from The Jungle Book. They're still the Bandar log.
After all there are no pygmies in India.
Let's face it, the Phantom would
have died a long time ago if Indian boys hadn't inherited their colonial khaki
knickers. But they did. And reading The Phan -tom was our initiation to the colonial
fantasies that had shaped our forefathers. As the unbroken line continued
through the centuries the Orient believed it... Falk's genius was to
encapsulate so much of the colonial canon in his terse frames. The Phantom
starts out as Robinson Crusoe but he's also Kim and Mowgli. He's Leo, the
immortal he of She. He's Tarzan of the Bandar and the Embodiment of Kipling's
If. Falk himself once said that the Phantom was Tarzan with a college degree.
Finally—though it may take a
college degree to see this—The Phantom was also Mr Kurtz of Conrad's Heart of
Darkness. I just reread it in the wake of Falk's death, and the parallels with
the Phantom are, just... spooky. Kit Walker has his skull cave, Kurtz has a hut
surrounded with skulls. Kit has his oath "to destroy Piracy, Greed and
Cruelty", Kurtz has his own: "Exterminate the brutes!" They are,
of course, mirror images, one just and balanced, the other insanely cruel, but
both reflections of the feral white man among the savages with a mission
civilisatrix.
One of these days some Comp. Lit
type, born right here and educated in America, is going to write a dissertation
on all this. I can see it now. Phantoms, Pygmies and Others. Or White Skin,
Black Mask. Or if s/he's really with it, Purple Prose: the Jungle Chronotope
from the Heart of Darkness to Denkali. As for the Ghost Who Walks, he'll have
to find a ghost who writes. Because Mistah Falk — he dead.
" THIS ESSAY EXCLUSIVELY BELONGS TO MR. KAI FRIESE AND OUTLOOK INDIA"