Lee Falk's newspaper comic strip
The Phantom premiered on February 17, 1936, with the story "The Singh Brotherhood", written by Falk and illustrated first by himself, for two weeks, followed by
Ray Moore, who was an assistant to artist
Phil Davis on Falk's
Mandrake the Magician strip. A Sunday
Phantom strip was added to newspapers on May 28, 1939. During Moore's
World War II military service, he left the strip to his assistant,
Wilson McCoy. Upon Moore's return, he worked on the strip on and off until 1949, when McCoy succeeded him. Following McCoy's death in 1961,
Carmine Infantino and
Bill Lignante (who would later draw several Phantom stories directly for comic books) filled in before
Sy Barry was chosen as a successor. Barry would continue working on the strip for over 30 years before retiring in 1994.
Barry's longtime assistant, George Olesen, remained on the strip as
penciller, with
Keith Williams joining as the
inker for the daily strip The Sunday strip was inked by
Eric Doescher until
Fred Fredericks became the regular inker in 1995
Falk continued to script
Phantom until his death on March
13, 1999. His last daily and Sunday strip stories, "Terror at the Opera"
and "The Kidnappers", respectively, were finished by his wife,
Elizabeth Falk, after the hospitalized Falk had torn off his oxygen mask
to dictate the adventures.After Falk's passing,
King Features Syndicate collaborated with the European comics publisher
Egmont
on the strip. They went from initially publishing Phantom stories in
licensed comic books to providing the stories for the newspaper strip by
adapting their own comic-book stories.
Tony DePaul and
Claes Reimerthi
alternated as writers of the daily and Sunday newspaper strips,
respectively. DePaul would later become the sole writer of the strip.
In 2000, Olesen and Fredericks retired from the Sunday strip, which was then taken over by artist
Graham Nolan. Olesen and Williams left the daily strip after Olesen retired, and artist
Paul Ryan took over the daily in early 2005. Ryan succeeded Nolan as artist on the Sunday strip in 2007. On July 31, 2011,
Eduardo Barreto
became the Sunday artist. Barreto died after only a few months of
working on the strip, and Ryan did the January 15, 2012, Sunday page and
the following week's comics before Terry Beatty became Barreto's
permanent replacement.
