Issue 1599 - Fortnightly, 2011

• "The Return of Colonel Weeks" - story by Tony DePaul and art by Paul Ryan.

Now, here’s a story to test your knowledge of Phantom history!

The Return of Colonel Weeks, a new adventure created by Tony DePaul and artist Paul Ryan, seems straight-forward enough….the retired Jungle Patrol’s Colonel Weeks returns to the

scene to check up on the well-being of his grandson, a captain in the Jungle Patrol, who has been shot and severely wounded while on duty.

Everybody, including The Phantom, is kept busy….there’s a kidnapping, a terrified female hostage, whose life seems to be in continual danger, several cruel roughnecks on the loose and of

course, the young captain at death’s door in hospital!

Colonel Weeks is helped through his personal ordeal by Colonel Worubu, who took over Weeks’ position with the Jungle Patrol in the mid-1960s.

On the surface, a simple plot—but writer Tony DePaul has cleverly overlaid everything with an age-old grey area….have either Weeks or Worubu ever positively worked out the identity of the

Unknown Commander?

It’s a riddle Phantom creator Lee Falk and those writers who have followed in his footsteps, have kept on the boil for an amazing 57 years!

This may well be a world comics record for a sub plot!

(Lee  first had Colonel Weeks come face to face with the Unknown Commander in the 1954 Sunday, The Master Spy. Colonel Weeks failed, in that story, to make a connection to The

Phantom!)

Did Weeks or Worubu ever come even close to solving the mystery?