Issue 1617 - Fortnightly, 2011

The climax of Curse of the Granite God will, I guarantee, be far above your expectation!

Kari Leppanen achieves a few artistic near miracles to do justice to Scott Goodall’s engrossing story and all the big surprises in the plot are wonderfully handled—perfectly handled, in fact, when you consider writer and artist worked so many miles/kilometres apart!

Once again, we have reset almost the entire story, retaining only some of the original ‘effect’ words hand lettered in Scandinavia and later, Australia. (I’m slowly coming to believe that the fonts obtainable from our computers are easier to read than a great deal of our original hand lettering!).

A few changes have also been made to the front and back cover artwork which was rendered by the late Terry Welsby. The Frew logo has been repositioned as is now the norm, various background colours have been changed for newsstand effect, Lee Falk’s credit is now positioned where it should be, above The Phantom masthead, issue number altered and the retail price structure brought up to date.

Note that we have also strengthened the overall background colours selected by Terry.

They were fine when this story first appeared back in 1992, but since that year, colour impact on newsagency racks has strengthened dramatically and any title with a muted colour presentation tends to disappear!

Our next issue will be a brand-new adventure—A Strong Case, written by Janne Lundstrom and illustrated by Hans Lindahl.

It will be on sale on 25 November across Australia and a little later in New Zealand.

This is a most unusual story, tracing , as it does, the adventures of a young Phantom-to-be when his parents take him firstly to England and then to Italy, for his secondary education as he awaits the call to his ultimate family duty.

Phantom devotees will have fun trying to work out exactly which Phantom wife plays a part in the beginning of the story.

Her name is given as Renata and she is clearly of Italian descent. This has to be accepted as partly the reason for her son, the young future Phantom, to be sent to Bologna in Italy for his secondary education.

As the story also strongly revolves around the old slave trade which involved both Great Britain and what is now, the United States, various years quoted do not actually align with what relatively little official Phantom history was recorded by Lee Falk.