228 pages Colour 2026 Annual Special The Phantom and Mandrake
Plus: 24-page Replica No 36 "King of the Beasts"
Cover signed by Jason Paulos
In this Annual, we bring together two of Lee Falk’s greatest characters! I am often reminded that the enduring strength of the Phantom and of his remarkable intersections with Mandrake the Magician lies not merely in nostalgia, but in the clarity of their creation and the confidence of their shared world. Both heroes sprang from the imagination of Lee Falk, yet they were conceived from very different impulses. Mandrake was born of Falk’s boyhood fascination with stage magicians, men who could dominate a room with intelligence, confidence, and illusion rather than force. Falk himself sketched the earliest Mandrake strips, later admitting with wry honesty that the magician looked suspiciously like his creator simply because Falk was alone in a room with a mirror. The Phantom emerged from deeper, older soil. Falk’s imagination was steeped in myth and legend. From these grew his vision of a hero who was not just a man, but an idea carried across generations.
