Mandrake, the Phantom, and Elizabeth Falk

A few months ago I had the privilege of talking with Elizabeth Falk, the widow of Lee Falk, creator of the Phantom and Mandrake the Magician, at the Boston Comic Con. There were a lot of great people to see there (I'm still bummed I didn't get a chance to talk to Peter Bagge--Hate was my Indy comics gateway drug--but them's the breaks) but the only one I really talked to was Mrs. Falk.

I was aware she was his widow but my friend was not. He asked if she was his daughter, which made me want to hide my face but it's a fair enough question. She was about twenty years younger than he was when they married. She still looks great, by the way.

In its day, Mandrake the Magician was as well known as Spider-Man or Garfield. It depends on how you look at things but Mandrake could be considered the first "superhero" in comics. His superpower was making people believe anything he wanted them to, simply by making a gesture. The strip began in 1934, four years before Superman. Not only that but the Phantom, who is without superpowers and relies on his strength and wits, was created in 1934, five years before Batman. It's hard to say who came first and maybe it really doesn't matter (hey there hipsters) but it's interesting none-the-less. Falk continued writing the Phantom from 1934 until his death in 1999. That's dedication. That's love for what you do right there.

I admit I'm not all that well read in Mandrake or the Phantom but I've recently been trying to correct that. While the Phantom, if not widely read, is still remembered, it's too bad Mandrake's been largely forgotten because it's really good stuff.

There are better examples, sure, but "pussy-visaged" is hard to beat.

A friend and I were lucky enough to see some of the original art pages for Mandrake and the Phantom comic strips, pieces from Mrs. Falk's own collection. Unfortunately I don't have any photos of the art, but like all art it's better seen in person.

While Mandrake was modeled after Leon Mandrake (among others, too), a real life magician, the look of Mandrake was modeled on Falk himself, who sketched the early strips before asking Phil Davis to draw the strip, which he did until his death in 1964. She even told us that Mandrake's smoking jacket was modeled after the same jacket Falk would walk around the house in. Okay, so maybe that's only interesting to me, but still.

Falk wrote the scripts while the art was by Davis, whose art really stood out. You could see individual ink strokes and the texture of a striped overcoat that gets lost when printed on newsprint. The word balloons were still there, some cut out and pasted on, others written directly in the panels. 

I couldn't find scans of the art I saw but I mean just look at panels 5 and 6. Uh, please.

 

One panel had a great looking dinosaur, which had to have taken hours and hours to fully render despite the fact that the majority of the detail would be lost due to the limitations of the printing process back then.

Then on the next page Mandrake boarded a rocket ship blasting off to who knows where.

Dinosaurs and rocket ships? Why haven't I read Mandrake before this?

Who can forget Brass Monkey, that funky Monkey?

I think the most interesting part of the conversation was when Mrs. Falk started talking about Fellini. Yes, thee Fellini. Federico himself. Apparently, the Falks were good friends with Fellini and would stay at his villa whenever they were in Italy. There was even a talk of a Fellini Mandrake the Magician movie. Now there's a lost opportunity if I ever heard one. Mrs. Falk even did a quick impression of how Fellini sounded like on their answering machine (apparently his voice was really high and excited). It was a bit surreal.

Despite his famous comic creations, Falk preferred theater. On the stage, he directed Charlton Heston and Marlon Brando, among others.

That's not to mention all the trips he took all over the world.

I get the feeling a biography on Lee Falk would be one fascinating read. Someone needs to get working on one right now.

They were selling the art, too. And we got a really good price on a set of 3 pages: $7,000. My friend seriously contemplated buying them. I kind of wished he did.

By the way, Mrs. Falk herself is an accomplished stage director and writer and helped write some of the later Phantom strips. She was the first woman ever to direct a stage play at Shakespeare's Globe Theater in London. How cool is that?

Yeah, she's pretty awesome.

Man, sometimes I hate Comic Cons, but sometimes I love 'em, too. 

Mandrake, the Phantom, and Flash Gordon in the 80's!

Side note: One of my professors in college is the Phantom expert Robert Griffin who was a consultant on the Billy Zane Phantom movie. Um, well, at least he got to meet Kristy Swanson and Catherine Zeta-Jones, so that's something.

*All material related to Mandrake the Magician, the Phantom, and the Defenders of the Earth copyright King Features Syndicate.

There's this thing called Good Reads . . .

If you haven’t heard, there’s this website out there called Good Reads where you basically build a virtual bookshelf of all the books you’ve read, are reading, and plan to read.

And it’s addictive. I joined three days ago and I have already listed over 400 books in my “My Books” shelf, all star-rated and a few with reviews.

According to my “stats”, apparently my top two most-read (i.e. Favorite) writers are Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns, which (no offense to either of them) is far from the truth. They’re both comic book writers and I read a lot of comics, especially Batman and Green Lantern. And it just so happens that both Morrison and Johns have been writing those characters since 2004/2006. Morrison on Batman, Johns on Green Lantern. And since I’ve read every Morrison Batman and Johns Green Lantern book they’ve written in the past 6-7 years, well that comes out to a lot of comic books.

Side note: In case you were wondering (and I know you weren’t) I own every Green Lantern comic book published since 1976 (starting with issue 90, which was published 4 years after issue 89)*. No fooling. That’s 36 years worth of the Emerald Crusader’s adventures. Money well spent, you ask me. Money well spent.

This is what I say to women after I tell them I read comics. Especially after I tell them I prefer Kyle Rayner as GL.

 

*Full Disclosure: I am missing a few Action Comics Weekly issues that were published after the cancellation of Green Lantern Vol. 2 and the start of GL Vol. 3 (circa 1988, a dark period in the life of all the Green Lanterns). Mainly because they’re not very good and I refuse to pay more than 50 cents an issue.  Right off the bat, Hal Jordan pimp slaps Carol Ferris (his on again/off again girlfriend) several times. To be fair, she was Star Sapphire at the time [was she, or was she just dressed like SS? I forget]. Yeah, she was evil for a while. She got better.

Image from Green Lantern Reborn, art by Ethan "I draw one crazy Sinestro" Van Sciver

Hey look, it's Poetry! Everybody loves Poetry.

The Illusion of Movement

I.

I stare out of the subway window, out at the darkness, as the occasional light flashes by when out of nowhere the tunnel, the earth itself, opens up and I see another train below us--us, as if I'm a part of all of this, as if these people in here are a part of me--and then it's gone, cut off, the wall is back but something is different now, pictures flicker by, a series of photographs, and as we--us again--pick up speed the wall becomes a motion picture, a commercial on the Green Line--even away from the TV we (goddamn it) can't escape them--pretty people at the beach, burning on a suntan, wading in the water with bikinis and boxers, but the images don't do what they're supposed to do all they do is make me think of the suicide dolphins, the self-destructive beached dolphins that appear every other year--the hundreds! the hundreds!--to throw themselves on the sand and soak up the sun as they gasp for breath and when the people--when the heroes--come they can only save a few and we--they--cry.

II.

Never show the dead dolphins in the pictures of the beach, in the commercials at the beach. 

Never show the dead fish washing ashore, never capture the smell the fish bring, the rainy day fish smell, the rotting body fish smell. 

Never show the seagulls shit on someone's head or into a child's ice cream cone. 

Never show the hot sand burning feet. 

Never show the Portuguese Man o’ War, the not-really-a-jellyfish jellyfish, floating dead a few hundred feet away, still dangerous, still toxic.

Never show the fat people.

III.

Someone blows out the candle and then the pictures are gone, the pretty people are gone, and I can’t even remember what product they were selling but it was probably beer or shoes or suntan lotion, which would be the most logical but commercials are never the most logical.

I’m back in darkness, back in the tunnel as the occasional light flashes by and I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be the same light, a single light, and I’m on a movie set, and outside is a man out there with a light on a dolly, a light on a swivel he keeps spinning around to give the illusion of movement as two or three other people shake the subway car for extra effect.

The conductor hits the brakes hard and I fall into the woman next to me who looks at me with dagger eyes as if it was my fault and I fumble out a sorry, tell her I didn’t mean it in the slightest and she calls me a little shit and pinches the back of my arm, digging nails into flesh, drawing blood, making me scream a high pitch whiny bitch scream, but I don’t say anything to her.

The doors open and I know it's not my stop but I get off anyway and turn back as the doors close. She breaks into a smile and waves goodbye with her finger as I stand there staring, rubbing my arm, waiting for the next train.

"What are fears but voices airy?

Whispering harm where harm is not;

And deluding the unwary

Till the fatal bolt is shot!"

        --William Wordsworth, from the awesomely titled "Inscriptions - Supposed to be Found In and Near a Hermit's Cell, 1818 - I" (Yes, there is a sequel!)

So I'm a bit behind the times. It's 2012 and I just found out there are these things called Blogs. I think they're pronounced Bee logs. I imagine they're similar to the Balrog from Lord of the Rings, but I could be wrong.

Since this blog resides on the internet I figured I'd go all pretentious and name my blog after a two hundred year old poem by a dead white guy. A poet whose last name just happened to be Wordsworth. Yeah, and my real last name is Pussymerit.

But along with being pretentious, I think the name fits. I guess. Because this blog is going to be all about deceit apparently. Hm. Maybe I should rethink this.

Actually, the title refers to me. I am the unwary. Unwary of this whole internet thing. I've been hesitant to start a blog. Hell, I've been hesitant to start many things. I've stayed away from all social media for some unknown reason. Not so unknown really. It's fear. Fear of what I don't know. Hence, the Wordsworth quote. Plus, for awhile I felt there were too damn many blogs out there already and I didn't want to become another rusty clog in a machine of shit. But then I thought, you know, I would never say there are too many books out there, or too many movies, or songs, or religions--well, maybe that last one.

Anyway, I talked myself into this whole blog thing. Well, I had a little help from a friend, too. So she shares the blame if this turns out bad. But, really, how could this turn out bad?

So what's this blog about? Good question. Hopefully I'll have an answer one of these days.