Saturday, July 28, 2012

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.