Kevin Patrick orginaly conducted this interview in late 2000. It was originally published online at the now defunked OzComics.com in 2001. In a very generous offer Kevin has allowed the interview he presented once more here at ChronicleChamber.com
Most of us think the golden age of superheroes began with the debut of Superman in Action Comics No.1 back in 1938.
The truth is that the award for the world’s first costumed hero goes to The Phantom which was created and written by Lee Falk and illustrated by Ray Moore , and first appeared in American
newspapers on 17 February 1936!
Strangely enough, The Phantom has always proved more popular overseas than in America. This is certainly the case in Australia, where The Phantom has been a runaway success with generations of readers since its debut in The Australian
Woman’s Mirror in 1936.
So popular was the strip that The Australian Woman’s Mirror published a series of five Phantom annuals between 1938-1940. This made Australia the second country in the world (after Italy) to publish a Phantom comic book.
After the Second World War, the Australian comic book industry enjoyed a short-lived boom, with dozens of local publishers releasing original Australian comics and local reprint editions of such popular American comics as Superman, Batman and Donald Duck, to name a few.
It was during this period that The Phantom reappeared in comic book format, this time published by Sydney-based Frew Publications. The first issue apparently sold 50,000 copies on its debut in September 1948, with sales for subsequent issues climbing to 80,000. Such was the demand for the title that The Phantom eventually moved from a monthly to a fortnightly schedule, where it has remained ever since.
Comics were a big part of the young Jim Shepherd’s childhood during the 1940s. Little did he realise know that he would cross paths with The Ghost Who Walks many years later!
“I remember clearly the first comic book I ever read was Buck Rogers” he recalls, “when a lot of comics were coming in courtesy of American servicemen.”
“So I grew up with Buck Rogers, Dick Tracy, Joe Palooka and all those sort of classic American
comics,” says Jim. “For some reason, I never had an affinity for Australian-written and created comic books.”
Jim didn’t give comic books much thought over the years, as he embarked on a lengthy and successful career as a newspaper journalist and freelance magazine writer. Between 1964-70, he was the Sporting Director for Channel Ten Sydney, where he worked as a commentator and producer on a variety of sports shows covering cricket, motor racing, rugby league and boxing.
His first book, The Australian Sporting Almanac, was successfully published in 1974, leading him to establish his own publishing company, Jim Shepherd Pty. Ltd., in 1978. Over the next twelve years, he published 20 sport, travel and corporate history titles.
Then one day in 1987, Jim bumped into Ron Forsyth and Lawford ‘Jim’ Richardson, the founders of Frew Publications.
“They were getting pretty old and, while they hadn’t lost interest in the Phantom title,” explains Jim, “they needed someone who could give them a few ideas about what could be done to kick it along a bit.”
Frew’s owners sent Jim to New York for a meeting with King Features Syndicate, who distributed The Phantom comic strip to newspapers worldwide, to learn about the character and to discuss ideas for rejuvenating the Australian edition comic book.
Returning to Australia, however, Jim learned that Jim Richardson had died during his absence, which left the elderly, semi-retired Ron Forsyth at the helm of Frew Publications. Soon after, Jim and Ron’s son, Peter Forsyth, bought all the shares in the company. Jim subsequently bought out Peter Forsyth, leaving him the sole owner of Frew Publications – a position he holds to this day.
Taking over the reigns at Frew set Jim on a steep learning curve about The Phantom and its publishing history in Australia.
“My first observations of the comic book, as it existed back in 1987, was that it was getting a bit dog-eared, tired and they’d stuck religiously to this self-cover, newsprint format,” he recalls.
“Never being a devotee of The Phantom, although being aware of it, I went through Frew’s files and discovered that they had rarely run any of Lee Falk’s classic stories in their entirety,” he says.
“One example was The Diamond Hunters – they’d only ever run one half of the story!” explains Jim. “They started it half-way through and just dropped the first half.”
Jim‘s first decision was to bring back all of Lee Falk’s classic stories from the 1930s and 40s in their entirety, as a way of bringing one-time fans back to the magazine, to rediscover complete versions of their favourite stories.
Reassembling the original artwork, however, was easier said than done. Amazingly enough, King Features Syndicate did not have complete story runs in their archives – nor did Frew Publications, for that matter.
Going through Frew’s correspondence files, Jim discovered Barry Stubbersfield, a comics’ historian from Brisbane, and a keen devotee of The Phantom.
“I wrote to him and discovered he had lots of contacts in the United States,” says Jim, “including one Professor Rob Griffin from West Michigan University, who had a lifetime hobby of collecting newspaper tear sheets.
“So with his help, and through other people, we slowly, painstakingly, began to bring back the old Phantom stories,” he says.
It was during their first restoration job on the 1942-43 story The Phantom Goes
to War, which was published in its entirety by Frew in 1988, that Jim also started looking at the comic’s cover artwork, which rarely had anything to do with the featured story!
“Tom Hughes had been doing their covers for almost thirty years,” Jim says, “but he would never get any instruction from the publishers, so Tom would just think of anything!”
Yet Jim found that, when he quizzed people in newsagencies and comic shops about their favourite Phantom stories, many people could vividly remember a pivotal scene from that story.
“I started to use these ideas, thinking if people’s memory banks are that good, if they see that image on the front cover, they might get a bit more enthused about buying Phantom comic books,” he explains.
When Tom Hughes retired from the title in 1988, Jim decided to test his ideas by revamping the comic’s format with new cover artwork and promoting each restored reprint as the ‘complete, uncensored’ version.
“These little features obviously worked,” says Jim, “because, magically, the whole thing began to take off from 1988 and, within a year, we doubled the sales, which was quite amazing.”
Soon after relaunching the title, Jim worked out that, due to Frew’s strange numbering system, issue number 972 of The Phantom, due to be published in
January 1991, would in fact be the title’s 1000th issue – a world record for most comics, let alone The Phantom!
“I thought ‘why don’t we come out with a big issue, something special?’,” Jim says. “Then it dawned on me that if we could put together a lot of old stories in their entirety, and made it an event, we could make it bigger and put a bigger price on the front cover.”
Despite reservations from longtime distributor Gordon & Gotch about the commercial viability of a $10.00 special edition comic, Jim went ahead with the bumper anniversary issue.
With the help of Melbourne freelance writer Julian Lewis, who Jim commissioned to generate publicity for the comic, The Phantom‘s 1000th issue was a runaway success and put the title back on the map.
“While I’m normally hesitant to talk about sales figures, I like to crow about this one,” admits Jim. “We printed 45,000 copies of that issue, at a $10.00 retail price, and sold 43,000, which was amazing!”
“Now we’ve never achieved that sale again,” adds Jim, “but the annual January issue is still our biggest selling issue of the year by far.”
The Phantom went from strength to strength from 1988 onwards, with that year’s much publicised visit to Australia by the strip’s creator Lee Falk, through to The Phantom feature film’s release in 1996.
Like the comic itself, The Phantom movie did remarkably well in Australia and Scandinavian countries, such as
Denmark, where Semic (later Egmont) has published the Phantom comic since 1950.
The film, which starred Billy Zane, took $7 million at the Australian box office, but did much better on video, holding the number-one rental spot for two weeks, before reaching the Top 10 once again on its retail release.
Both Marvel and DC Comics in America tried their hand at publishing new versions of The Phantom comic book during the 1990s without success, which begs the question – just why is The Phantom so popular with Australian readers?
Jim thinks that The Phantom has the advantage of being one of the most popular syndicated newspaper strips in Australia, which greatly enhances the character’s exposure. The fact that so many prominent media and sporting identities, such as rugby player Wally Lewis, were
also diehard Phantom fans hasn’t hurt sales either!
“It just amazed me how many media people kept referring to The Phantom, without any pressure from me,” says Jim.
More importantly, Jim argues that it’s the basic concept of the character and all he represents that ensures its popularity with readers in such far-flung markets as India, Brazil, Italy, Spain, France and Australia.
“It’s probably the only major comic book character in the world whose adventures are written and illustrated by so many different people, to the point where the character looks different [in each country],” he remarks.
“Yet the character is consistent and the appeal comes down to the quality of the
stories,” he claims.
The Phantom‘s popularity with older Australians is no surprise to Jim, who claims that the majority of letter writers to the magazine are adults.
“I’ve had many chats with Ulf Granberg, the publisher for the Egmont company in Scandinavia, and he says his audience is basically adults,” he adds.
Part of Jim’s overhaul of The Phantom has been translating stories created by the Scandinavian publisher for the Australian market. While these stories have proved for the most part popular, Jim admits their occasionally offbeat storylines prompted him to search for alternative material.
“We were at the stage where the quality of the material from Scandinavia left a lot to be desired,” he admits. “They kept drifting into stories about Nordic mythology and Scandinavian kings and queens, which had little interest here.”
With Lee Falk’s output of original stories also slowing down by the early 1990s, Jim sought permission from King Features Syndicate to commission locally created stories, which they granted.
Working with celebrated Australian comic book artist Keith Chatto, who created such classic comics as El Lobo, The Twilight Ranger and Steve Carlisle in the 1950s, Jim set about writing the first-ever Australian-made Phantom story.
“Keith and I thought the hottest person in world sports at the time was Mike Tyson,” explains Jim, “so we said let’s do a story about The Phantom fighting the world heavyweight champion, who we called Turner in the story.”
The story, Rumble in the Jungle, appeared in The Phantom No. #951A in 1990 and, according to Jim, “sold like crazy”.
“But just before the story came out, Mike Tyson was knocked out by Buster Douglas, so he was no longer the champion,” he says.
History overtook The Phantom on his next Australian-made adventure, The King’s Cross Connection, again written by Jim and illustrated by Keith Chatto, and published in The Phantom No. 1000 in 1992.
“I knew that our then-Prime Minister Bob Hawke was a keen Phantom fan,” recalls Jim, “so I thought ‘Let’s work him into the story.’ A week before it went on sale, he was no longer the Prime Minister!”
“Hawke was really pleased to be a part of it anyway,” he adds.
Rumble in the Jungle wasn’t Frew Publications’ first foray into Australian comics. Inspired by The Phantom‘s strong sales on its 1948 debut, Frew launched a line of Australian titles in the 1950s. These included a handful of short-lived comics, such as Suicide Squad, Planetman and The Green Skeleton, whose scarcity today makes them highly sought-after titles.
Frew Publications had greater success with The Shadow (a masked crime-fighter, but no relation to the famous American pulp magazine character of the same name), Sir Falcon (a medieval knight in a modern-day setting) and The Phantom
Ranger (a masked cowboy who became the star of his own radio serial during the1950s). These titles were mainly illustrated by Jeff Wilkinson and Peter Chapman, and continued to be published (albeit in reprint form) well into the late 1960s.
(For more information about Frew Publications’ early Australian comic book
heroes, visit Australian Vintage Comics on CD-ROM)
Frew also bought the rights to Catman , an American superhero, which was redrawn by several Australian cartoonists during the 1950s.
The first to do so was Lloyd Piper, who drew the strip for Frew’s Super Yank Comics in 1951-1952, before going on to illustrate the Ginger Meggs comic strip. Frew launched a solo Catman comic in 1958, which was written and drawn by John Dixon, before he created the Air Hawk and the Flying Doctors newspaper comic strip.
While several of Frew’s Australian titles survived well into the 1960s, Jim has no plans to reintroduce them to a new generation of Frew readers, claiming “I can’t see any market for them at all.”
Jim admits that, if he had the budgets of Marvel or DC Comics, he would “start to experiment with some classic-type characters and try and recreate the old magic that strips like Dick Tracy, Rip Kirby and Big Ben Bolt had at their peak.”
While he would love nothing more than to see Australian-made comic books compete successfully with their imported rivals, Jim argues that local publishers, “if they made a huge mistake, it was to follow the American line of superheroes, which just added to the oversupply anyway.”
Perhaps the bigger obstacle confronting Australian comics is the local audience’s changing entertainment habits.
“Just about every magazine title in Australia is going down,” Jim argues. “The internet is starting to take people’s attention away from publications.”
“All of this has happened before,” he adds. “When television really got off the ground, not only did comic books and publications generally suffer, but so did movies – people even started to turn off their radios!”
“So here we go again – now people have gotten tired of television, so they’ve started turning to other pursuits, like PCs and Nintendo,” says Jim.
“I don’t know what happens from here,” he adds. “I think people have to say the [internet] is the new version of television, in the sense that young people are really turning on to it.”
The Phantom hasn’t been immune from this trend either. While admitting that sales of the title have plateaued in recent years, Jim stresses that they are “still extremely healthy.”
“With The Phantom comic book, we have the strange situation where the bulk of our readers are not youngsters,” he adds. This could go some way to explaining the title’s continued longevity in the face of competition from computer games and the Internet, which are traditionally more popular with younger people.
So what does the future hold for The Phantom – and for Jim Shepherd as well?
“I think we might try more locally-created stories in the near future,” says Jim.
“I’m talking at the moment with Ulf Granberg about collaborating on a story, where we bring back Sala from The Sky Band into the story,” he says. “The idea is one of us will write the first half and the other guy finishes it.”
Apart from “jazzing up” the magazine’s presentation, running more reader competitions and including more collectable posters, Jim says there won’t be many major changes to the title.
One idea Jim has been toying with is the creation of a Phantom museum, based on Frew’s collection of original Phantom artwork and memorabilia.
As for Jim’s future with The Phantom, he says he will stay on for another 2-3 years, “then I’ll hand over to my eldest son [Steven], who’s champing at the bit to become involved.”
“My son will run the business and I’ll be the curator of the museum,” adds Jim, half-joking.
Kevin Patrick writes the column, Comics Down Under , for Collectormania magazine. He published The Panther comic book in 2001-2002 and was the Guest Curator for the exhibition, Heroes and Villains: Australian Comics and
their Creators being held at the State Library of Victoria from 20 October 2006 – 25 February 2007.
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