For the first time in German, Christian Blees' tells the publication history of the fascinating hero and goes into detail about the various sources on which the editions published in this country are based. "Lee Falk's Phantom" is a reference work not only for Phantom fans, but for anyone interested in comics.
About "Lee Falk's Phantom"
Softcover
Size: 17 x 24 cm
244 colored pages
Regular Price: €29.95 Special Edition Price: €39.95
About Christian Blees
I was born in March, 1964, and was never a Phantom fan!!! :-)
In the foreword to my book I do explain why I wrote this book though. I always had been a Batman fan and considered Jim Aparo as my favourite Batman artist. Some time ago I thought I should check which Phantom stories he had done (of which I, of course, had heard before, but never really cared).
So I bought German editions that contained his stories. After comparing the German versions with the originals I discovered that some had been heavily edited by the German editors. And this all started my interested in The Phantom in general. At first I thought I maybe should write just an article for the Bastei Freunde fan magazine, but then I realized that the publication history of The Phantom is really interesting (particularly in Germany!), and so I decided to write a whole book on it...
What the book covers
The first part (called Roots and Sources) deals with the publication history and origins of the character in the U.S.A., including chapters not only on the different artists (not the ones which came after Sy Barry, though, as his stories were the last ones printed in Germany), but also on the different comic book publishers and their issues, authors and artists.
Then come the Swedish and Italian publishers/issues of which quite a lot (about 90 from Italy and 150 from Sweden) later were reprinted by Bastei in their Phantom comic books and digests.
In the second part (The Phantom in Germany) I tell the (more or less) complete story of how and when The Phantom appeared in Germany, including the daily strips in the newspapers (and also the novels).
Sometimes I focus on particular stories, showing how the German editors edited (and sometimes complete rewrote!) stories from the U.S., Sweden and Italy for their different publications.
The third part is called Paths Through the Jungle and has 20 different tables that cover ALL PHANTOM STORIES EVER PUBLISHED IN GERMAN LANGUAGE, telling which story was published when and in which publication under which title, and if (and how much) it was edited.
Please feel free to ask any more questions!
As a bonus, the normal edition of the book there will be a special edition which will come with a kind of 48-page comic book supplement.
This contains the daily version of the Phantom Wedding story in the German language, a story that was edited quite heavily for the Bastei comic book series in the late 1970s. We took the strips from the original German newspaper printings (from 1979) which had been collected by a German phan in that time!
You can find out more about me at the following websites.
