The Four Color Media Monitor

Australian Broadcasting interviewed Shane Foley, an artist in Oz who's drawing one of the oldest costumed heroes in comicdom, Lee Falk's Phantom, which may have continued storytelling under the management of a northern European company in recent years:

Like most in the superhero world, Shane Foley is an ordinary man with an extraordinary ability.

There's no secret lair or identity and his weapon of choice is a pen, rather than a sword.

From his suburban home in Bundaberg, 400 kilometres north of Brisbane, Foley, 66, brings The Phantom comic character to life by illustrating both covers and comic sequences.

The retired paramedic began drawing The Phantom in 2016 and has now completed more than 500 pages of stories.

"I began reading The Phantom when I was about nine. It was the first comic I ever knew," Foley said.

I'm amazed it's still around in any capacity. I'm certainly glad somebody still cares about it, since it was a pretty famous comic strip of the past century, and is now surely almost 90 years old. According to the artist:

Foley said The Phantom had barely changed since the early days of the comic strip, resisting the modernisation and upgrades given to other, more populist superheroes.

If the Phantom's remained pretty much the same, and the publishers in charge avoided the woke plague of modern times, that'd have to be miraculous, considering there's SJWs out there who'd doubtless want to exploit the purple-colored costume as a repellent excuse for LGBT propaganda. Even so, it's honestly better if these serial fiction classics could be allowed to retire already, and be less vulnerable to woke exploitation, depending how you view these topics.

So great for Mr. Foley if he cares about these classics and enjoys drawing new adventures. But if he slips and lets PC obsessions infiltrate, his work won't amount to much in the end.

Labels: comic strips, Europe and Asia, exhibitions, history