Phantom Stranger #41. A Time For Endings.

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 Phantom Stranger Quote of the Day:

"Men call me the Phantom Stranger and say that I have seen the beginning of this World. Perhaps they are right... ...for each man's world begins with his memory, and ends at the furthest borders of his dreams!"

Everyone knows how much I love the Phantom Stranger. His capacity for strangening phantomly, when I was a child, set him apart from all other heroes and bestowed upon him a wisdom at which the rest of us can only marvel.

But, oddly, it seems not everyone loved him as much as I did.

And so it was that, after just 41 issues, his comic came to an end.

But, having never read it before, what do I make of that end?

And will the presence of Deadman affect my perception of it?

It all begins when, during a presumably typical day at the Sanders School for the Blind, two of its teachers Cassandra Craft and Adam Shapiro go to the assistance of fellow blind person Nathan Seine - only for him to capture Cassandra and knock out Shapiro.

For this is no ordinary blind man. This is no less than the villain from Phantom Stranger #35. The one who tried to revive his dead wife by draining the protagonist's lifeforce into her.

Needless to say, that bid failed and, now, Seine's out for revenge against the titfer-topped tormentor of tyrants, terrors and troublemakers. And he's going to get it by sacrificing Cassandra to his masters the Nether Gods.

But it turns out they don't want her. They want the Phantom Stranger.

Taking advantage of the fact that she's still alive, Cassandra sends a psychic message to the Stranger who's stood around, arguing with Deadman. The Stranger knows that saving Cassandra's bacon is more important even than arguing with a ghost and instantly teleports off to save her.

But the Nether Gods have granted Seine the power to kill our hero and it looks like it's all up for the plucky man of mystery, until, as a last resort, he summons Deadman who takes one look at the situation and possesses the unconscious Shapiro.

Not that that does him much good because Seine promptly kills Shapiro.

But that's all our the Stranger needs. Now he can channel, into Seine, Deadman's pain at the knowledge that he caused Shapiro's death. And that pain robs the villain of his powers before he's taken away by the Nether Gods who don't take kindly to failure.

But not everyone on Team Good Guy is happy either because Deadman's angry about the death of Shapiro and his own part in it.

Not that he can do anything about it because, clearly tired of the conversation, the Stranger teleports away to wherever it is he teleports away to whenever he teleports away.

And that's how the Phantom Stranger's series ends. Not with a bang but with a disappearing act.

It would be nice to say it's a great finale to a great series but the truth is it all feels very rushed, with the story and its characters possessing no time to breathe.

It's nice to see Cassandra Craft and Nathan Seine return from previous issues but I'm not so sure it's nice to see Deadman again. A man who's always seemed, to me, to be a one-note character in the few appearances I've experienced. Not to mention that his constant complaining quickly starts to feel like a contractual obligation, rather than forming organically.

Fred Carrillo's art does its job and sporadically carries echoes of both Gerry Talaoc and Alex Niño but it's mostly routine in comparison to the work of those two. While Paul Levitz's dialogue feels clumsy and ineffectual.

But if little in the story itself satisfies me, at least the issue does boast that mean, moody and magnificent Jim Aparo cover to remind us of the strip's glory days.

But have I fallen into a trap? Is it possible that it was always the covers alone that had lent the book the air of it being a title experiencing its glory days?

Phantom Stranger #33. Deadman's Bluff.

I always thought the Phantom Stranger was the comic book equivalent of those tin foil trays that meat pies come in. You always think you should do something with them other than just throw them away - maybe wear them as a hat or something - but in the end, you can never decide on just what.

In the same way, DC never seemed too sure what to do with the Phantom Stranger.

Here was a character who, thanks to his status as man of mystery, was nice and shiny but what exactly was his purpose?

If Marvel Comics' Dr Strange was the master of mystic dimensions, the Phantom Stranger was master of the single dimension, as he appeared to have no existence whatsoever outside the pages of his own comic and, in some issues, didn't even seem to have an awful lot of existence within them.

Thus it was that, in some tales, he was an active participant, in some a mere narrator and, in others, he'd simply appear during a lull in the action to give one of the participating characters a lecture that, while no doubt wise, was of no more practical use to them than a chocolate teapot.

Still, it didn't really matter as, despite dressing and talking like a wally, the Phantom Stranger was cool, maybe even more so than DC's other men of mystery the Shadow and the Spectre. While they might turn you into wood and chop you up or just plain shoot you, the Phantom Stranger would merely lecture you to death, which seemed an altogether more civilised, though annoying, trait.

Here, it was Deadman's turn to get a good nagging, as, monomaniacal as ever, he was out to find the man who killed him. Given his mystical powers, the Phantom Stranger could probably have found out who killed Deadman and told him.

Instead he insists on turning up at the tale's climax to lecture the vengeful ghost on the foolishness of his ways. In one panel he lambasts the ghost because he's not going to kill a man and then three panels later, lambasts him because he is. Jeez, some people are never happy.

But you have to credit writer Arnold Drake; given the Stranger's somewhat undefined nature, it must have been no easy task to weave interesting tales around him and this tale is never dull.

Still, as with all of DC's mystery mags of this era, the main attraction's the art and, with a magnificent Jim Aparo cover and interior work by the Legion of Super-Heroes' Mike Grell, it was never going to let us down on that score. Granted the Stranger's anatomy on the front cover's a little weird - his arms seem to end just below the knee - but, that aside, it's another classic cover from the late, great Jim Aparo who at this stage of his career seemed able to churn out classic covers in his sleep.

"Follow me into strange worlds," said the blurb at the top of most issues, "-- For I am the Phantom Stranger." And I must've been hooked because I always would.