Reliving the Magic of Phantom and Mandrake in Comics

Flashback to my childhood comic days!

For almost a century, young readers around the world fell in love with The Phantom Comics and Mandrake the Magician. If I remember right, I first read these comic strips by Lee Falk, in one of the Tamil dailies that carried a translation of them at a set frequency every week.

To many the Phantom embodied the spirit of doing the right and protecting the underprivileged, and the Mandrake was about his magic and his super-strong friend Lothar. I was drawn to Phantom for how his forefathers managed to keep the legacy of the ‘man who never dies’ alive across generations by passing on the values and the skills; and to Mandrake for his hypnotic gestures and scientific-looking explanations which sounded plausible to my younger self. Reading the attached panels in a recent set of comics I bought, I was reminded of why I like these two heroes.

Anyone else grew up with these legends?

The Phantom - Regal Comics No 1, The War Mongers
The Phantom – Regal Comics No 1, The War Mongers
Mandrake the magician, Shakti Comics Issue #1, Invisible Man & The bullies
Mandrake the magician, Shakti Comics Issue #1, Invisible Man & The bullies

#comicnostalgia #phantomfan #mandrakemagic #LeeFalk


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One thought on “Reliving the Magic of Phantom and Mandrake in Comics”
  1. Yes I grew up reading Indrajal comics but focused only on those characters, “The Phantom”, “Mandrake the Magician”, “Bahadur”.

    Also strips of these characters would appear in the newspapers and I would be curious to know what happened next. I even cut the strips from the newspapers and saved them to read again.

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