By the time Superman arrived in comic books in 1938, the Phantom had already been crusading against crime in the newspapers for two years.
In May, the month the Man of Tomorrow made his first appearance, the Ghost Who Walks was embroiled in the adventure of The Prisoner of the Himalayas, the fifth of his daily storylines recorded by writer Lee Falk and artist Ray Moore.
The course of the Phantom’s relationship with his lady love, Diana Palmer, rarely ran smooth, and this time out, he’s forced to break up her wedding to another suitor and carry her away, as in The Graduate.
As if that weren’t trouble enough, the Ghost Who Walks is also kept busy aiding Scotland Yard in the investigation of the kidnapping of the young ruler of Barogar. And Diana’s mother makes her first appearance in the strip, meeting the Phantom for the first time.
Naturally, she has certain misgivings about the idea of having a spooky purple-clad masked crusader as a son-in-law.
The Phantom merely posed as being superhuman to intimidate criminals, of course. But four years earlier, Falk had come up with a true superman — Mandrake the Magician.
“One could have called him a superhero without exaggeration,” noted James Van Hise in King Comic Heroes.
Debuting in newspapers on June 11, 1934, the tuxedoed titan originally had vast powers of sorcery. With a gesture, he could cause a car to leap over a woman in its path, or halt himself in midair after a fall from a plane. But Falk eventually saw the dramatic trap he’d set for himself there.
“For the first six months or so, I don’t recall where the cutoff was, I made him a real magician,” Falk recalled. “When he turned the Cobra into a rat, he really made him into a rat. When he made the ceiling fall in, it really fell in.
“I did that for a while, and this was before Superman, and I began to think that this was too easy. That it would be too hard for people to fight Mandrake if he really was supernatural, which is what he was. So I changed all that without mentioning anything, and I turned him into a super hypnotist, so that he was a real man using hypnosis.”
“So that changed Mandrake and made him a real man, and I think it probably saved him,” Falk said. “Superman had the same problem, but with him having 20 or 50 writers, they managed to get enough ideas and keep him going very successfully. But I did my own writing.”
Any number of costumed avengers kept busy entertaining the public before Superman arrived, but the Man of Steel represented their apex, their culmination. He was a new hero for a new medium perfectly suited to him.
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