To every man he knows, he stays a stranger

The first time I ever saw the Phantom Stranger it was in DC house ads showcasing the Neal Adams cover below. As far as I knew, it was the first time anyone had seen the Phantom Stranger.

This came out during that tragic period I stopped buying comics, preparatory to father moving my family back to the USA. I don’t think I ever saw the issue itself but that cover had me hooked. Not everyone felt that way (comics blogger Alan Stewart, for instance), but the mix of the weird supernatural atmosphere, the character’s cool name, the suspicion he was significantly different from Green Lantern or Aquaman — that’s the perfect prescription to hook me on a new character.

In those pre-Internet days, a young kid like me, with no access to any sort of organized comics fandom, had no way to know the Phantom Stranger’s real first appearance had been the 1952 Carmine Infantino cover to Phantom Stranger #1.

Inside that cover, the Stranger’s first story was “The Haunters From Beyond,” by Infantino and John Broome. A pair of ghosts inform one Anne Parris that they’re going to haunt and curse her in revenge for her ancestor getting them hung in the Salem witch trials. The haunting drives Anne to attempt suicide, then the Phantom Stranger intervene. With the help of his sonic screwdriver — er, “conjure flash,” sorry about the confusion — he exposes the ghosts as relatives who want Anne’s inheritance. No sooner are they arrested than the Phantom Stranger is gone.

In “When Dead Men Walk” by the same creative team, three buddies take a flight together —

— but the flight never lands.

Following the crash, the ghosts of the three men apparently begin carrying out their dying wishes. Obtaining blackmail documents.

Breaking a horse.

The third ghost insists his girlfriend join him in death.

A perfect Scooby-Doo ending. Except the story throws in one final wrinkle: when Margo looks at the photo of the three men on the plane, the Phantom Stranger is standing behind them! When she turns to ask him about it, he’s disappeared again.

It’s an effective story unless you stop to think about it. How did Wright know what the other two men hoped for? How did he train the horse so swiftly? What the heck was the Phantom Stranger doing on that plane? The third story, “House of Strange Secrets,” works better as the Stranger battles a stage magician in a house wired for tricks.

Overall, it’s not a bad issue. I’m baffled, however, why anyone would thought it would support a solo book.

Sure, spooky supernatural stuff was in, and Dr. Thirteen had a cover-featured ghost-breaking series running around the same time in Star-Spangled Comics (cover by Leonard Starr). That strip hadn’t taken off, however, wrapping up right before the Stranger bowed in. Had the Ghost-Breaker come close to breaking out as a hit? Did editor Julius Schwartz think “Dr. Thirteen but spookier” was a winning formula?

Whatever the reason, this version of the Phantom Stranger seemed better suited to a backup slot in Detective Comics or cover feature in House of Mystery than supporting his own series.

The stories in the remaining six issues are mostly fun but hardly star quality. There are also little details that annoy me: I can buy occultists recognizing the Phantom Stranger but having a district attorney know him as a trusted crimefighter (“Death’s Strange Deputy” in #2) is odd. A couple of the stories slip into science fiction — an other-dimensional horror in #4 (“The Hairy Shadows”) and time travelers in #6 (“Horror in Miniature.”). To me that undercuts the ghost-busting skepticism of the premise. Though I do like Bob Brown’s cover for #6.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who wasn’t into the series: after #6, it was over, sending the Phantom Stranger into comic-book limbo. Clearly superheroes, even oddball sort-of-not-quite superheroes like him, were done for in comics. And the Stranger himself would never be seen again. Or so it must have seemed at the time.

Fifteen years later, that would prove as wrong as my assumption the Stranger was someone new. We’ll get to his resurrection from obscurity in a later post.