I always suspected that Bob
Phantom, an early MLJ superhero, added the friendly, aw-shucks “Bob” just so he
wouldn't seem too fancy.
“However silly his name might be, Bob Phantom debuted in Blue
Ribbon Comics 2 (Dec. 1939), only a year and a half after Superman had founded
the superhero genre in comic books, and just a few months after others had
started populating the newsstands,” Don Markstein observed.
“In fact, he was the very first
long underwear guy published by MLJ Comics. (The Wizard would have tied Bob,
but the Wiz's original superhero suit consisted of a tuxedo. Other very early
ones, such as The Shield, The Comet and Steel Sterling, didn’t reach the public
until the first couple of months of 1940.)
“The publisher demonstrated its
lack of practice at crafting super-powered crime fighters by not explaining how
Bob managed to do what he did. In his first 6-page story, which was probably
written by Harry Shorten (Tippy Teen, There Oughta Be a Law) and definitely
drawn by Irv Novick (Captain Storm, Batman), he demonstrated an ability to
appear out of (or disappear into) nowhere, survive a gunfire attack unharmed,
and know things he had no way of learning.”
“Bob” was secretly Broadway
columnist Walt Whitney, who goaded the police to arrest criminals. So he was
Walter Winchell as a superhero? I must say, the mind reels.
Actually, it seems likely that Bob
got his silly name simply because people had run out of variations on the
evocative mysterioso term “Phantom.” By the late 1930s, you had Lee Falk’s
comic strip superhero the Phantom, the pulp magazine superhero Phantom
Detective, Gene Autry’s Phantom Empire
movie serial and so forth. Even in the current Mickey Mouse newspaper comic strip
story (running from May 20 to Sept. 9, 1939), the redoubtable rodent was busy
battling the Phantom Blot.
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