The missing part of the picture

A familiar story is not always a complete reproduction. The dialogue may be there, every daily instalment may be present, and the adventure may read perfectly well. Yet part of the drawing can still be missing.

For me, that distinction became central to collecting and reprinting Lee Falk and Wilson McCoy’s The Phantom. What began as an affection for the artist of my first Norwegian Phantom comic eventually became a concern with the physical strip itself: its proportions, its composition and the parts of the picture that later readers were no longer being shown.

1. Rediscovering Wilson McCoy

My first Norwegian Phantom comic, bought in 1967, was drawn by Wilson McCoy. His version of the character stayed with me through those early reading years. Later, Sy Barry impressed me more as an artist. His powerful figures and polished drawing made an immediate impact.

Much later, some Australian Frew editions brought me back to McCoy. I found myself looking at his work with renewed interest, and began collecting the newspaper strip seriously. Familiarity had once made the drawings seem ordinary; returning to them made me appreciate how much of the Phantom’s world they carried.

That personal attachment influenced my choices when I became associate editor of Comics Revue. I was given considerable freedom to select stories, and wanted American readers to see more of a series that had long enjoyed devoted audiences elsewhere. Norway and Sweden had their own strong publishing traditions, and Frew had kept the character before Australian readers. Many of the older newspaper adventures were much less familiar in American reprints.

But nostalgia was only the beginning. There was another reason to return to McCoy: even readers who knew the stories might never have seen all of the artwork.

2. When paper became a constraint

The reduced-height period discussed here runs from the first week of 1943 to September 1957. Its starting point belongs to the wartime pressure on newspaper production. Its long continuation belongs to the publishing habits that survived the war.

The pressure was real. At the start of 1943, the US War Production Board ordered newspaper publishers to reduce newsprint use by 10 per cent. Contemporary reporting described efforts to shrink features and remove unused space. TIME, 28 June 1943.

A newspaper working with less paper had to make choices about how much space its contents could occupy. Reducing the height of a comic strip offered one practical saving: more material could be fitted into the same page area. Repeated across several strips and many thousands of copies, a small change in layout could matter to a publisher.

This is the connection between wartime paper shortage and the narrower strips that concerns me. It was not simply a change of artistic taste. A restriction in the physical means of publication affected the shape in which the drawings reached their readers.

That does not mean every newspaper used the same format, or that wartime restrictions remained unchanged until 1957. Paper shortage helps explain the beginning. The continued attraction of fitting more features onto a page helps explain why the reduced format outlived the immediate emergency.

3. Smaller is not the same as cropped

Two different changes are easily confused. A strip can be scaled down with its proportions intact: everything becomes smaller, but the whole image remains. Or the strip can be made shallower by removing part of the picture. In that case, something has actually been lost.

For the Phantom dailies at issue here, the reduced version often omitted artwork along the bottom. Other reprint layouts could also sacrifice the sides of panels. The important distinction is between making the drawing smaller and showing less of the drawing.

The principal action and dialogue could remain readable in the shallower version. That made the compromise workable for a newspaper. But a readable adventure and an intact drawing are different standards of completeness.

A lower section of a panel may contain only ground, vegetation or the continuation of a figure. It will not necessarily change the plot. It can still affect the balance of the composition, the space around the characters and the sense of where the action takes place. The artist drew a whole panel; the reader of a cropped reprint sees only part of it.

Sunday pages had their own format compromises, including half-page and third-page presentations. Those deserve attention too, but they are not identical to the loss of a band of artwork from a daily strip. A careful comparison must distinguish the two.

4. How a temporary compromise became a lasting version

The problem did not end when an individual newspaper had printed its page. A reproduction becomes the source for the next reproduction. If the material available for a later edition is already cropped, the new publisher may reproduce the omission without making any fresh decision to cut the drawing.

That is why the supply of source material matters so much. The reduced strips became familiar through repeated publication, while complete material was harder to assemble. Readers could reasonably assume they were seeing the original composition, particularly when nothing in the dialogue suggested a gap.

In my collecting and editorial work, I encountered this problem in reprints from different countries. The story could be complete as a sequence and incomplete as a visual record. A larger page or a cleaner printing job could not, by itself, bring back artwork absent from the source.

The consequences of a wartime economy could therefore last much longer than the economy that first encouraged it. Once the reduced version became the readily available version, it acquired a publishing life of its own.

5. Returning to the full drawing

My aim became to present the Falk and McCoy dailies as faithfully as possible. That meant looking beyond a list of dates and asking whether each strip retained its full image area.

Comics Revue gave me a practical opportunity to pursue that aim. Its February 2010 issue began reprinting The White Monkey with full strips. The point was not merely to offer another edition of a familiar adventure. It was to let readers see material that reduced reproductions had left out.

The work was not straightforward. Complete runs of full proofs were not readily available to me, and preparing the stories required considerable editing. A run assembled for publication needs consistency, but consistency should not be achieved by cutting every strip down to match the smallest surviving copy.

There is also a boundary worth keeping clear: recovering existing artwork is not the same as inventing missing artwork. The objective is to get closer to what was drawn, not to make a modern substitute look old. If a source is incomplete, a polished surface alone does not make it complete.

In my original account I stressed the rarity of these full-strip presentations. The lasting point is the standard behind that enthusiasm: a reprint should be judged not only by which story it contains, but also by how much of that story’s visual form it preserves.

6. More than the missing bottom of a panel

I do not claim that every cropped section contains an indispensable revelation. Sometimes very little changes in the immediate reading of a scene. But preservation cannot depend entirely on whether we think a particular piece of the drawing is important enough to keep.

The McCoy years matter to me because the Phantom’s world feels so alive in them. The Jungle Patrol, Monkey Mail, the good and bad marks, and the customs surrounding the masked figure are part of a legend that readers come to recognise and inhabit. The storytelling is carried by the pictures as well as the words.

That is why I keep returning to these strips. My interest began with a comic bought in Norway and found a new outlet through Frew and Comics Revue. It grew into a broader conviction: the familiar version of a comic is not necessarily the fullest one.

To understand what Falk and McCoy achieved, we should be able to see as much as possible of what they put on the page.

7. Back to full strips and a new Sunday format

During the autumn of 1957, the daily and Sunday strips ceased to be supplied in two formats as before. The daily strip, however, had become slightly smaller in both width and height. Some newspapers also printed the new Sunday layout as a third-page version by omitting the top row. In my view, losing an entire row was even worse than the earlier practice of altering individual panels. The first stories after the changes were; The Crown Jewels of Corba 9-23-57 to 12-21-57 (daily) and The Frameup 8-25-57 to 12-22-57 (Sunday)