Bringing the classic Phantom back to print
A personal account of recolouring Sunday pages for Frew and restoring Wilson McCoy’s strips for Comics Revue — and of the practical choices involved when the surviving material is less than ideal.
How it began
When I took on my first colouring assignment for Frew, for their 2017 Annual, I had no idea it would mark the beginning of nearly ten years of work and more than a thousand pages.
It began with a question from my contact at Frew: could I find suitable pages for a reprint of a Wilson McCoy Sunday story? I had the material, but the quality was rather poor. Instead of simply supplying what I had, I offered to recolour the story for him.
For that first assignment, I followed the original colours almost exactly. My aim was to prepare the pages for a fresh printing while keeping their appearance as close as possible to the old Sunday strip.
I took the next invitation as a sign that the result had been well received. Not long afterwards, Frew asked me to undertake a considerably larger colouring project covering several stories for their first trade paperback, Frew TPB 1. What had begun as an offer to help with one story was becoming an ongoing part of my work.
There is something special about this kind of work. A story may have survived in collectors’ files for decades, yet the material available for a new edition can be far from ready for print. Between the old newspaper page and the finished book lies a series of decisions about what can be preserved, what needs attention and how best to present the strip.
Working with what survives
Preparing Sunday strips for reprinting, as in the Frew projects, can be difficult. Much of our source material consisted of newspaper tear sheets from a private collection, mostly in the third-page format. The print quality was often poor, and gaps in surviving collections can make it difficult to assemble a complete story.
Having an old printed page does not necessarily mean having a good source for reproduction. It may show the original colours and page layout clearly enough to serve as a reference, yet still be unsuitable for direct reprinting. Even a substantial collection may be missing some of the pages needed.
In these circumstances, recolouring can be the most practical solution. My usual aim is to follow the original colours as closely as possible. The surviving pages provide a guide, even when their print quality prevents them from being used directly in a new edition.
Colour as part of the original character
Recolouring a classic strip gives the person doing the work considerable freedom. For this project, however, the point was to use that freedom with restraint. A newly coloured page should still belong to the story and to the visual world in which it was first presented.
Colour affects more than the appearance of individual objects. It helps separate figures from their surroundings, directs attention within a panel and contributes to the atmosphere of a scene. Changing it can alter the way a familiar drawing is read, even when every black line remains in place.
Keeping close to the old colours therefore mattered. The pleasure lay in making the strip readable and attractive again while retaining its familiar character. A clean new reproduction and a respect for the earlier presentation could serve the same purpose.
Much of my restoration work was for Comics Revue, including five years spent bringing the combined daily and Sunday story together, with Sundays restored to half-page format. I also restored many of Wilson McCoy’s reduced-height strips to their full height, recovering artwork and giving the scenes their original space.
The reward is in the reading
The work behind a reprint is easily overlooked once the finished pages are in a reader’s hands. That is understandable: the reader has come for the Phantom, the story and the drawings.
For me, seeing those pages read again is a large part of the reward. The Frew assignment and the longer commitment to Comics Revue involved different material and different practical problems, but both offered the satisfaction of returning classic strips to print.
Readers interested in classic McCoy may find these editions worth seeking out — both for the adventures themselves and for the opportunity to look more closely at the artwork.
