Phantom | PHANTOM WAR SHIELDS

…<<On the other side of the Pacific, Time magazine had great fun with the story, scattering Tok Pisin quotations of dubious authenticity through the piece and concluding that “ol man bilong Nugini will go right on making toktok as they please.” However amusing all this was to Time magazine (and they would have equal fun with the story of the Tok Pisin version of the Phantom two decades later), the story underlined a serious problem.>>…

…<<The early editions of Wantok, carried mainly letters from the Sepik and the north coast, but after a few years correspondence was coming from the Highlands and then from the Islands region. Also of note is the number of letters coming from students at technical schools and colleges, from teachers and from school pupils.
These are the very people who would vote in future elections and have a major role to play in an independent PNG. By giving them a voice, Wantok was carrying out an important developmental function. Wantok’s readers wrote to the paper on everything from the danger of beer drinking to the recently introduced Phantom strip to their concerns about the
future. As this selection of letters makes clear, they had doubts about the way the country was going and whether they would have a say in what was going to happen. >>…

…<<However much its readership increased, though, it was still a difficult world for the fledgling paper. Printing readers’ letters was an obvious winner, but Mihalic tried many other tactics. Like Charles Foster Kane, he was prepared to try anything to attract an audience. Mihalic
experimented with a variety of features, including comic strips. It was here that he hit pay dirt and gained the paper international fame. After failing to garner much of a reaction to some frankly awful Disney cartoons about a puppy, Mihalic bought the PNG rights for the Phantom. The strip was so popular that it spawned an advertising campaign which declared:
“Sapos yu kaikai planti pinat bai yu kamap strong olsem Phantom.”
(If you eat many peanuts, you will become strong like the Phantom.)

With Tok Pisin now the lingua franca of Bangalla, the Ghost who Walks was better equipped to keep the peace from the golden sands of Keela-Wee to the Misty Mountains, always certain that his waildok Devil would be at his side and that they could parachute out of a balus any time they liked. Younger readers were delighted.

Christine Rocky begged the paper to start the whole saga from the beginning: “Mi wanpela skulmeri bilong Yarapos Gels Haiskul. Mi save laikim tru long ritim olkain stori bilong Fantom. Olsem na mi laik askim yupela, inap long yupela i prinim wanpela stori buk Fantom, stat long bigining bilong em?” (“I am a student at Yarapos Girls High school. I love reading about the Phantom. I would like to ask whether it would be possible to print a book with the story of the Phantom from the beginning?” – Wantok, letter to the editor from Christine Rockey, June 11, 1975.)

Unfortunately, the Post-Courier was also running the Phantom in English and its owners were not amused. Eventually they put pressure on the distributors in Sydney and two years later they told Mihalic that from now on the adventures of the Guardian of the Eastern Dark would no longer be available for him to translate into Tok Pisin. Somehow Time magazine got to hear of the matter and ran a story on the struggle between Wantok and the Australian owned paper. The introduction is enough to understand why Mihalic accused the author of mixing in a little fiction: “The spear-carrying tribesmen of Papua New Guinea – homeland of the cargo cults and of islanders who once regarded L.B.J. as a demigod – have a new Western hero to worship. No, not the Fonz or Jimmy Carter, but the masked comic-strip marvel who lives in the Skull Cave of Bangalla – namely, the Phantom.

Every Friday thousands of natives stream out of the jungle to buy copies of Wantok”…- (‘Fantom, Yu Pren Tru Bilong Mi,’ in Time, September 26, 1977.)” Mihalic attributed the loss of The Scourge of the Singh Pirates this to the Post-Courier’s nervousness about the fact that Wantok’s circulation had risen to 9500 a fortnight. “The Post-Courier actually gave Wantok more credit than it deserved. It felt that… Wantok had the psychological edge in knowing how local customers were thinking and what they liked and disliked.” Although the demise of the Tok Pisin Phantom is a little outside our time frame, it does afford some light relief in what was, at times, a genuine struggle for Wantok. It also indicates that Mihalic’s struggling paper was beginning to be noticed. >>…

New word : <<Tok pisin “Waildok”: Literally, a wild dog. Or, in the Phantom’s case, his wolf, Devil>>