We dig
once again into the archives for an interview I did with comic book legend Lee Falk (1911-1999), originally
conducted in 1996.
Back in
those days, your correspondent worked for several magazines as an interviewer
and critic. I had the great pleasure to
interview some of the most significant figures of Pop Culture, but few were as
enjoyable as my talk with Lee Falk.
The following
interview appeared around the time the film adaptation of his comic strip The Phantom appeared, and was later, in
2011, translated into Swedish (!) for a book celebrating Falk’s
centennial. I hope you enjoy it.
Some men
are touched in profound ways by the magic stuff of their boyhood.
A case in
point is comic strip legend Lee Falk. He read the stuff of boys, and it stayed.
He was touched by Burroughs' Tarzan and Kipling's Mowgli, and with a little world myth thrown in, created The Phantom, The Ghost Who Walks, The
Man Who Cannot Die. And now, at 83, he still does it, turning out the
adventures of the Phantom three generations of boys later. In fact, 1996 is the
60th Anniversary of The Phantom, and Falk still writes his daily adventures.
That is not
all. In 1934, Falk, then a college student with dreams of being a writer,
created the elegant Mandrake the
Magician, an avenger in evening clothes and suave mustache, one of the
ultimate icons of 1930s heroism. Mandrake's adventures are still widely read,
and still scripted by the energetic Falk.
Lee Falk is
a working legend. He has holds the world's record for writing the continuing
adventures of any comic strip character, and with The Phantom, created the
costumed superhero. The Phantom's 60th Anniversary will be marked with a new
Phantom film from Paramount, starring Billy
Zane as the masked avenger, and Treat
Williams as the villain. Based on several stories penned by Falk, and set
in the 1930s, this promises to be a treat comic strip lovers will not want to
miss.
I caught up
with the busy Mr. Falk at his home in Manhattan's Upper West Side in June 1995.
Could you give us some
background on yourself?
Well, I was
born in Missouri, many years ago. I started Mandrake in 1934, when I was still
in University of Illinois, and started The Phantom two years later. I'm very
proud that this is the 60th Anniversary of The Phantom, and Mandrake is still
going strong at 62. I still write them both, always did, daily strips and
Sunday papers. I haven't drawn them in many years, many, many years. It takes
more than two or three men to do that much work!
When I
first started, I first drew Mandrake for fun for myself. I drew up two weeks of
daily strips, and took my time with it, very slow, and made changes. I had some
help from an older artist. Then I sent these two weeks of daily strips for
Mandrake to King Features, and, to my amazement, they optioned them! And they
wanted a Sunday page, too.
So I
suddenly realized that these are not cartoons, these are illustrations. Whereas
old friends of mine like Al Parker and Bud Briggs, well known magazine
illustrators at the time, could do one or two illustrations in one week, here I
had two comic strips with about 18 panels a week, with another eight panels or
so for Sunday. Each panel is an illustration. A lot of work. Eventually I got
Phil Davis to take over Mandrake when I started The Phantom.
What comic strips at
this time were big influences on you, or inspiration?
That's a
good question. What really influenced me more were not comic strips, but novels
like Tarzan, or the Jungle Book of Kipling.
As a boy, my reading was the great adventurers and detectives like
Arscene Lupin. Mandrake comes out of all that. He was a crime fighter. Remember
that Mandrake, started as a stage magician, but I turned him into a hypnotist,
an illusionist. He creates illusion, things don't really happen, you just think
they do. Incidentally, in the very first story I had introduced this African
Prince, bodyguard, Lothar. The idea was teaming a big, powerful physical man
and the mental giant Mandrake. And then gradually Lothar, who used to wear a
leopard skin and so forth, was modernized, to sports shirts and boots, and his Pidgin
English was turned to proper speech, and he became Mandrake's friend, rather
than bodyguard. And these two actually were the first black and white crime
fighters, as far as I know, anywhere. This was long before Cosby and Culp's I Spy; there weren't any black and
white crime fighters. It wasn't my intention to do something in that area, it just
happened. And then, as years passed, it became very commonplace to have a black
and white team. As you know, it is a common theme in movies to this day.
What was the genesis
or inspiration for Princess Narda?
Princess
Narda just a beautiful, ideal young woman. There was no special influence for
her.
Could you tell us a
bit about your relations with Phil Davis, and does he remain your favorite
Mandrake artist?
Phil was an
older artist that I knew. I was about 22; he was in his early 30. He had a lot
of success with his illustrations in magazines like Liberty and Colliers. He
did very well, but he got tired of it. He welcomed a chance to get out of the
rat race of a freelance illustrator, where he had to submit stuff to agencies
and get it backed changed, and so forth. With Mandrake, he could just sit down
and draw. He worked with me very early on Mandrake, and then I turned over all
the drawing to him. He did very tight pencil work on it. We got Ray Moore, another artist. These guys
were all older than me: Ray Moore was kind of a Bohemian artist, very
interesting man. He did the inking on the strip. I continued to do some of the
layout. But when The Phantom came along, I had no time. I got Ray Moore to come
off of Mandrake and onto The Phantom.
Two or
three years later, I stopped drawing The Phantom layouts completely. I stopped
drawing over a half century ago! But I
continued, without a break, until as we speak, to write the stories.
These are
adventure strips, and I think of them as illustrated stories which appear in
the newspapers.
More Lee Falk tomorrow!
No comments:
Post a Comment