The Phantom:
A Publishing History in New Zealand

To the best of my knowledge, there has been only one series of Phantom comics produced in New Zealand. Commencing in October 1949, Feature Publications of Wellington published a series of Phantom comics that reprinted the daily and Sunday newspaper strips in black and white. These unusual comics can be easily identified by the "FP" logo on the front cover. They were different in several respects to the Australian Phantom comics published by Frew:

1. The colour covers depicted the Phantom in a yellow-brown coloured costume, as opposed to the traditional purple. Some samples of the covers are shown above -- larger images are available by clicking on the thumbnails.
2. The comics were serialised with each story usually running over several issues.
3. They adopted a landscape format inside but usually had a portrait format cover (the first 20 FP issues had landscape covers). The staples were located along the short top edge, so that after looking at the front cover, the reader had to rotate the comic 90° anticlockwise in order to read the story inside. Actually Frew used this same format themselves from 1949 to 1952 (#7 to #42), before settling on the more common portrait format.
4. They had fewer pages than the Frew Phantom comics, running for a total of 20 pages with only 16 pages of strips.
5. There was no advertising material in the comics whatsoever -- the inside front and back covers were left completely blank, and the outside back cover usually ran some sort of editorial information.

The series ran as a monthly from 1949 until #35 (August 1952), with a cover price of 6d (#1 to #24), 7d (#25 to #31) or 8d (from #32). They were then published on a fortnightly basis until #104 (July 1955). From #105 the comics were published weekly -- the cover price had increased to 10d by the mid#300s. The comics sold for one shilling from issue #377 onwards. For some unknown reason issues #475 to #488 (1962/63) carried a "published monthly" tag, before resuming a weekly schedule from #489 onwards. The last issue of the series was #556 in mid 1965.

Since the FP Phantom comics did not require each story to fit neatly within their limited number of pages, each story was usually quite complete and very few panels were removed. However, they were not totally devoid of censorship -- the editors at FP took it upon themselves to correct many instances of "poor grammar" and also converted the occasional Americanism into a local New Zealand equivalent. Some scenes of "graphic violence" were blanked out, which created some confusion over plot development, to say the least.

Nevertheless, these comics are an excellent source of good quality reproduction of the daily and Sunday strips. Over the 16 years that FP Phantom comics were produced, the vast majority of the first 90 daily and 64 Sunday stories were printed. The only stories from this period not printed were The Singh Brotherhood (D1), The Sky Band(D2), The Diamond Hunters (D3), The Shoplifters (D63), The Gibs Brothers (S40), and the Sunday versions of Fathers and Sons (S22), The Flirtatious Princess (S23), The Thuggees (S24), and The Ape Idol of the Durugu (S25). Sunday stories were presented in their original landscape layout with one Sunday strip to a page. The first printings of each daily story were usually in a large format with 6 standard-sized panels per page. Subsequent reprints were often presented with three daily strips per page, each daily fitting neatly on a single line -- thus avoiding the need to reorder panels to make them fit. The publishers also usually maintained the original newspaper appearance order of the various stories, such that continuity could be easily followed. The reprints of Sy Barry's first 14 stories are definitely a highlight of the series -- the dailies being printed in a large format with two unedited strips to a single page.

A complete chronology of the Phantom comics published by Feature Publications is given below. I am indebted to many people for helping complete this list. Should you find any errors in the list please send me an email.