by
Tom “The Comics Savant” Stewart
TM
A L o o k at D C ’ s S u p e r n at u r a l S w i n g e r w i t h a G o l d Me da l l i o n DC. 1968. It was the “1/3rd Era,” coming hard on the end of the “Checkerboard Era”; it was the era when the title logo of the book took up 1/3rd of the available cover space. In the late ’60s DC, the #1 super-hero publisher (I’m betting that Dell/Gold key beat most comics in sales up to the ’60s) had been losing ground the last few years, and was trying to make it up by a policy that seemed to be “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.” This may be unfair—Lord knows, there were a bunch of good series being published—but most were given little chance to find an audience, much less an eighth or ninth issue. During this great experiment, new characters and titles were being created, old series dusted off, and then those were dumped for new, new characters, and new old series, some so old or short-lived that most fans had forgotten they had even been published. Such was The Phantom Stranger.
DC’S ORIGINAL GHOSTBUSTER The Phantom Stranger had made his first appearance in 1952, unannounced by any previous guest-starring or even special gueststarring appearance, smack in his own book, The Phantom Stranger #1. In that issue, he solves a phony haunting. In fact, he solves two phony hauntings and stops a mad magician from his
Neal Adams’ cover sketch for The Phantom Stranger #19 (May–June 1972), courtesy of Frank Giella, and the published version. Phantom Stranger TM & © 2006 DC Comics.
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