During my career as a Phantom artist I have got very free hands to handle the manuscripts which have been given to me to turn
into drawn pages. I have also been free to change some details and incidents which hasn´t been correct or good enough for
the story. Although the scripwriters who write Phantoms scripts are mostly professionals, even the best of them make sometimes
surprising errors. I have even rewritten a large part of a script written by another person.
That was when I got in my hands the story "Doomsday Mountain. In its original version the scriptwriter has put a large pack
of dinosaurs in a small volcanic crater where they had survived since Cretaceous Era. It was so impossible invention that I said
to my boss that, even if I´d love to draw dinosaurs, I wouldn´t do such a stupid drawings in that story. My boss agreed that the
invention of the dinos was an error and let me change the script and find something else in the place of dinos.
I choose a number of carnivorous plants that tried to eat Phantom when he arrived to the crater. Moreover I made them movable as
the result of the dangerous radiation caused by spacecraft of the humanoid-castaways living in the crater. For the changes in the story
I was forced to rewrite one third of the script. My name was not mentioned in the printed publications because I said that let it be Len-
nart Moberg´s story. It was humiliating enough that his script had been changed so much. He had even made rough drawings of every
page of his story, but I used only some of his suggestions. I lost my chance do draw dinosaurs, but I found a pleasure to create horrible
giant plants.
OTHER ODD PHANTOM WORKS
Usually the illustration work of Phantom-stories goes by the certain routine - the finished manuscript checked and edited by the editor in charge
is mailed to me by mail or email and I start to draw pages after reading it. The only thing that may slow the process happens when I need refen-
cies for certain details - in historical stories more than in modern ones. One of the strangest works with the Phantom occurred when I made a
comic version from a Phantom musical in Sweden. My boss wanted it to be published in comic form before the prèmiere of the act. He had only
a disc of the music and a script of the songs and mailed them to me with hope that I´ll turn the whole thing into a comic. So I did and the result
was the worst Phantom-work I have ever done. The whole composition in the musical was awkward and even ridiculous and I couldn´t make
any changes because it was expected to be like the musical. I was invited to the prèmiere of it, but I didn´t go. Almost everyone from the Phantom-
team scripwriters and artists were they including even Lee Falk himself. He didn´t like the musical at all, and it must have been also a public
opinion because the musical didn´t run very long. The most stupid detail was an invisible tiger that Phantom killed. Invisible because it was not
possible to have a real beast on stage.
In the photo below some of the invited Phantom-teamers are posing in the prèmiere of the musical. I have named those who I know by look.
MORE ODD WORKS:
There are some old Phantom-stories from the times of McCoy and Moore which were made as remakes with new artwork and I was involved
with one of them. It was a story with the double rainbow and took place on an island by name Gullique. The story was one of the our present Phan-
tom´s adventures and this time he was to recover the gunbelt of his murdered father. The original text in the old comic was used freely and I rewrote
it and made pages after that. I made the illustration work looking the original comic´s pictures as little as possible. It was published by Frew in the
number 1127.
BORROWED CHARACTERS
I believe that many Phantom readers have noticed that sometimes I´ve used real persons as characters in my drawn stories. In Ibis-story I took
three principal american actors to represent gangsters of the story - Edvard G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart and James Gagney. Latest borrowed
character was however from an animation movie of Disney ...
Captain Hook in the story "Pirate Festival" (FREW 1520) and two gangsters in Ibis-story-
The most boring illustration work I had done with Phantom happened in 2002. Egmont was saving money with the magazine and decided to publish the
American Phantom-stories sketched by George Olesen. Those stories had already been inked by Keith Williams, who was in charge of Phantom during
that time. The Swedish editor disliked the inking of Williams and decided to make new pages after Olesen´s sketches. I was the unfortunate to do the job.
It was first time in my life when I was forced to draw after somebody elses pencilwork. The sketches looked awful and the pay was much lower than usual
Phantom payment. Moreover the inking was made on a transparent sheet of paper which I should tape on the sketched paper and the method was something
I strongly disliked. I made four stories by that method and the result was something that I do not like to see ever. Still here are some examples ...
George Olesen´s sketched strips. Below the finished strips by Williams.
George Olesen- penciller Keith Williams - inker and below the inked strips of KTL.
After all Egmont couldn´t save so much money because when Olesen learned that his sketched were being used, he
demanded his portion of the money and this closed the project permanently. I was relieved and returned to normal
Phantom production after that humiliation.
The strips are from the story "African Queen (The Treasure Hunters". Australian FREW Publication Pty. didn´t publish
my redrawn stories because the works Olesen-Williams had already beenwere published in Phantom-magazine. That
was very good to my point, because my inking after Olesen´s pencilled strips wasn´t much better than the original inking.
WORKING WITH A MANUSCRIPT OF A FINNISH SCRIPTWRITER
In Australian FREW-Phantom magazine number 1627 a Phantom adventure The Gulf of Aden Pirates was
published with creators info telling that the script was made by Nils Kajander and the artwork by Kari Leppä-
nen... The real story behind that was quite different.
Swedish and English title page of the story.
The backgound story goes as... In 2011 my boss Ulf Granberg had got a manuscript written by a Finnish Phantom-fan who was a member of Scandinavian
Chapter of the Lee Falk Memorial Bengali Explorers Club. After reading that story which was the new scripwriters first try to have his script used as a base
of Phantom comic, my boss was a bit confused. Because I was the only Finnish artist in Fantomen magazine´s team he contacted me telling that he had a
script dealing with very actual problem of the pirates raging in the Gulf of Aden, but to use it yhe script should need a lot of corrections and changes. As a
managing editor of the magazine he usually did the editing himself, but it seemed that there was so much to do with that script that he liked to give it to me to
be rewritten. He also suggested that I would contact the scriptwriter whose name was Nils Kajander because we both were Finnish and to work together to
better the script.
Well, I actually contacted mister Kajander, who was ex-advertising agency-man, and he was over-enthuastic about to have HIS SCRIPT to be published.
But he also turned out to be very self-assertive and wanted to check every changes which I might do to his script. After a weeks busy email-correspondence
I got enough when I finally found out that it was impossible to do anything for the script and to start to illustrate it when he was breathing to my neck all the time
and finally I stricktly told him that if his story would ever been published I must do it all by myself alone.
Having my working peace when the useless contact had stopped, I did read his manuiscript a couple of times more and decided what needed changes, and
that was a third of his original work. At first his story went rather acceptable, but when the action part started I was forced to write almost everything into di-
ferent shape. The Phantom was acting few times like he shouldn´t and the most unsatisfactury loss of the story was that the Somalian pirates, who were bad
villains didn´t have any good punishment at the end, which was against a story like that and wouldn´t satisfy the sense of justice of average readers.
So I blowed the whole bunch to pieces.
Of course they did it to themselves by a stupid way making their Semtex supply to blow up.
The most of the last third of the script was rewritten by me and I should leave out text from a few pages to straighten the run of the story. I really didn´t like
to tamper a script written by someone else, who has spent many hours of studying and thinking to have the whole story ready, so I decided that my name as
a co-writer should not be shown in the printed matter, and told so to my boss and Jim Shepherd, who were the people responsible of Fantomen and Phan-
tom issues where the adventure was to be published. Thus Nils Kajander was the writer and Kari Leppänen the artist when the story came out.
Curious enough was that the Norwegians voted that hybrid-story as the best Fantomet in 2012 !!!
If there comes more odd jobs, the story goes on ...