The Phantom Detective

 

Another striking pulp cover featuring a skeleton.  Well, a skull.  We'll just have to assume that the rest of the skeleton is hanging around there somewhere.  The Phantom Detective, of which this is the May 1936 issue, was one of the earliest 'hero pulps', focusing on a single character, often some kind of masked crime fighter, along with the better remembered The Shadow and Doc Savage. Despite the higher profiles of these other two pulp heroes, The Phantom Detective outlasted them both, the magazine being continuously published for twenty years between 1933 and 1953.  In common with other genre entries, each issue featured a short novel chronicling the titular character's latest adventures, backed up by a selection of non-related, stand alone, short stories.  All of these were usually authored pseudonymously by various house writers.

'The Phantom', as he was referred to in the stories, was the usual masked crime fighter who was actually the secret identity of a wealthy playboy - a formula which would quickly translate into the world of superhero comics.  His main ally was a newspaper publisher - who, in one story, even had a 'Bat-signal' type beacon set up on the roof of his newspaper offices to alert 'The Phantom'.  Part of the Thrilling Publications stable, The Phantom Detective - in common with several other Thrilling characters - also had an equivalent comic strip in the publisher's comic book line.  While The Phantom Detective might have outlasted rivals The Shadow and Doc Savage in terms of its length of publication as a pulp, the character - aside from the comic strip - didn't translate into other media.  Both The Shadow and Doc Savage had radio series and films based on the characters, giving them a life beyond the pulps, whereas The Phantom Detective effectively died with the pulp as far as the public were concerned.  Except that perhaps he too had an afterlife of sorts, in the form of the ostensibly unrelated (and still extant) comic strip The Phantom.  The latter bears more than a passing resemblance to our 'Phantom' and the strip's creator may, indeed, have been inspired by the pulp character, (as originally conceived, rather than being a jungle-dwelling hereditary hero, the comic strip character had been the Manhattan-based secret identity of a wealthy playboy).