Or, indeed the opinion that the Phantom is a man.
Random Criminal: “Wait, I thought the Phantom was dude?!”
Heloise/The Phantom XXII: “That’s because no one wants to admit they got their ass kicked by the Ghost Who’s a Girl” [proceeds to kick ass].
Over the years, the Phantom’s costume has been published in an array of colors:
Purple in USA, Australia, Canada, Egypt, etc
Blue in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, etc
Red in France, Italy, Turkey, Argentina, Brazil, Lebanon, etc
Brown in New Zealand
Green sometimes in Yugoslavia
I recall Diana finding a woman’s Phantom suit in the old comic that is being rerun.
Well, there you go.
If having a female Phantom would ruin the whole bit, the whole bit’s already been ruined in canon since the late 1800s, when Julie Walker took on the mantle.
Also, the Phantom is, by rumor, an actual phantom, the Ghost Who Walks, a spirit of vengeance, not an immortal living human. And spirits often don’t play by our normal rules of sex and gender. In medieval demonologies, for example, the male incubus and female succubus were often considered to be not two different demons but the same demon of lust in two different forms. A phantom that sometimes appears as a man and sometimes as a woman would be far from the most illogical or inconsistent element of legends about a Ghost Who Walks.
Is that from newspaper comics, or comic books?
It was the 32nd Sunday Phantom story, written by Lee Falk, and originally ran in Sunday newspapers from July 20 - October 12, 1952. (Upthread, I bungled the cite, and wrote that the story ran in 1969; I think I got the date of publication of a reprint collection mixed up with the date of publication of the original newspaper serial).
Thanks, gdave.
Which Phantom is the 21st century guy? I presume he is the grandson or great grandson of the Comics Kingdom Phantom, about 1940.
All I can recall about Diana finding the female Phantom suit is that she puts it on, there are the two standard pudgy, light haired, not terribly intelligent bad guys, who refer to her as “a dame in a funny suit” and the Phantom rescues Dianna from being trapped in a mine.
I’d read somewhere that Schumacher actually thought it quite funny.
If the Phantom can be an immortal ghost, is it that much more unbelievable that the Phantom can sometimes be a man and sometimes be a woman? Which characteristic is more fantastic?
It would go over better if it had begun three hundred years ago. 