The Phantom in Aboriginal Australia: Educational Comics, National Identity and Indigeneity

Abstract

The costumed adventurer. The Phantom has become a locus for Australian national identity. Although created as an American newspaper strip in 1936 by Lee Faulk, The Phantom’s popularity in Australia has long surpassed his influence in his home country. Australian reprints of the American Phantom comics have been published regularly since the 1940s, and sold in nearly every newsagent from the city to the outback. A recent nationally-touring gallery show has seen Australia’s fine art community reflecting on the character’s place in the national culture, but perhaps a better place to examine this phenomenon is actual Phantom comics that have been created in Australia. Interestingly, the earliest wholly Australian-created Phantom comics were educational in nature. This article will examine these comics from the 1980s and early ‘90s to explore the pedagogical dimensions of how The Phantom has been used in Australia as a way of constructing postcolonial national identity. As superheroes are increasing in popularity on a worldwide scale, this study will illuminate how to conceptualise unique, local expressions of globalised heroes, as well as how these heroes can be most effectively used in educational context.