The Phantom:
A Publishing History in India

When Indrajal stopped publishing The Phantom in 1990, the rights were quickly picked up by Diamond Comics in New Delhi. The Phantom was added as a regular feature in the Diamond Comics Digest, a monthly set of digest format issues (155mm x 195mm). The digests were numbered by Roman numerals and the first Phantom comic was in Diamond Comics Digest XLV (#45). The Phantom appeared in about every second issue and each Phantom edition was assigned a sequential number in addition to the digest number. Other editions of Diamond Comics Digest featured Mandrake the Magician, James Bond, Spiderman, Guiness Book of Records, or various Indian comic characters. With the exception of the last few issues, publication dates were not printed anywhere in the comic. However, the series was not like most comic books, as it was common for the publisher to keep a stock of all issues and whenever they sold out of a particular number, more copies would be printed, sometimes with a different cover price.

All issues featured locally drawn cover art, contained between 68 and 140 pages all in full colour, and were priced between 12 and 20 Rs. Both English and Hindi versions of each issue were published. Most of the Falk-Barry stories from 1961-1992 were printed at least once - some stories appeared in up to three different issue numbers. The stories were all heavily edited with many panels being cropped and/or stretched with extra inking in order to suit the small page size of the digests. And of course, the story titles were often quite different to the official titles - sometimes the cover title was even different to the given title inside. A total of 101 Phantom comics were published as part of the Diamond Comics Digest, the last appearing in about June 2000. The digests are still being published but The Phantom does not appear in them.

An incomplete index of all Phantom stories in Diamond Comics Digest is shown below. Note that the digest numbers have been converted from Roman numerials to conventional Arabic numerals. The last column shows the first Phantom issue number for stories that had previously appeared in the series.

Comments

• (*) = unnumbered issue
• Key to "Code" field: D = daily strip, S = Sunday strip
• Phantom #5 was reprinted with the cover of #81, but no issue number or story title was given on the front cover. Cover price shown as Rs 25 but it was given free with a pack of Luxor colourpens.
• "The Trouble Shooter" from Phantom #37 and #90 was reprinted in a mini size comic as a giveaway with Kellog's Cornflakes.

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