The Phantom, 3/20/25

The Phantom, it is my task to occasionally remind you, is actually a 22-generation long chain of fathers and sons who each take the role of the Ghost Who Walks in turn, who arrived in southern Africa from Europe back in [waves hands vaguely] the pirate era, and who have perpetuated themselves by continually sending away for European or European-descended brides. But one of the very long- and slow-running ongoing storylines in the strip is about how the current Phantom's son Kit will probably be the first to break this chain of racial purity. He's not going to marry one of the Bangallans that his family has lived among for centuries -- let's not go nuts -- but will probably end up either with the local girl who's mooning over him as he studies Phantom stuff (?) at a monastery in the Himalayas, or with Kadia Sahara, born the daughter of one of the Phantom's longtime nemeses but now a foster daughter of the weird Walker clan. Anyway, the thing I like most about today's strip is that container ship cruising by in the background as Kit's sister Heloise, a Kadia partisan, boasts to her mother (via some kind of bespoke video messaging app, the screen branded with the Phantom's famous skull mark) about the beach-based meet-cute she's just arranged. The huge vessel reminds us that, despite all these superheroic breeding machinations, the quiet miracle of global commerce soldiers on.

Mary Worth, 3/20/25