`Phantom' Lives In Lee Falk

NEW YORK - No alien culture sent him to become Earth's savior. He wasn't invulnerable, wasn't bitten by a radioactive spider, wasn't a playboy holed up in a mansion with a faithful butler and a dark obsession.

No, indeed. This gun-toting hero lived in the jungle, rode a white horse, wore a skin-tight purple suit - purple! - and was just as human as the legions who followed his escapades in daily newspapers.

Before Batman, before Superman, a masked swashbuckler fought evil in style from his cave headquarters deep in a lush, vaguely defined jungle named Bengalla. His name was The Phantom, and Lee Falk knows him well.

Matter of fact, Falk - who dreamed up the Phantom in 1936, drew the strip at first and still writes every story for distribution to more than 500 newspapers - likes to think his creation added just a little to the modern definition of a hero. Loved legends and heroes

"When I was a kid, I loved tales of gods and heroes - Thor, Ulysses, Rolanz, the Knights of the Round Table," says Falk, who gives his age as "just plain old."

"All those heroes went into the Phantom. He's that kind of a hero. But I don't remember those heroes as self-effacing," he says. "The Phantom would be in the middle of guns and he'd joke about it. That's not unusual now. And it makes the hero more likable.

"Ulysses," he hastens to add, winking, "wasn't self-effacing."

The Phantom, aka Kit Walker, is the 21st in a family of men who have passed the crime-fighting mantle from father to son since 1535, when the first Phantom took the job to avenge his father's death at the hands of pirates. Their seeming longevity begat the legend that the Phantom never dies.

This weekend, Falk's creation comes to life at theaters, the latest of American cartoon heroes to make the leap to the big screen. It's a fun ride - and, Falk says, a natural extension. "The Phantom," a Paramount Pictures release, stars Billy Zane in the title role and co-stars Treat Williams and Kristy Swanson.

Falk's Phantom may not top the A-list of mythic American comic superheroes, but it has certainly proven its longevity.

"Superman, Batman - they all came afterward," Falk says. "There were a bunch of guys around New York who wanted to be cartoonists, and this strip captivated them."

New superheroes emerged during the next few years that would become American legends: Superman, Batman, the Blue Beetle, the Green Hornet. All shared many traits with the Phantom - a secret identity, a skintight costume, apparent unexplained powers.

"In Marvel and DC, there are so many superheroes. They're not humans," Falk says. "I wanted him to be human."

Falk always has tried to write for adults, not for children; besides mythology, he drew on everything from Edgar Rice Burroughs' "Tarzan of the Apes" to Kipling's "The Jungle Books" to fashion his Phantom.

"When you're writing for Esquire or Rolling Stone or even Screw magazine, you're writing for an audience. I'm writing for 80 million people. Some of them are sun worshipers," he says. "So I couldn't go around asking different people, different religions, what they liked. So I wrote for myself. And I guess it worked."

Falk, whose narrow, benevolent face evokes Jason Robards behind dark amber glasses and an immaculately trimmed, white mustache, himself resembles an adventure-strip character - The Kindly Old Gent, stylish in a porkpie hat, a paisley scarf. He even wears the rings

He arrives at a publicity appearance with all the accoutrements - a Phantom's head cane (made by a fan) and the two Phantom rings: the "good mark" of crossed sabers on the left hand and the bad one - a skull - on the right, or punching, hand. Those punched by the Phantom bear the skull scar forever.

He is pleased with the theatrics in the film, a combination of a "Superman" movie and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." It is great fun - delightfully and deliberately cliched in a way that "Dick Tracy" wasn't.

There are swinging vines, rickety wooden bridges, a plucky tomboyish female lead, a vague jungle location (Falk says it's supposed to be Africa, though the "Bengalla Jungle" and the evil "Sangh Brotherhood" evoke the colonial subcontinent), native manservants and British Empire soldiers.

Lee Falk plans to keep the epic forces of good alive as long as he can. Because, humans come and go, but heroes of pen and ink last forever.

"I guess that's what I am - a storyteller. Some kids sing to impress their parents. I would come down and tell stories to my parents' friends - weird stories that only a kid would tell. I guess I never stopped."