Writer: Mike Bullock
Artists: Silvestre Szilagyi, Bob Pedroza(c)
Publisher: Moonstone
The Ghost Who Walks' battle against a fictional cult based on the unfortunately real Lord's Resistance Army continues in this speedily paced and heroically packed issue of The Phantom. Through this storyarc, Mr. Bullock informs the Phantom reading public of a reprehensible evil being perpetuated against children, but he never forgets to entertain as well as educate.
The Lord's Resistance Army kidnaps, molests and tortures children. The Army impels them to murder in their name, and the cult metastasizes. The fictional cult leader Him is a descendant of the Phantom legacy's arch-nemeses, creations of the Moonstone era of the Phantom. Him is one of a long line of would-be gods that pervert the legacy of the Phantom. He and his cult also make the Singh Brotherhood look like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Bullock unerringly writes evil after evil. He shows the terrified children being abducted. With examples of abuse, he displays the Army's intense hatred of children. He lays bare scenes of the Army forcing the children into slave labor. The reality is far worse, but such scenes would only disgust and undermine the entertainment and the lesson.
Bullock gives readers an idea of what happens to the Army's victims, and he also demonstrates that there is hope. This isn't reality. This is The Phantom. Bullock directs Silvestre Szilagyi to demonstrate the inhumanity of human monsters toward children. He also has Szilagyi express the Phantom's classic heroism to combat this abomination.
I've said it before. I'll say it again. If you have a super-hero helplessly watching evil happen and doing absolutely nothing to stop it, then you really have no idea how to write for the super-hero subgenre of science fiction. You may believe that you're making a point, but you're not. You're betraying a concept as old as Robin Hood. Super-heroes are meant to be the vanquishers of evil. They are meant to be escapes from an often-unfair world and instill optimism in those who are faced with the direst of situations.
The Phantom ups the ante in this issue. He adds a psychological attack against Him that’s beautifully illustrated by Szilagyi and Pedroza. Szilagyi brings a primal essence to the Ghost Who Walks in Him's nightmare, and Pedroza embellishes symbolism to the panels in a flood of Phantom purple.
Within the psychological attacks, the Phantom systematically derails the Army's operations and leavens the hearts of Him's victims. That is how it should be. If the Phantom fails, we as readers have been cheated. This would be an affront to the oath the first Phantom made on the skull of his father. It doesn't matter that the reality hasn't changed. We cannot expect a fictional hero to affect reality. Though the Phantom already has. We expect him to succeed in a fiction that's based on reality. The Phantom is pure heroism. The good guy wins, and perhaps by having the reality in the book, perhaps Bullock gives the victims' voices. By having the Phantom succeed against his fictional foes, perhaps Bullock will help facilitate the will to stop this threat.
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