It was a vivid demonstration of just how much both The Phantom and Mandrake The Magician had become such a part of Australian popular culture. What is even more remarkable is that both characters were the brainchild of one man - Lee Falk.
Although he may have been overshadowed by The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician was, in, fact, Lee Falk's first comic strip feature.
While studying at the University of Illinois, Falk developed an idea for a comic strip featuring a stage magician. He wrote and drew two weeks of daily episodes, before selling it to the King Features Syndicate in 1934.
Unable to juggle his studies with writing and drawing the feature, Falk hired a commercial illustrator, Phil Davis, to take over the artwork.
Davis' clean, elegant line and formal panel compositions might have spelt a quick death for other, more robust adventure characters. Yet his artwork's restrained elegance proved to be a perfect fit for Mandrake, lending an appropriately unnatural look to the character's visually surreal demonstrations of his hypnotic powers.
Legend has it that Lee Falk named his top-hatted magician after the mandrake herb, which was used in ancient medicines. Others claim that Falk took the name from a real-life stage magician, Leon Mandrake, whom was said to bear a striking resemblance to his comic strip counterpart. Falk, for his part, has said that he based the character's image on another magician, The Great Cardini.
Joining Mandrake was the muscular giant, Lothar. An African Prince by birth, Lothar was originally portrayed as a dim-witted valet and bodyguard, but over the years, his role was rewritten as Mandrake's close friend and partner in adventure.
Completing the cast was the dark-haired beauty, Narda. She too was of royal descent, being the Princess of the tiny European kingdom of Cockaigne. Like Lothar, she preferred a life of excitement and, as Mandrake's fiancée, did battle with gangsters, mad scientists, hijackers and space aliens.
Mandrake the Magician was an immediate success, with a full-colour Sunday newspaper strip commencing in February 1935. Phil Davis hired an art assistant, Ray Moore, to help him with his increased workload - before Moore achieved greater fame as the original artist for The Phantom.
Unlike America, it was a woman's magazine that became responsible for introducing Mandrake to Australian audiences, when The Australian Women's Weekly unveiled their new comic strip character on 1 December 1934.
Even so, the magazine's founding editor, George Warnecke, had some reservations about the character. "I felt at first that Mandrake wasn't homely enough for our readers, and too American," he recalled in Denis O'Brien's book, The Weekly. "But we were urgently in need of an adult strip and Mandrake was the best then available."
Warnecke needn't have worried. Mandrake quickly became one of the Weekly's most popular features - a feat no doubt helped by the magazine's policy of replacing any mentions of American place names and idioms with their Australian equivalents, thus persuading readers that Mandrake was, in fact, an Australian character.
Mandrake's peak of popularity coincided with World War Two. When the Weekly was forced to reduce its page count as a wartime paper rationing measure, Mandrake was dropped from the magazine for a week - before readers' protests prompted the Weekly to bring him back in the next issue.
Consolidated Press, publishers of the Weekly, produced two large black and white Mandrake The Magician comic books. Numbering up to 72 pages apiece, these two comics were probably published between 1939-1941.
Even though no other Mandrake comics were published during the war, he did make comical cameo appearances as 'Mudrake the Magician'. This satirical strip poked fun at Lee Falk's debonair hero and appeared in several comics from Frank Johnson Publications during the 1940s, including Bonzer and Champion. 'Mudrake' was the creation of Emile Mercier, who became a popular cartoonist with the Sydney Sun newspaper during the 1950s.
Mandrake's loyal Australian fans had to wait several years for the character to be given his own comic book. Shakespeare Head Press, a company acquired by Consolidated Press in 1946, launched a new Mandrake Comic sometime around 1953.
Shakespeare Head Press also published a series of attractively designed Mandrake Annuals, printed in magazine format, lasting at least until 1957-58.
The next phase in Mandrake's Australian comic book career becomes a little murky, thanks to the confusing way in which several different companies handled the character.
Shakespeare Head Press may have restarted its Mandrake Comic series sometime in 1957, which lasted until at least late 1959 (Issue #28, for instance, has a cover date of September 1959).
It has also been suggested that there were gaps in the Mandrake Comic's numbering sequence published by Shakespeare Head Press - and that these gaps were 'back-filled' by two subsequent series of Mandrake comics. (Never let it be said that collecting Australian comics was ever meant to be easy!)
It wasn't long before the Mandrake The Magician comic reappeared under a new publisher's imprint in the early 1960s - Photo-Type Press Pty. Ltd.
The Photo-Type Mandrake comics featured new covers by the Australian artist Keith Chatto. A prolific comic book writer and artist, Chatto produced many popular comics, including The Lone Wolf, El Lobo - The Man from Nowhere and The Twilight Ranger.
When Australian comics faded from view in the early 1960s, Chatto carved out a second career as a cover artist, churning out hundreds of covers for local comic book reprints of such American strips as Rip Kirby, Flash Gordon, Jungle Jim and Tim Tyler.
Chatto continued to draw new covers for Mandrake The Magician comic which, by the early-to-mid 1960s, appeared under the Page Publications imprint. The first Page Publications' edition was No. 38 and series continued up to at least No. 42 - and quite possibly higher.
Page Publications was the magazine publishing division of the Yaffa Syndicate - the company which originally sold Mandrake The Magician to The Australian Women's Weekly.
By the late 1970s, Page Publications' comic book line consisted largely of black and white reprints of America's Marvel Comics superhero titles. However, they did issue a final Mandrake The Magician comic (of which there is at least one known issue). This 68-page comic didn't reprint the newspaper strip version, but instead featured stories from the Mandrake The Magician comic book published by King Comics during the 1960s.
Phil Davis, the strip's original artist, continued to draw Mandrake until his death in 1964. Davis' successor was Harold 'Fred' Fredericks Jr., who initially emulated Davis, before allowing his own drawing style to emerge.
Several of Fredericks' strips from 1971-72 were included in Mandrake The Magician Album Edition, a large format, 66-page comic book published in Sydney by Gredown Pty. Ltd. in 1978.
Nearly a decade passed before Mandrake resurfaced. In 1987, Melbourne's Budget Books Pty. Ltd. published two landscape format paperback book collections: Mandrake The Magician - Master of Illusion (No.1) and Mandrake The Magician - Spellbound (No.2).
It is perhaps fitting that the last Australian publisher to play host to Mandrake, Lothar and Narda was Frew Publications which, since 1948, has published the world's longest-running edition of The Phantom comic book.
Commencing in 1990, Frew published a six-issue limited series Mandrake The Magician comic. Reprinting original Lee Falk and Phil Davis stories from the 1930s and 1940s, the 'portrait' format magazine reprinted the strips in landscape layout, displaying Davis' lush artwork in the best possible light.
The first four issues featured covers by Sydney artist Glenn Ford, who was also a regular Phantom cover artist. In a neat historical twist, Keith Chatto (who would later illustrate the first Australian-drawn Phantom story) provided the covers for the remaining two issues.
Frew followed this first mini-series with another six issues, which continued on the issue numbering (Nos. 7-12), and again featured cover artwork by Keith Chatto.
"I have always loved the Mandrake [strip] and hoped there would be enough diehards out there like me." Sadly, Frew's Mandrake comic was not the commercial success that Jim hoped for: "The experiment is best described as my heart ruling my mind."
Unlike The Phantom, which continues to appear in Australian newspapers, Mandrake has vanished from the public eye since The Australian Women's Weekly ceased running the comic. "The character's appeal was almost totally generated by its generous exposure in the Women's Weekly," says Jim, "as well as its unique theme and the brilliance of the artist, Phil Davis."
"Tragically, to my mind, the title is now obviously considered 'old hat' by devotees of superheroes and maybe even a little quaint to old guard fans."
This article originally appeared in the September 2004 edition of Collectormania magazine. Comic cover images courtesy of AusReprints.
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