The Phantom - Captain Action #1

Now here's a comic that's tailor-made for me.

It combines two of my favorite heroes from when I was a kid - The Phantom (a character I covered in this review) and Captain Action, the hero based on one of the earliest action figures for boys.

The toy version of Cap was a clever concept that would probably be impossible to manage today. You bought the action figure dressed in the classic blue togs, and you could buy additional hero "disguises" to "transform" him into other heroes, including the Phantom, Captain America, Batman, Flash Gordon, the Green Hornet and many others.

The success of the toy spawned a short-lived (and outstanding) comic from DC - but then both faded away and were not seen again for decades.

Now both Captain Action and the Phantom are being published by Moonstone, so they created this comic to team-up the two icons.

I just wish it ended up being a better comic book. The Phantom is caught in a trap as the story begins, and he's not a factor for the rest of the issue.

His wife, Diana Palmer-Walker, heads up a security agency of some kind, and is involved in some kind of espionage investigation (I know it doesn't make much sense - I read the comic and I don't understand it, either). She realizes her husband is in trouble, so she calls an old friend for help - Captain Action.

The story by Mike Bullock just doesn't seem well developed. Diana sets up two poorly thought-out traps for no apparent purpose, the Phantom has little to do and Cap is written as a jerk.

The art by Rene Maniquis and Keith Williams rates a "good try," but the action scenes are jumbled and the faces of the characters are inconsistent. It's not bad, it's just not great.

It's difficult to give this comic a low grade, because of my childhood attachment to both.

But there's no getting around the fact that this comic wastes two great characters in a pedestrian story. A shame.

Grade: C