10 Years Ago: Phantom
I started my comics short story “Phantom” in late October of 2013 and finished it in August of 2014. While I did a few edits before I collected the story in This Wasn’t the Plan (2018), the bulk of the piece was completed ten years ago this month.
All the stories in This Wasn’t the Plan are the most literally autobiographical of my fictional works, especially “Defrost” and “Phantom.”
While it is never explicitly named in the story, Las Vegas is the setting of “Phantom.” I lived there when I was between the ages of four and eight. My father was in the U.S. Air Force and stationed at Nellis Air Force Base. At the time, he flew in F4 Phantom IIs (which are his all-time favorite jets).
The mascot of the Phantom II was Spook. I decided to draw Spook as an end paper for my story. It was really odd to draw him, because I remember seeing him on cups and badges in my childhood. My father, who was himself an artist, also drew him when I was a kid. It was almost an out-of-body experience recreating the mascot myself.
A lot of elements in “Phantom” are based on my experiences in Las Vegas. At the time I was there, the desert around Las Vegas was filled with trash. It may sound horrible, but as a kid it was a wonderland to play in. Also, my parents were smoking pot at the time, which makes its way into the story. My father actually even grew his own marijuana in our back yard when I was a kid. He moved his plants into a closet under grow lights when the neighbors noticed. There was also a horrible crash at Nellis at the time, which is the basis for the story that the mother tells on page 11.
My own mother told me a story that provided the basis for a piece of background dialogue towards the end of “Phantom.” When the main character is haunting his parents’ party, you can see a guy talking about loading his jet with toilet paper. The dialogue balloons are obscured, but this is my mom’s story. She got trapped at a party once by a guy who obviously had PTSD from the Vietnam War and he told her how he and his squadron had been given a flight path during the war. They flew the route over and over again, but were never given the order to release their payloads (i.e. drop their bombs). Yet during all that time they were shot at. The pilot talking to my mom told her how he saw one after another of his teammates shot down. So on the last run, when the war was coming to an end, he filled his jet with toilet paper and finally did the bomb run. As my mom told me, he looked her in the eye and said: “And I hit every god-damned target!”
The kid in “Phantom” is older than I was when I was in Las Vegas, more like ten years-old than five. Between the ages of eight and twelve I lived in a town called El Dorado Hills in California and I had a habit of sneaking out of my room at night and running around the neighborhood. Besides “Phantom,” this experience is also the basis for my story “The Boy.”
I got the idea for “Phantom” in 2011. I know this because I have the thumbnails I did for the first few pages.
As I said, I got to work on the story in October of 2013. As is common with me, it took me awhile to get into the flow. And I hadn’t ever really drawn planes before. The first panel below was redrawn many times.
And it isn’t even the final version…
At the time of all the stories in This Wasn’t the Plan, I was using this inking approach that I called “sculptural inking.” Basically, after completing Carnivale, I wanted more texture in my line. So I would build my lines from a series of short marks instead of one flowing stroke. I actually was so into this style that I redrew all of “Defrost” this way even though it had already been completed. I also started inking on vellum paper, partly because it made it easier to see the pencilled pages when I traced the lines for inking.
As I said, I completed “Phantom” ten years ago this month.