Issue 1798 - 40th Wedding Anniversary Special 2017

Cover art by Romano Felmang

The Wedding Special, has been compiled by us to celebrate The Phantom and Diana’s 40 years of nuptial bliss.

It was a long journey in the making but The Phantom eventually married his childhood
friend and teenage sweetheart Diana Palmer on 24th November, 1977. Lily Palmer, Diana’s mother was never totally comfortable with her daughters choice of a man who lived his life in a distant jungle.
The notion of a him as a suitable candidate for Diana was a cause for great motherly concern. Living with a purple clad hero in a jungle Skull Cave wasn’t really what Lily had hoped for her daughter’s future. Nonetheless, when pressed by the Phantom for her permission to marry Diana, she acquiesced through a veil of tears.

She is clearly impressed by the cavalcade of prominent guests that attend the wedding ceremony and softens her position over time. I am quietly confident that for those of you whom we lovingly refer to as Falkists, there will be little to disappoint in this Ruby Anniversary celebration!
You know who you are! It is our intention to choose stories that document the significant milestones in the lengthy history of friendship and courtship between the dynamic couple. Where better to start than at their first meeting? This story is not in published sequence having been created by Lee Falk in 1959 and I must point out that there is another version of the same story with a different ending published as early as 1944.

This story gets pride of place as our opener since it depicts The Phantom as a boy meeting Diana in childhood and it traverses their friendship into adolescence. Diana’s marriage has been on the agenda for a considerable period of time since 1943 when Lee Falk and Wilson McCoy created The Phantom’s Engagement. No fewer than 16 other men were eager to marry Diana over the course of the Phantom’s premarital history.

Some of them perfectly eligible and others were simply rogues with bad intentions.
Our historian Barry Stubberfield has been burning the midnight oil preparing a very thorough essay documenting the romancing of Diana which I have included as a little something extra for those that are fascinated by the detail.
This is a celebration of creation comic, with stories that you would expect to find in a Wedding Anniversary issue. I have stayed away from the other suitor’s stories in preference for pivotal Diana and The Phantom relationship moments. We’ll reminisce the meeting, various proposals, engagement, the wedding and honeymoon, childbirth and the building of an unconventional family home! Find a comfortable spot to put your feet up and enjoy this very special relationship.

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