Issue 1602 - Special, 2011

The complete presentation of The Python Strikes Back, the longest newspaper strip story in the history of Lee Falk’s famous comics creation!

Full details of this story are featured on the splash page (Page 4), but briefly, The Python Strikes Back has run as a daily strip for more than a year,

It is not the longest Phantom adventure ever! That honour fell years ago to a story published as a comic book by the old Semic company (now absorbed into Egmont) in Scandinavia.

The Scandinavian story has never been published by Frew so I cannot tell you much about it, save that it ran for almost two years and for obvious reasons, has never been repeated in its original form at least, by the Scandinavian publishers.

But back to The Python Strikes Back!

Writer Tony DePaul never gave the overall story an official title although not long after the story began, he did make a few suggestions for Frew to consider. (We had made contact with a request for a possible overall title and as it turned out, borrowed a little of some of his suggestions.)

Rather than devising an all-embracing title, Tony divided the adventure into five segments and gave each of these episodes a separate title ...