Issue 1654 - Fortnightly, 2013

• "The Bandar Idol" - story by Tony DePaul and art by Cesar Spadari.

Presenting—Part One of an intriguing, new Phantom adventure! The Bandar Idol (which we have occasionally referred to as ‘The Bandar Statuette’) will take you from the Deep Woods to New York City, USA and at the end of this first chapter, en route back to the Deep Woods.

There is action aplenty as The Phantom battles a group of rough and tumble New York thugs to regain possession of the mysterious Bandar relic for which he has just outlayed a million US dollars to buy at an auction. How could an old Bandar carving be worth so much money?

That’s what you are about to discover! There is just so much more than sentimental value. The base of the idol carries words carved in an old Bandar language which Guran understands—and discovers might hold vital clues to the exact whereabouts of a lost civilisation popularly known as Mu!

‘Mu’ sounds like a word lifted from say, an early science fiction story of Edgar Rice Burroughs, but it still exists today and may—stress the may—be far removed from fiction. ‘Mu’ was the name given to what many people believed was a huge land mass which once existed in the greater Pacific Ocean.

It was so huge that if it indeed existed, would have stretched from the western coasts of North and South America (as we recognise them today) as far north as the Hawaiian island group, as far south as part of the North Island of New Zealand and as far west to embrace Fiji and all the island groups to the immediate north.

The first ‘proof’ of this seemingly far-fetched theory was published by British army officer, explorer and historian James Churchward (look him up on the Internet and you will be surprised at how much support he had and for that matter, still has!)