Dinners with Sy Barry

Drawing an adventure comic strip is gruelling... meeting those unforgiving deadlines, constantly searching for source material while trying to keep it fresh. Even when you have help, it's complicated... just getting the work from the layout to the letterer to the tight pencils and to the final inking. And no strip is more demanding than The Phantom. You need references from every geographical locale, people from every conceivable ethnic background, every animal imaginable and four hundred years of technology including weapons, architecture, machines... cars, planes, rockets, boats, ships, submarines, helicopters... and lots of detailed jungle foliage. You need expressive imagery, dramatic shadows and enormous genre scenes like military battles, while making room for dialogue and narration. The entire sequence has to clearly illustrate the script while remaining interesting but not too demanding for the readers. And it has to look good when reduced to two inch panels. It's a chore that would have taxed Leonardo da Vinci.

Sy Barry did it all with style... using graceful, eloquent ink strokes, dramatic lighting reminiscent of Rembrandt, fluid compositions inspired by Edgar Degas and he never lost the point of effectively telling the story.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing he did was to make it look easy. The readers loved his work but never understood the magnitude of his accomplishment or the difficulty of the task. From that August in 1961 when he began until the August in 1994 when he retired he was responsible for over 12,000 strips. During his long tenure on the strip, he not only maintained a high quality that thrilled the fans, but he produced images that inspired other artists to emulate and often swipe for their own work. Art from his panels graced the covers of countless Phantom comics, books and magazines, as well as interior pages literally traced by other artists. His art also found its way to be used for many licensed products like magnets, posters, collectors cards, and bumper stickers.

Considering the effort it takes to do such a job, it's not surprising that many illustrators don't have much time to pursue other interests besides raising families. In Sy's years on the strip, he didn't meet many of his fans (although he got tons of fanmail). So our dinners with Sy are a very special thing to Friends of the Phantom.

To accommodate Bill's tight travel schedule, we began dinner at 12:00 and as always, the hours just flew. Among the amusing anecdotes was a reminiscing by Sy       back to home