From Comic Books to Shields

Scott Hamilton

This image appears on the back cover of Chris Boylan and Jessica Lindsay Phillips' The Man Who Cannot Die. The book was published by JM Fogel Media in 2021.

When I am in Auckland Museum's Pacific Masterpieces gallery with kids I like to ask them a question: can you spot the superhero? The gallery hosts one of the many shields that artists in New Guinea have adorned with the figure of the Phantom, a comic book superhero created by American Lee Falk in 1936. Chris Boylan and Jessica Lindsay Phillips have published Man Who Cannot Die: Phantom Shields of the New Guinea Highlands, which documents one hundred and five shields. Phillips and Boylan worked hard to establish the provenance of each artefact, and several scholars gave them essays about the culture and history of the Wahgi Valley, where the Phantom genre was created and where it is still centred.

For the people of the Wahgi the Phantom is an emblem of local identity, and a vessel for the ancestral spirits that continually intervene in everyday village life. Today the shields are deployed in dances, but Boylan and Phillips reveal they were used in tribal fighting as recently as the eighties.

The Phantom was brought to New Guinea by American soldiers during World War Two. They were helping the Australian army push Japanese forces off the island. Tens of thousands of New Guinea men became porters for the Allied troops, hauling equipment and wounded men over the mountains of the Highlands. Some volunteered to work, attracted by the prospect of earning cash, but many were pressed into service at the point of a gun. At camps in the jungle and during breaks in marches, American troops shared cigarettes, food, guitars, and comic books with their porters.

In New Guinea and in many other parts of Melanesia, the American military had a radical impact on locals. Melanesians had long been alienated from the aloof and niggardly British and Australian officials that ruled their islands; they found GIs comparatively friendly and much more generous, and appreciated the contempt that the newcomers often showed for their British counterparts. The sight of black GIs handling modern weaponry and enjoying American commodities was especially intriguing. It is no coincidence that a series of anti-colonial protests broke out in the aftermath of the war. The most spectacular occurred on the island of Malaita, where the Maasina Rule movement ignored British authority and established a parallel government in much the same way that the Americans had done during the war.

This Phantom shield was created in Korkor village in the Wahgi Valley in the late nineties. Boylan and Phillips' book lets us see the enormously various ways in which the superhero has been presented on shields. Some shields, like this one, feature only his head; others show his full body. A few focus on his muscled torso, eliding the lower part of his body as well as his head. Still others feature only his name. This variety is consistent with the idea that the people of the Wahgi Valley are creatively appropriating the figure.

Wahgi valley lies in New Guinea's highlands. It is in this valley, at a place called Kuk Swamp, that Australian archaeologist archaeologist Tim Denham has found, in collaboration with locals, the earliest evidence of agriculture in Melanesia. Eight thousand years ago the people of Wahgi were planting crops and digging drainage ditches. They were agriculturalists before Sumerians and Egyptians. But whereas those peoples developed large-scale, hierarchical societies, where slaves built monuments for an idle elite, Papuan societies remained small. Most of them had a few hundred members; the largest had a few thousand.

In Papua and elsewhere in Melanesia, small polities led to linguistic diversity. Today eight million Papuans speak eight hundred and fifty languages. Vanuatu, which was settled only three thousand years ago by a small group speaking a single language, now boasts one hundred and thirty-eight tongues, even though its population is a mere quarter of a million. The linguist Alexandre Francois argues that Melanesians practiced a sort of ‘egalitarian mutilingualism’. Instead of building chiefdoms, states, and empires, and imposing their tongues and cultures on their neighbours, they placed a positive value on diversity. It was common for people in New Guinea and other parts of Melanesia to speak four or five languages, and to adopt and assimilate parts of other cultures. Dances, carving styles, and fighting techniques circulated as easily as words. This history of exchange is important, because it helps us understand how a comic book superhero made in America could become an icon of Wahgi Valley.

In his writing about Kuk Swamp and about Highlands societies, Denham notes that the small scale of polities did not rule out cooperation on large projects. He points to the networks of drains, canals, and terraces that for centuries covered large parts of valleys like Wahgi. These were created not on the orders of a pharaoh, but through temporary alliances secured by a 'big man', who had won power not because of his bloodline but by convincing the people of a series of villages to follow him.

In 2018 the Guardian's Jonathan Jones reviewed a huge collection of art from Oceania that had travelled to Europe. Jones was excited by the artworks, and could see why Oceania had inspired Picasso and many other modernist masters, but he didn't like the Phantom shield he saw. For Jones, the shield was a symbol of the degeneration of the region's art during the colonial era. Local cultures could not survive contact with the West; they were overwhelmed and debased by its flow of consumer objects and its easily reproduced imagery. Jones was regurgitating what is sometimes called the 'fatal impact' view of Oceanian history, which holds that indigenous cultures were too weak to withstand the juggernaut of Europe and lost their integrity soon after contact.

In his lectures and writings, art historian Rangihiroa Panoho has emphasised the ways indigenous peoples can appropriate imagery from outsiders and integrate it into their cultures.

But it seems to me that the people of the Wahgi Valley would be puzzled by Jones' view. As the book by Bylan and Phillips shows, when they paint the Phantom on their shields they continue an ancient tradition of appropriation. The Phantom represents continuity, not disruption. Maori art historian Rangihiroa Panoho has also emphasised the role of appropriation in the New Guinea Highlands. I remember a lecture he gave at Auckland University's Art History department back in the nineties, when he was teaching a paper on indigenous art. He showed a slide of a New Guinea 'big man' wearing the front of a packet of Corn Flakes on his head. There was laughter.

But Panoho pointed out that many of the objects that Western collectors find and prize in the Pacific were meant, like that Corn Flakes packet, to be disposable. They had been thrown away by locals after ceremonies. One culture's trash is another's taonga. Any object in any culture underdetermines its uses. In the same way, a character who provides light entertainment to one culture can become a sacred vessel for the dead in another.

Boylan and Phillips' book made me wonder: why didn't other Marvel characters of the forties, like Captain America or the Human Torch, end up on shields in New Guinea? What gave the Phantom his appeal? Then I thought about the character's biography. The Phantom was born to English parents in the sixteenth century, and christened Christopher Walker. At the age of about twenty he was working on a trading boat when it was wrecked in the Bay of Bengal. Walker was washed up wounded and alone, then adopted by a (fictitious) tribe called the Bandar. After caring for him while he regained his strength, members of the tribe took him a skull-shaped, enchanted cave which somehow gave him magical skills. Walker took a vow to use those skills to fight 'piracy, greed, evil, and destruction', and donned a purple and black costume. He was lived for more than a score of lifetimes, regenerating himself rather than dying of old age.

The peoples of Wahgi Valley keep the skulls of their ancestors in shrines. They do not make the clear distinction between life and death common in the West. The spirits of forebears plot, aid, punish, and gossip about the living. They are dead and yet alive, and can be propriated, with sacrifices of pigs, or offended by the violation of sacred places in the forest. As an ancestral being who remains alive, who punished wrongdoing and rewards good, and who lives symbiotically with nature, the Phantom seems ideally suited to New Guinea and to the people of Wahgi.

In the seventies some Papua New Guinea newspapers began to feature Phantom strips that had been translated into the country's lingua franca, Tok Pisin. They helped to bring the Phantom - or the Fantom, as his name is spelt in Tok Pisin - to young people living in lowland towns like Lae and Port Moresby for the first time.