Mandrake the Magician (King)

(King, 1967-1968)
™ and ©1967 King Features Syndicate

Mandrake the Magician debuted as a Sunday newspaper strip in the 1930s, the creation of Lee Falk, who also brought The Phantom to life. Mandrake is a stage magician, complete with top hat and cape, who can control people’s minds with hypnotic gestures. Together with his gigantic African servant Lothar (often seen wearing a fez and leopard-skin cummerbund), they tackled all kinds of criminals, spies, pirates, and other menaces. If this sounds clichéd, it’s not Mandrake’s fault; he was the first crime-fighting magician in the comics, and all the imitations that followed were based on his huge popularity.

Comic books often reprinted complete Mandrake adventures after they had been serialized in Sunday newspaper strips. In the 1960s, however, King Comics published this series of new Mandrake adventures, credited to original writer Falk.

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