Lee Falk
About
Leon Lee Falk created two of the most successful and longest-running action-adventure strips in the history of comic art: Mandrake the Magician and The Phantom.
Falk was born in St. Louis in 1911. He was a graduate of the University of Illinois. He spent four years writing copy and directing radio shows for an advertising agency in St. Louis. Once he was comfortably situated as the producer of two of the most sensationally successful features in daily newspapers, Falk took to globetrotting. For many years, the adventures of both The Phantom and Mandrake the Magicianwere as often as not set to paper in hotel rooms in one of the world’s great capitals.
The inexhaustible stories continued to come one after another even as World War II intervened. Immediately after Pearl Harbor was attacked, the patriotic Falk took on duties in secret intelligence operations with the Office of War Information and became chief of its radio foreign language division. In 1944, Falk enlisted in the United States Army.
Up until the time of his death, the expert storyteller still roamed every corner of the globe and continued to mastermind the daily and Sunday newspaper adventures of both The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician.