När Fantomen Blev Svensk (which translates to When The Phantom Became Swedish) is a book published by Daidalos Publishing House in Sweden on the 24th of November 2022. Written by Robert Aman, the book explores social and political view points of the Phantom within Sweden and the impact he’s had as a comic book character within this region of the world from the perspective of it’s author.
Robert Aman is Associate Professor in Education. He received his Ph.D. from Linköping University (2014) and has been a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Glasgow (2015-2017), and a visiting research fellow at Duke University (2010), University of Oxford (2013), and Sciences Po Paris (2015).
His publications include the books Impossible Interculturality?: Education and the Colonial Difference in a Multicultural World (Linköping, Linköping University Press, 2014), Decolonising Intercultural Education: Colonial Difference, the Geopolitics of Knowledge, and Inter-Epistemic Dialogue (London, Routledge, 2017), and, with Timothy Ireland, Educational Alternatives in Latin America: New Modes of Counter-Hegemonic Learning (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
Aman’s research is multidisciplinary with a base in critical cultural theory. He has published several articles on interculturality and intercultural education, indigenous movements in Latin America, multiculturalism, epistemic racism, and migration. His most recent work explores ideology in Swedish comic books with a particular focus on how the political ideals of the New Left during the 1970s found its way into superhero comics.
When The Phantom Became Swedish contains 290 black and white pages with Swedish text, available in a hardback format. The book is of interest to researchers and students in comics studies, cultural studies, media studies, and sociology. The front cover can be seen below, with the Phantom and his wife Diana Palmer featured in a comic strip.
The description provided by Daidalos Publishing House for the book reads:
How can an American superhero in blue leotards, who has been accused of both racism and sexism, become a Swedish national hero?
The comic book character Fantomen appears in the Swedish press as early as the early 1940s, but it is not until the 1970s, a decade when a strong left-wing wave washes over Sweden, that Fantomen seriously becomes “Swedish”. The magazine then gets a Swedish editorial board, “Team Fantomen”, which lets Fantomen devote itself to everything from colonial liberation struggles to gender equality and to opening a Konsum in the jungle. And in the middle of it all, Fantomen is of course a present father, just missing.
In short, the Fantomen character embodies the ambition behind Swedish foreign policy and it is evidently to the taste of both old and young readers. During the 70s, more people actually read about his fight against social injustice than read “Expressen”. In his book, Robert Aman – cultural writer, comic book researcher and assistant professor of education at Linköping University – examines how this was possible and what the series’ dialogue with the surrounding society looked like in more concrete terms.
His book allows us to encounter both the superhero in leotards and a Sweden in a time of political and social upheaval.
thephantom.fan 