The Phantom (comic strip) (1936)

Lee Falk's daily strips, from February 17, 1936, in Hermes Press's reprints The jungle avenger who got there first: the Phantom was the first fictional hero in a skintight costume, years before the superhero boom. Falk's best idea is the legend itself. The man behind the mask is the 21st in a line of crime-fighters, so to the people of Bangalla and the crooks who cross him he is an immortal, the Ghost Who Walks. Read it for that sense of a hero bigger than any one man, and for brisk, serial-length chases through jungle and sea. Hermes Press has reprinted the dailies in a long run of volumes, and the strip still runs today. Its Africa is a 1930s pulp fantasy, and the early strips see African characters with the colonial outlook of the day.