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Caricature of Claes drawn by Per Gyllen�r

Claes Reimerthi was born on January 12th, 1955 in the small town of Ystad in the southern part of Sweden.  He wrote his first Phantom strip in the summer of 1983.

Throughout most of his career, he has been working for the Semic (now Egmont) publishing house starting with the Phantom.   In 1984/85, Claes began writing a Swedish version of the American cop-strip, 'Keri Drake'. During 1985-1992, he had written approximately fifty scripts for this title, which were drawn by many British and/or South American artists. In 1989, Mr. Reimerthi began working on several funny		A sketch of the Phantom by Claes Reimerthi.
and children's comic books including 'Bamse', 'Lilla Fridolf' and '91:an'.  He also wrote a couple of episodes of his own cop-strip, 'Murphy's Law' (which was drawn by Phantom artist Hans Lindahl).  But currently concentrates on the Phantom and '91:an'.

Recently, Claes has had a new concept for a boys' adventure story accepted as a back-up story for the Swedish Phantom magazine (Fantomen).  This will be set in southern England during the Battle of Britain and will involve sorcery, time travels and Merlin the magician.  The strip will be named 'Myrddin', the Celtic name for Merlin.

On October 25th, 1999, I received an e-mail from Claes about his first Phantom daily story.  The following section is just a portion of the message:

The synopsis for the story was written last fall on orders from Egmont and editor Ulf Granberg.  Egmont wanted to hang on to the Halloween-craze, that has been gaining around Sweden for some years now.  So I wrote a slightly Batman-inspired story on the Halloween theme, and submitted it to the editor.   Only after that I was informed that the story was to be written in daily strip-fashion and to be submitted to King Features for consideration.  The reason back then was that King Features wanted a story on the shelf that they could use in case Lee Falk should fall ill or be unable to deliver a script.  Only after Lee Falk's death this spring was it decided that the story would run this fall.  And that is about it...
- Claes Reimerthi

Below is the first strip from Claes' "Halloween" story (pencilled by George Olesen and inked by Keith Williams) as it appeared in colour Mercury Center's comics site.

� 1999 King Features Syndicate Inc.

Thanks to Claes Reimerthi

The Phantom � ™ 1999 King Features Syndicate Inc.
Last Updated:  October 28th, 1999.