Late this month but we have new Phantom releases! We have quite a few of them, in fact!
The Boy Beneath the Opera by J.R. Blackwyck is a prequel to the original story (and thus presumably a period piece). It's hard to pin down what it's actually about beyond that since all the cover copy and suspiciously similar reviews talk about is the mood/vibe/psychological depth of the work instead of anything going on in it, but might be an interesting comparison to the popular Kay backstory and its descendant in the 2004 film, at the very least!
Phantom of the Opera by Tyler Boss & Martin Simmonds is the first volume of a very exciting new arrival - a beautiful comic adaptation of the Universal movie Phantom stories! As you can see above, we're definitely adapting the 1943 Lubin/Rains film (variant covers make it even more obvious, with Claude Rains and Susanna Foster, as well as the iconic hat and mask, very visible), and the few panels of artwork I've seen seem really dedicated to the original ethos.
The Phantom Returns by Annalyse England is a time-travel period sequel to the Lloyd Webber musical (from the cover, probably the 2004 film adaptation of it!) that loosely ties into an overarching time travel series (apparently Elvis is involved, somehow?). The vibes are powerfully "this is something we would have seen posted on LiveJournal by a fourteen-year-old in the mid-aughts." (Get it while it's hot, because that cover is NOT going to pass a copyright check.)
Gray Phantom by Herman Landon is a fiction podcast about a murder at the opera and an ominous Phantom that may be to blame. If you like your stories audio and in serial format, this one's for you!
The Devil's Opera by A.R. Tapiero is a bit of an odd duck - it's a dark fantasy romance, with an opera singer main character trapped in an arranged marriage and a dark underworld figure trying to seduce her away from it, and also the "Phantom Voice" that steals memories from those that hear it. It's clearly riffing on the Phantom story, but is going in a lot of directions at once and doing a lot of things.
Phantom of My Heart by Sarah B. Wilkins is a third book, following on her first two features, Never Alone and Phantom Letters, in the same series, explicitly based on the 2004 Schumacher/Butler film with the Phantom falling in love with a new female character.
After those, we've got two coloring book entries this time (I know, I know, we all groan as we brace to see if these are regurgitated stolen fanart, but):
My Phantom by Sara DeLue does appear to be a real coloring book, with samples of a sketchy, Leroux-based style provided in the Amazon listing; the preview pages are full-color plates, but it's possible that those are example colored images as included in a lot of coloring books. It says "coloring book 1", so maybe there will be more on the way in the future!
The Phantom of the Opera: An Adult Coloring Journey by Hulya Yildizel also appears to have original images, but unfortunately I can't swear that they aren't AI-generated; the preview doesn't allow you to see more than a low-res page that can't be blown up for detail, but a quick look at the author's other coloring book adaptations of Gothic novels shows pretty definite AI-generated cover art on several of them. You'll have to use your judgment.
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And speaking of AI, it's time to stop and have a quick conversation about that!
Obviously, back when I first started the Phantom Library, AI-generated writing and art weren't really a thing I had to deal with much. I have a lot of personal opinions about generative AI, mostly negative ones, but in context of the Phantom Library, they're going to be included in the lists of works. There are two reasons for this:
The Phantom Library's mission from day one has always been to examine the historical trends in adaptations in all kinds of media of the Phantom story - what kinds of stories are being told and why and how they affect each other and illustrate their times. I may personally have no interest in reading anything AI-generated, but in that context I also have to note that their existence IS part of our current time period's trends and storytelling map, for better or worse. Ignoring them would rob the project of its ability to analyze why people made these, what features characterize them, and what that says about how people are relating to the story right now. (Weirdly enough, because of the way generative AI works, fiction created by it is going to be by definition a sort of generalized stew of "what people currently think about/how people currently present the Phantom story" and these works will inevitably be intensely mediocre as art but fascinatingly revealing of what's out there in the zeitgeist getting fed into training models.)
I couldn't actually prevent AI-generated (or edited, or "enhanced", or what the fuck ever) works from making it into the Library even if I tried, because authors and artists know that people do not like AI-generated creative products, and if they're looking to make something that passes muster enough to make some money and gain them some credibility, in most cases they're not going to actually tell their audience that it was AI-generated. (To say nothing of the fact that some publishing platforms wouldn't publish it if they did, or that they couldn't use it on their resumes for many publishing industry situations, so they're likely to just never tell anyone.) We'd all like to flatter ourselves that we can of course Tell Immediately when something is AI-generated, but the reality of the situation is that until I get to the point where I want to add something to my personal library, or I'm preparing to review it, I don't buy most things because I'm a small-town librarian and not a Rockefeller, and trying to guess if something was written by a human or not from an Amazon blurb and a bit of page preview is an exercise in futility. (Also, I think it's very important to note that I don't want to go around accusing works of being AI-generated without decently solid proof anyway, because if I were wrong - and I'm a fallible human so I would sometimes be wrong - accusing an actual person who wrote their work of being a deeply mediocre robot is devastating both personally and professionally, and I don't want to be doing it.)
So what I'm going to do is, in these posts, note where a work is AI-generated (if the author tells us or it's otherwise extremely obvious, ilke for example the visual noise is incomprehensible or they forgot to remove a watermark or a prompt), but still include them in the overall list of works that have been created on the Phantom story, and call it a day. While we all wait for the bubble to pop and somewhat free us from the techno hellscape we currently inhabit, there will be AI-generated works and their existence still says something about this historical and cultural moment, and so too there will be some AI stuff going on in our literary corner.
If you're trying to avoid AI-generated Phantom stuff, I would be especially wary of coloring books (which can easily be created with AI-generated art you won't be able to see clearly until you've bought them), study guides and nonfiction explanations of the story (which are very easy to generate by telling an AI model to come up with summaries/interpretations and then just copy-pasting them), and "modernized retellings" (I have already seen several of these that are clearly just someone plugging the de Mattos translation into an AI and telling it to repeat the story back but in modern vernacular). I would also be VERY skeptical of any "new translations" of the book floating around (translation is a very complex art and there is a reason that we do not see new ones very often, and anything an AI translates is going to repeatedly whiff badly on meaning and nuance compared to a human who understands language).
All that said, there are three final items worth noting here this month:
The Phantom of the Opera: A RavensGate Classics Edition is a repackaging of the original story (de Mattos translation) with expanded introduction material, study guide, and annotations. These sorts of "study" versions of the original novel are nothing new in Phantom-land, since the text is in the public domain and there's always been someone out there willing to "publish" their own "edition" and hope they catch a few sales from people in a hurry, not to mention most outlets collapse the reviews of different editions of a classic work into the same listing so it automatically makes it look like various people have bought and read this "edition" and have reviewed it positively (more charitably, small education companies working with classic lit often do this because it's cheaper to make their own version than to license an existing one), but it's worth noting that a lot more of them are suddenly popping up over the past year or so. I took a peek at the intro material for this one and didn't see anything particularly notable or interesting. (I'd love to be surprised, but I have never seen an "annotated" edition like this have actual annotations; people seem to think that means a glossary of terms at the back or perhaps and end-of-chapter Cliffs Notes explaining what just went on. I would pay a notable amount for an actual new annotated edition, just saying.)
The Phantom of the Opera: Adapted for Modern Readers by Michael Evans is a retelling of the original story that claims it "[enhances] readability with contemporary typography and subtly clarified language." From what I can see from the previews, this means a line-for-line retelling of the story in a modern average American English conversational tone, which in my opinion does not even try to capture the actual tone of the original evocative language - it reads like a Shakespeare for Dummies summary, just expanded on out. I'm not actually entirely sure what the point of it is - if someone just wants to know what happens in the story, they'll probably read a summary or Sparks Notes, and if someone wants to experience the story, stripping it entirely of its atmosphere will not produce anything like the same results, but presumably there's someone out there looking for this.
The Phantom of the Opera, translated by Dangello Medina, is being advertised as a new translation by Medina, but I'm skeptical about what that actually means, given that there has been no buzz and most translators don't have the time and money to dedicate to doing a full professional-quality translation on an indie budget. Medina shows well over a thousand search results over on Goodreads, all translations of classic literature (mostly from English into Spanish, from what I can see), and unfortunately the sheer volume of them does not look realistic to me, so this is a rare case where I'd be willing to bet this is a machine translation.
And that's February's haul! March is traditionally quieter, but we'll all cross our fingers and keep sending yearning vibes out toward various filmmakers for good news in the future!
