Team-Up Tuesdays: Phenomenal Phantoms

Teams we've previously considered, the Mighty Crusaders as well as Captain Atom with Nightshade, met the key players in this week's post. Two men, Walt Whitney and Alex Rios,  aka Bob Phantom and the Ghost, discovered  the means  to teleport  from place to place instantaneously, seemingly appearing as phantoms when they did appear (hence their aliases). While the Ghost used technology in his glove, Bob Phantom used other means never described, although the end results were the same.

Both worked alongside gangs of confederates, although one was a powerful ally the other was a persistent adversary. This resulted in mixed results when interacting with the superhero set, as can be seen below from April 1966's Mighty Crusaders #4 (and then 1983's Mighty Crusaders #3 v2) in the third panel )and June 1967's Captain Atom #96, respectively:

As you no doubt have observed, this pair never quite got along with their fellow men and women in tights. The latter appearence of Bob Phantom was as mindless replica for the madman Eterno, while Alec Rios inbetween battles with Captain Atom and Nightsshade befriended their civilian identities, none the wiser. Both were social butterflies outside of their longjohns, as Rios was a rich playboy and Whitney was  a gossip columnist on Broadway. This affable nature never quite translated into their costumed lives, however Although the Ghost was soon adopted into an alien tribe of women from Sunaria who believed he was their Faceless One...long ago disappearing, although there are definite visual differences. Which reminds one of Bob Phantom's fellow phantom mystery man, Mister Justice of the Terrific Three, an ancient crusader tied to legends of lore.

Bob Phantom would eventually join the Mighty Crusaders at the dawn of a new century, while Ghost disappeared once his Sunuria kingdom was destroyed by its high priestesss (a tale for another Team-Up Tuesdays).