Norman Worker

Norman Worker was a British comic book writer born in Kent, England, in 1927, who became one of the most prolific contributors to Scandinavian Phantom comics. He died on 5 February 2005.

His route into the medium was anything but direct. After serving in India during World War II at seventeen, he spent years working in his father's furniture factory until the business failed in the 1950s. It was his cousin Peter O'Donnell — creator of Modesty Blaise — who pointed him toward comics writing as a new path. Worker cut his teeth scripting stories featuring The Saint and Buffalo Bill for Semic, a Swedish publisher, before turning his attention to Lee Falk's The Phantom, the character with which he would become most closely identified.

He initially published Phantom scripts under the pen name "J. Bull," though he soon dropped the pseudonym in favor of his own name. Over the course of his career he wrote 127 Phantom stories, retiring in 2004 — a body of work that made him arguably the most popular writer in the Scandinavian Phantom tradition. His historical interests left a distinctive mark on the mythology: he is particularly credited with developing rich backstories for earlier generations of Phantoms stretching back across centuries. His credits span titles including Fantomen, Fantomet, Helgonet, and War Picture Library.