Topic started by erb (@ 61.1.200.196) on Fri Jun 20 13:35:33 .
All times in EST +10:30 for IST.
|
Any tamil comics wanted. |
Responses:
- Old responses
- From: vijayasankar (@ 202.56.253.184)
on: Sun Dec 28 02:51:44 EST 2003
Hi Sivakumar,
Please mention me if you want to buy or sell Rani Comics.
- From: sivakumar (@ 61.11.87.66)
on: Tue Jan 6 11:22:41 EST 2004
i want parvathi cithra kathihal issuses. contact me
- From: erb (@ 61.1.202.126)
on: Tue Jan 6 23:47:43 EST 2004
I HAVE SOME BOOKS OF PARVATHI
DIAL 100
AVAL ENGE
THUNGATHA THUPPAKI
- From: sivakumar (@ 203.197.138.163)
on: Wed Jan 7 08:51:55 EST 2004
i am ready to sell following lion editions
maran mul(tex willre)
jony in paris(muthu comics)
hollywoodil jony(lion comics)
princs in affrica(lion comics)
maranthodu mothathe(Thil-karupu kilzavi kathaihal)
- From: sivakumar (@ 203.197.138.163)
on: Wed Jan 7 08:52:18 EST 2004
i am ready to sell following lion editions
maran mul(tex willre)
jony in paris(muthu comics)
hollywoodil jony(lion comics)
princs in affrica(lion comics)
maranthodu mothathe(Thil-karupu kilzavi kathaihal)
- From: kumar-chennai (@ 203.197.138.163)
on: Wed Jan 7 08:58:55 EST 2004
i am ready to sell few of following comics
nesamalar comics
poni comics
kali poni
malar comics
poovilzi comics
all the above r in good condition
- From: Skullcave (@ m032-053.nv.iinet.net.au)
on: Fri Jan 9 09:51:21 EST 2004
I have some Australian Phantom comics for sale on my website www.skullcave.com
- From: P. Sunil Kumar (@ 61.16.171.4)
on: Wed Jan 14 06:58:26 EST 2004
I am looking for Phantom Comics. I would want to get hold of as many as I want.
- From: quake (@ 202.68.154.19)
on: Fri Jan 23 07:42:36 EST 2004
http://www.iomx.com/online_ebooks.htm
http://www.iomx.com/download.htm
http://www.iomx.com/webmaster.htm
http://www.iomx.com/
- From: M I Siddiq (@ 202-177-189-133.sify.net)
on: Mon Feb 2 15:05:46 EST 2004
Hi... I have some Indrajal Comics which I would like to exchange for other Indrajal titles (Phantom/ Bahadur/ Mandrake/ Buz Sawyer/ Rip Kirby) or sell... The Indrajal titles are given below...
BAHADUR (Good Condition :: 13 Nos.)
------------
20-9 The Secret of the Blue Mountain
20-21 The Duel at Shikargarh
21-41 Journey to the Silver Sands
23-5 The Growing Spectre
23-31 The Mask of Deception
25-3 The Call of the Valley
352 The Secret Assignment
358 The Desert Smugglers
374 The Golden Tower
382 The Spectre of Crime
395 The Dragons
404 The Vengeful Outlaws
439 The Maze of Treachery
RIP KIRBY (Good Condition :: 1 No.)
------------
20-17 The Missing Dorian Diamond
MANDRAKE (Good Condition :: 3 Nos.)
------------
338 The Hangman's Knot
411 The Sinister World of '8'
380 The Legend of the Giants
PHANTOM (Good Condition :: 1 No.)
------------
394 The Call of the Jungle
I also have a single bound book (excellent condition becuase it's bound) that contains the following 13 comics... I would like to exchange for other Indrajal titles (Phantom/ Bahadur/ Mandrake/ Buz Sawyer/ Rip Kirby) or sell the book...
20-4 The Hanging Sabre (KERRY DRAKE)
20-11 The Mystery at Kanchenjunga (GARTH)
20-16 The Trauma of Fear (FLASH GORDON)
20-17 The Missing Dorian Diamond (RIP KIRBY)
20-23 The Captive Couple (BUZ SAWYER)
20-41 Operation Cancer (BAHADUR)
20-42 The Magnificient Emblem - I (PHANTOM)
20-43 The Magnificient Emblem - II (PHANTOM)
20-47 The Stalking Fury (PHANTOM)
20-48 The Concorde Mystery (GARTH)
20-50 The False Legacy (KERRY DRAKE)
20-52 The Drug Scandal (BAHADUR)
21-9 The Star of the East - II (PHANTOM)
I also have some very old (but good condition) Amar Chitra Katha (late-70s / early-80s) comics for exchange or sale... Will give details on request...
Get in touch if you're interested...
Regards,
M I Siddiq
Mumbai, INDIA
- From: oliver xavier (@ 202.70.194.162.iolbroadband.net)
on: Wed Feb 4 06:21:53 EST 2004
Hi!
i have some 500-odd Indrajal Comics of Phantom, Mandrake, Rip Kirby, Buz Swayer, Garth, Flash Gordon, Kerry Drake and Bahadur among others. Anyone keen?
Cheers,
Sudden
- From: iNDRAJAL fan (@ 220.224.32.13)
on: Thu Feb 5 13:54:08 EST 2004
Does anyone get nostalgic about the comics of our youth? I am referring to Indrajal comics - of the '60', '70s and '80s - when competition to these were Tintin & Asterix (too expensive), Chacha Choudhury (too downmarket!) and Amar Chitra Katha (who wants boring history lessons?). My favorites were Phantom (the ghost who walks), Mandrake (the magician), Bahadur (the brave) etc. Only last week, I happened to pass by a raddiwala in the Juhu market who had a huge stockpile of 300 odd assorted Indrajal comics. Attracted like a fire-fly to the fire, I dropped everything else and zeroed in on the pile. Lots of old comics, going at the rate of - hold your breath - Rs. 2.00 a piece (after bargaining dutifully), For the first time, I thought I had a great bargain - I could even have gone up to Rs 5.00 per piece. The Rs. 3.00 I credited to my consumer surplus (as taught by my Economics teacher). I rifled through the collection, scientifically sorting the comic pile into Phantom, Mandrake and others. A lot of the comics were in parts, i.e. each issue had only one part of the adventure / story. The ones in parts were kept separately, to be checked if all the parts in a particular story were available or not. These were later sorted to sift out the complete adventures. All in all, the exercise took about 2 hours. In between there were other customers who were trying to get to other magazines and novels, whom I quelled with a strong glare. The ones I couldn't quell with glares came in for some shoving and pushing from my side. The final haul was 121 Phantom and 48 Mandrake comics. I had to leave behind some, because they were unfortunately incomplete. The money was paid out grudgingly, as was my duty as a (apparently) disgruntled customer. I have been feasting on these comics since last Sunday, devouring them one by one.
Some of the comics date back to 1968/69, i.e. pre my birthday. The price of the comic was a princely 0.70 Rupee per issue and the subscription for the whole year (26 issues) was a princely Rs.19!! (What kind of comic would you get in Rs.19 today?). After 1973, the price was raised to Rs.1 per issue, then to Rs.2 and then to Rs.3. When Indrajal comics closed operations (I think it was 1986 / 87) the comics were going at Rs.3.
Brought back nostalgic memories - for those of you who are familiar with Phantom / Mandrake and others of their ilk, each comic superhero had individual traits - and also a unique environment around him. For example, some of the phrases associated with Phantom are "(all old jungle sayings) ghost who walks, man who can never die, Phantom has the strength of 10 lions, the voice of an angry Phantom freezes the blood (!), Phantom is rough on roughnecks" etc etc. There would be Hero (his white stallion) and Devil (he's a wolf, not a dog). Then there would be the skull cave, the deep woods, the Bandar pygmies, the garden of Eden (where the big cats eat fish and Phantom goes skiing on dolphins). The villains would fall into one of the following categories: Rogue Sultans from neighboring sultanates, poachers of wild life, rogue tribes attempting to make war on the peaceful Wambesi and Llongo tribes, black sheep from these tribes who would go to town, and return for the riches of the jungle with white friends. Somehow, the villains and the adventures didn't sound repetitive at all.
My favorite always has been Mandrake (probably because he used to get involved in esoteric adventures, some of them inter-galactic (!), and also I thought the artwork of Mandrake comics was the best of the lot.) Mandrake came with Lothar, Narda, Zed, Hojo (the secret chief of Inter-Intel, the entrance to which was an adventure in itself), Theron etc. The villains in Mandrake's adventures were a mixed variety, which ranged from ordinary goons to Intergalactic villains to the dreaded 8! Gang, to the Cobra (Mandrake's half brother, who was disfigured by Theron, the chief of the college of magic). Mandrake's favorite method of getting the better of villains would be to "freeze" them, and while the villains would be suitably imagining themselves to be in sticky positions, Lothar would step in and finish off the gang. Feminine interest was provided by Narda and Karma, who also got mixed up in Mandrake's adventures often.
Adding to the whole nostalgia bit are the sort of fillers, or one page comics / advertisements / competitions which appear towards the end of each issue, after the main adventure is over. Henry, Baboa, Chalky, the little king, are the perennial favorites - most of these characters were the strong, silent types. The first prize in various kiddies' competition used to be in the range of Rs.10-20! and various banks would put in their ads at regular intervals, exhorting the young ones to start saving with a princely sum of Rs.5!
Anyway, I think these comics were, and are, great fun. In today's politically correct world, Phantom and Mandrake's characters would be so grossly redefined that they would be completely un-recognizable. The idea of a White masked man ruling over the semi savage blacks of Africa, with Muslim sultans as the villains indulging in slavery and drugs, would be complete no-no. (Is that the reason why Phantom comics disappeared suddenly?). Similarly, Mandrake's adventures would be looked on as hallucinations of a over-fertile mind, or a mind high on LSD. Good comics these days are few and far in between, and most of the time the heroes seem to be gray, brooding types (Batman, X-men being classic examples). Somehow, today's slickly produced comics donot have the same effect.
Idea is to get them neatly sorted and bound, and store it for posterity so that future generations would know when the hero was white and villain was black and there was a clear dividing line.
Meanwhile, will continue search for more Indrajal comics, specially the Phantom & Mandrake ones. People who have any information on where these comics can be got in bulk may please put it on the site.
Shalabh Mohan is a banker based in Mumbai, India.
- From: Bryan C (@ 202-177-181-207.sify.net)
on: Thu Feb 5 17:42:54 EST 2004
Wow! stumbled on to something very good. Here's a nice article in indrajal hereos.
On the assumption that you're as fed up of Rabri Devi, Mohan Guruswamy, Vishnu Bhagwat and the Badal-Tohra feud as I am, this column is devoted to the passing of a man who managed only a single paragraph in most Indian newspapers. Lee Falk was hardly a household name anywhere in the world. When he died recently, at the age of 87, some newspapers duly recorded his departure but felt under no obligation to provide complete obituaries.
Even if you've never heard of Lee Falk, my guess is that you have heard of his two most famous creations: Mandrake the Magician and the Phantom, the Ghost Who Walks. And if you've heard of them, then you'll know why Falk's death marks the end of an era for people of my generation.
Falk conceived of Mandrake around 70 years ago at a time when superheroes were hardly the rage. Mandrake was no superman, either. A stage magician, he always appeared dressed for a performance at the Palladium, complete with cape, top hat and faithful loin clothed negro sidekick, Lothar (there was no political correctness in those days). Mandrake's gimmick was hypnosis.
In those days, it was commonly believed that mass hypnosis was not only possible but also easy to do. Now, of course we know better -- Sai Baba and J Jayalalitha notwithstanding. But Falk thought that hypnosis could be harnessed by the forces of good to fight crime. All a magician had to do was to wave his arms and a crook would feel that his pants were on fire or that his machine gun had turned into a snake.
Mandrake was followed in 1936 by the Phantom. The original concept was simple. A millionaire donned a mask to fight crime and then retreated to a cave. Nobody knew his true identity and because the title the Phantom was passed from father to son, everyone believed that the original Phantom was immortal; hence the name, The Ghost Who Walks.
If the original concept of the Phantom seems eerily familiar even to those who have never read the strip, think about it. A masked man? A millionaire with a secret identity? A hideout in a cave?
That's it. Right concept. Wrong hero.
Doesn't it sound too much like Batman?
I met Falk in 1980 on one of his rare visits to India. Already quite old (he must have been nearly 70) he looked like your average American tourist with a string-style Texan tie as he lounged by the pool of the Bombay Taj. He was surprised to find how popular the Phantom (or the Fanum, as he pronounced it) was in India and a little taken aback -- and here, I pause to blow my own trumpet -- to find as dedicated a fan as myself in Bombay.
What about the parallels with Batman, I asked.
Falk sat up in his chair. "It is a complete copy," he said. "the whole damn thing is a complete copy of the Fanum."
The way he told it, the Phantom came first (this is true) but because the character never had his own book, appearing instead in daily newspaper strips, Detective Comics (the forerunners of today's DC) were able to appropriate many of his distinguishing characteristics, combine them with some attributes stolen from The Mask of Zorro and claim that Bob Kane had invented Batman. Falk did not have DC's resources so he watched dumbfounded as Batman began appearing in three different comic books.
Faced with the theft of the characteristics of his hero, Falk was left with two options. Either he buried the Phantom or he changed the character. Sensibly, he opted for the latter. Out went the Batmanlike touches. There was no millionaire now, there was no secret identity and the Phantom did not operate out of a city. "I kept the skull-cave though," he said. "the Batcave is such a cheap copy."
He moved the Phantom to the jungle and decided to (this was my surmise though he was not pleased by it) steal a few of Tarzan's characteristics by making him the king of the jungle. There were problems though. Falk had never been out of the United States. He did not want to be like Edgar Rice Burroughs whose ignorance caused him to get Tarzan to fight a tiger in deepest Africa in one of the early books.
So, Falk made up a country. "I wanted it to be partly India," he recalled, "like that guy Kipling and The Jungle Book and all that. Basically, I wanted Rajas." But there was another problem. He wanted pygmies as well. "So I thought why not make up an Afro-Indian country with its own name?"
And what name did he choose?
"Well I wanted something really wild-sounding. You know, like the tiger."
So he called it Bengal.
Oops!
If you've read the Phantom comic strip or even the books produced by Indrajal comics in the Sixties, you have already paused for thought. Surely, you say to yourself, it wasn't called Bengal?
Well, actually it was. He was so impressed by the royal Bengal tiger that he called it Bengala. But when King Features picked up the strip for international syndication in the Fifties (yes, people of my generation remember reading it in The Illustrated Weekly), they had a little talk with Falk and told him that there were no lions, negroes or skull-caves in Bengal. So could he please change the name?
"I thought, it doesn't really matter, does it?" he remembered. "I mean, I made it up in the first place." So he let them call it Denkali. (It is still called Bengala in many versions, though.) But he kept the Indian touches. There are lots of rajas. And the current Phantom's father was killed by the Singh pirates (who, no doubt, sailed the seas of the Punjab).
The funny thing is that when I started reading the Phantom as a child (in the Weekly), it never occurred to me that it was meant to be set in India. I always thought it was Africa. After all, the Ghost Who Walks was protected by the Bandar pygmies (another politically incorrect Indian word - bandar -- think about it!) and his chief sidekick was a pygmy called Guran who wore a grasshat and had drooping breasts.
Everyone else was lily white, though. Even if the poor man lived in a cave in Bengal, he managed to find an American girlfriend called Diana Palmer, adopt a white child called Kit and pose as a white man when he visited the West, wittily calling himself Mr Walker (get it?)
But still, the Phantom was, for us in India at least, a comic book hero for the masses. We read him each week in the Weekly and in the early Sixties Indrajal Comics started collecting the newspaper strips in books, priced at 75 paise each. When they ran through all of Falk's original stories (one comic book takes at least six month's worth of newspaper strips), the creative folks at Indrajal (a branch of The Times of India) wrote their own Phantom stories. Such was our sophistication as children, that we couldn't tell the difference.
By the time Falk came to India in 1980, it was all over for the Phantom abroad. The strip still appeared in 500 small-town newspapers but nobody paid it much attention. There had been a Republic picture serial in the Forties (with Tom Tyler as the Phantom) but nobody seemed interested in making a television series or a movie. (A cheapo movie was made in the Nineties by Robert Evans with Billy Zane but it was a huge flop.) Falk was more optimistic about Mandrake. There had been a serial in the Forties but the producers had thrown out Lothar on the grounds that Americans didn't like black people. Federico Fellini had expressed a brief interest but nothing had happened. Falk was now pinning his hopes on Kevin Kline who was developing a Mandrake project. (It never happened.)
He was pleased therefore to come to India where the Phantom meant so much to people of my generation. Everywhere he went, journalists would take him aside to discuss the Phantom's marriage plans. "Well," he would say, "I can tell you this much. The Fanum will marry Diana, they will live in a tree house and have twins."
"It's a great feeling," he told me. "Because you know, the Fanum is really set in India." I didn't have the heart to tell him that they would hit him with jhadoos in Calcutta if they heard about the skull cave and the pygmies of Bengal. But my heart went out to the old man, cheated by Batman of the recognition that was his due in this own country, looking desperately for a reason to find significance in the Indian response.
Sadly, three years later, the Weekly dropped the Phantom. I never followed the adventures of the twins and the treehouse, forgot about Guran and had difficulty remembering Diana's name. And now alas, with Falk gone, there will be no future for the Phantom. The Ghost Who Walks has walked his last mile.
List all pages of this thread