Comic Books

I love reading and it so happens that I love comic books. Have always loved them from when I was a small child. It started with Indrajal comics; an Indian publisher owned by the Times of India - they used to publish syndicated stories of The Phantom, Ltd Drake, Flash Gordon, Mandrake, Rip Kirby and a few more including a Indian super hero named Bahahur. There was also Amar Chitra Katha a retelling of Indian History and Mythology in a comic book format. ( I must have passed my history exams due to these books ). By middle school I started reading TinTin and Asterix - French comics translated into English; and there were times when one had to pick up the dictionary to understand the meaning of the words. Captain Haddock sure introduced me to a new lexicon.  The daily strip was Mandrake and Tarzan (in the newspaper we got) and the weekend strip to follow was The Phantom. (It could be some combination of those 3 strips - it’s such a long time ago).

I have always been surprised that school looked down on comic books and if you were caught by the teachers carrying one it was confiscated. The  grammar and sentence construct was something to learn from and if it also taught you History it should have been looked as a positive. ( there were a few that were bad translations into English ; maybe those should have been banned and the rest allowed). The boys being boys figured out a way to create a private library of said books; the library owner rented out the books for a couple of days for 10 to 50 paise depending on the number of pages - we were dumb that way. It should have been on popularity of the books.  We got caught one year (the libraries; there were 3 competing ones - had expanded by then to include novels) the libraries were banned and the owners were roasted. 

Middle school and senior school likes consisted of DC, Harvey (Ritchie Rich, Casper, sad sack, little dot etc) , Marvel (spider man was a huge thing back then; I guess because we also got to see him in animated form on Sundays on the lone tv channel broadcasting at the time), Dell (Tarzan, little lulu , Lone Ranger ), commando (stories of war in black and white- a Uk publication I think) peanuts and Archies. I still read the Archies and every now and then and might have to reach out for the dictionary to figure out the words that Jughead uses. (There was one story line where Jug decides to learn the dictionary and only speak in sentences consisting of words starting with A, by the end of that storyline he had moved on to sentence construction with words only starting with B. I could not leave the dictionary aside while reading that). I was also introduced to Mad around that time and started to understand the concept of puns, insults and parodies. Spy vs Spy and once in the day of … being my favourite strips to look for; and yes, the parodying of a movie or some story was great but the fold out, and the above mentioned strips were something to look out for. 

College introduced me to Calvin and Hobbs (my all time favourite) and the Internet to the far side , dilbert , pearls before swine and a few more that could be considered as an editorial comical view of the news of the previous day. 

I guess it’s the combination of pictures and a storyline that makes comic books and strips so interesting. Life would be so vanilla without them. 

C