Magic of Mandrake :)

If you are my age and you haven't heard of Indrajal comics' Phantom and Mandrake, that would be weird :-p. C'mon not even one comic book of Phantom or Mandrake? They are even featured as strips in newspapers! Well, its certainly your loss and you definitely have a chance to make up for it.

I've always been fond of comics, since I can't really remember when :). I think I probably started off with Tinkle, but am not really sure. My cousins had this collection of Phantom and Mandrake comics that I'd gorge myself on :-D. Then there was borrowing from friends and reading. Still later we were living in this rented house where the owners lived above us (they were a very sweet old couple, I am guessing they are no more now :( ), there was this old storeroom in their house and I remember discovering this huge collection of comics there :)). The mysterious Phantom with his horse Hero and wolf Devil, his wife Diana and kids, nephew Rex, wow, there was so much to read. More so Mandrake, his fascinating magic, his friend Lothar, girlfriend Narda, cook Hojo, I was very ready to get swept away by the adventures.






I was more into Mandrake than Phantom. Who could forget the magic school, Mandrake's evil twin Derek and his evil teached Lucifer, the magic cube, his encounters with a rich oil sheik (who crashes their plane and kidnaps the whole bunch), with the future people (who take 6 year old geniuses and their families from all times to control the world in the future), with the invisible scientist (whose formula can put a city to sleep in 6 seconds :-D) and so many others. Man!! Did I want more!!

And this was all before I discovered Asterix, Calvin & Hobbes and Garfield. Yes my comics-interests have widened, but doesn't mean that I can actually forget the old ones I loved. I tried searching for the old ones in the libraries here and nope, sadly none could be found. As my quest pregressed (searching nooks and corners on the internet :-D), I found this amazing place which was here in blogspot all along!

The Comic Project

A place where some like-minded kind souls are actually scanning their old comic books for desperate people like me :-D. In addition to Mandrake and Phantom, there are also Bahadur, Flash Gordon and other Indrajal comics being scanned (I don't read any of these, so I might be "weird" according to their fans :-D). I've finished about 3 months of archives for now and there are more than 15 more months to go!!

Well I for one, certainly didn't want to keep such a goody for myself. So spread the word people, you never know who will turn out to be a Indrajal fan around you :).