Presenting today Mandrake Daily Strip No. 65 - 'The Million Dollar Loaf' in Hindi. This strip was only available in French so far (as I know). I decided to translate it so that it can be read by readers of other languages.
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| Phantom punishing a young girl old school style |
I thank all the visitors and downloaders of previous segments of the strip. Special thanks are due to all those who spared their time not only to write a comment and provided feedback, but also came up with valuable suggestions, which I undertook while moving on to next sections. All these wonderful people have kept the flame of desire burning constantly within me and have encouraged me to produce more, even though it was not easy for a novice like me to enter the field of comics colouring. Considering my (bad) nature of getting bored easily with new experiments and a tendency to leave it unfinished, personally I feel it is not a small achievement to finish a large comic comprising of none less than 65 pages for an amateur like me.
The opportunity has provided me some valuable experience in digital graphics art as I spent a lot of time with Photoshop. Most part of the strip was done with PS 6. It was after I purchased a new PC in October that I switched to PS CS4. Last quarter of the strip is being done with the newer version. |
Click on the above pic to see a much larger view |
It is really a long strip, and I am slightly getting bored now with the repetitive job of coloring the same characters and same scenarios. Looking for something new. Still wonder, was it a mistake to select this long story as my first shot in coloring.
Couldn't resist myself from some experimentation, purely for fun. So, in one panel I have used a real life picture as the background. The pic was taken by my daughter a few days ago on a colorful spring evening from the terrace of the home.
.jpg) Harvey hits 1958 | 1. Harvey Hits: A very old series. They published original Falk stories with Wilson McCoy artwork. It seems that coloring plainly without much experimentation was the established rule in those early days. So we see a minimal use of colors. The entire page is filled using only 4-5 colors but the selection of colors is soft and easy on eyes. |
| 2. Gold Key/ King/ Charlton Series: Most of the work was from Bill Lignante, another of phantom artist which is often not considered among the more popular people, but who produced some very good drawings. Unfortunately, the coloring of these series was sub-standard and that also caused the artwork to appear ordinary. Take a look. | ||
.jpg) Gold-Key 1963 | .jpg) King 1966 | .jpg) Charlton 1974 |
| 3. Indrajal comics: During my childhood, I always found the colorful presentation of indrajal stories very exciting. But looking at them now in light of others work, it seems indrajal was highly inspired by the order of those olden times, i.e., coloring with minimum of effort, choosing only a handful of vibrant colors. Surprisingly they continued in the same style for their entire publication life. Minor mistakes were routinely overlooked. | |
| A very early indrajal. Only 5-6 colors are being used here though the colors are soft. Look the color of the horse in the last panel. Too much of liberty the coloring artist takes sometime. |  #007 Man Eating Plant (1964) |
 #134 The Crime School (1971) | Now one from early seventies. More dark colors were in use as can be observed here. Though there was opportunity to show some fine coloring, but indrajal contended themselves with only the basics. |
| Late seventies show some kind of improvement. Light colors are used nicely. Good reflection effect has been created using white. |  #275 The Masked Assasin (1977) |
 #394 The Call of the Jungle (1982) | And they are at it again. Too dark coloring with amateurish touch in leaves. Blue and orange/red is used only to make the page more vibrant but depth is missing generally. This is early eighties work. |
| And finally one from late eighties. Still we see the same pattern while printing technology was improved considerably worldwide. |  #V25N08 The Masked Avenger (1988) |
| Financial constraints might be the reason behind indrajal's simple coloring. They were selling their product at quite low rates and this can be easily imagined that putting more money for improving coloring quality might have been difficult for them. | |
| 4. Newspaper Strips: Those were good indeed as can be seen here in the samples. Some of these are from illustrated weekly (an indian publication) and others from foreign newspapers. I like them over most comic books. | |
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A year and half ago, when I decided to scan my first Indrajal Comics, there were not too many scanners in the field. Only 'Comic World' was active in the dual role of a scanner and a blogger. Most of Mr. Ajay Mishra's scans were available to a select few in the form of DVD. Both TCP and ICC were enjoying a good earned holiday without a slight hint of their possible future returns. A lot many indrajals were unavailable for the majority of the visitors of these Indian comics blogs. So, I felt it as my duty to share with all whatever little I could do to spread the joy of reading the beloved indrajals, the nostalgic elements of the wonder years of childhood, the long goneby.
It gave me immense pleasure in sharing my collection in e-form, though I never counted myself in league with the big names like ICC and CW who are having a vast collection of indrajals in physical form, not to forget Sagnik, the most enthusiastic lover of comics I ever came in contact with.
With the passage of time many new contributors to the community arrived on the horizon with nice intentions and generous efforts to submit in the greater interest of all. It became clear that soon we'll have all the indrajals on net. That's a very nice feeling to have all that were published. But then, what next? The question is already put by some of the friends. Greater lovers like Sagnik want discussions over the comics. I feel it will require some planned efforts to form a plateform where meaningful thought exchange can take place. Let's hope to build it soon.
For the past couple of weeks, I have been seriously trying to learn the art of comic book coloring. The field has always excited me. When Comicrazee contributed some awsome colourful pages to Balaji (MTM), It made me desirous to work in this area. So I selected Lee Falk's original story with great Sy Barry's own illustrations. This is sunday strip number 136, "The return of the thuggees'. Published in the year 1990, it is a very interesting tale which spread over as many as 65 pages. I have just colored the first 10 pages till now as the process is very time consuming for an ameature like me. It takes me roughly 4-5 hours to colour a page.
[Update: 15 December, 2008 10:15 AM] There was some problem with the download link of the Hindi Translated version of this strip. It has been corrected now. You can download it and enjoy the story in Hindi also. Sorry for the trouble. |
Too much of talking about the sub-standard level of post Falkian era stories has already taken place. Here I am presenting another of Graham Nolan Phantom Sunday strip (#S160) The Viking Fortress Mystery.
Though the story has its fine points also but too few and too far apart to fully bind the reader. The graceful and courageous course of action adopted by the Ghost Who Walks with a cool head in the hour of life threatening underwater crisis is definitely inspiring and interesting. The essential idea of the virus attack establishing the ancestry of Phantom is also interesting.
