English Version of Mandrake Daily D065 - The Million Dollar Loaf

The English version of Mandrake Daily #D065 "The Million Dollar Loaf".

This has been a unique project for me. Translating from a language which is completely alien to me was interesting when I began but became a little tiring and time consuming as the work progessed and once the initial phase was over the speed became slow. Because I was taking help of mechanical translator like Google Tranlation, the conversion was not very smooth, as I mentioned in my last post, but somehow I was able to complete it.

Mandrake Daily Strip D065 - "The Million Dollar Loaf" in Hindi (लाख रुपये की डबलरोटी)

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.

Now, French is completely 'French' to me. How could it be possible? I knew nobody who could help me in translation of French. So thought, why not try with Google Translation service? First it appeared almost impossible task. To write all French dialogues (which didn't make any sense to me at all, as I do not know even the basics of this language) was a tough job. Secondly, google translation does not work as smoothly, as one would desire it to. The sentences I got back from machine were almost equally incomprehensible. Then I tried to convert them to both Hindi and English, and somehow it worked. Now I was able to infer something which made some sense. At some places I was also forced to use some common sense.

Mandrake Sunday Strip 072 - The Casino (year 1957) cleaned and coloured

First an announcement. I have joined twitter and my tweets are now available at twitter.com/phantom_head

And here comes a Mandrake Sunday strip illustrated by original artist Phil Davis. This is sunday strip No. 72 - "The Casino" from 1957. It's not a very long story but I found the story interesting enough to be taken for colouring.

I had downloaded the black and white strip pages from Lothar's blog, which is a fine blog dedicated to Mandrake strips. It seems that he had downloaded it from some newspaper archive and hence the quality of print was not good. A lot of black spots appeared on the pages which required treatment before the strip could aquire some presentable form. Out of eight pages, four were cleaned by somebody (most probably Lothar himself) when I downloaded it. But the remaining four were still in quite a bad condition.

Classic Phantom Daily Strip by Ray Moore and Lee Falk (D006 - Adventure in Algiers) in full colours.

Phantom punishing a young girl old school style

Presenting another classic phantom tale here in this post, one from the earliest adventures penned by Lee Falk and illustrated by the original Phantom artist Ray Moore. The story was published as far back as 1938.

For Indian readers this is unread in coloured form (for most even in any form) as it was not published in indrajal comics. In fact they never published any of the Moore's strips. It seems a curious case as to why they overlooked some of the best phantom stories while giving space for some non-Falkian stories from franchisees from american publishing houses e.g. charlton etc.

Phantom Daily Strip #060 (coloured) - The Wisdom of Solomon

During its peak period, many newspapers world over were publishing Phantom's adventures in form of daily and sunday strips. Many magazines were also happy to find a space for this mysterious masked man on their precious pages. While many newspapers and most magazines carried coloured prints for sunday strips, the daily strips were still published in only black and white.

Indrajal comics in India published many daily strips in coloured format, but still there remain  many a daily strips which were never published in Indrajal ever. For this reason, these stories are still not known to Indian comic lovers.

I decided to colour one such daily strip from the McCoy-Falk combo. This is a real classic from 1956. It is D060 - The Wisdom of Solomon.

Phantom Sunday Strip #040 - The Gibs Brothers (In Full colours)

Been extremely busy for some time, hence no posts. Posting today a short (only 5 pages) but classic phantom sunday strip from Lee Falk and Wilson Mccoy. This is #S040 - The Gibs Brothers, first published in 1955.

Set in a food joint in the coastal town of Bengali, it is one of those early tales which helped set the image of phantom as a tough and fearless crime fighter who maintains a whole world of secrecy about his sudden appearance and equally mysterious disappearance into the obscure surroundings of the streets full of mist.

The same act, with slight modifications, has been repeated in a number of other adventures (for example, in the phantom sunday strip posted earlier - #S136). But the original is original and has a solid effect on the reader, something that is found missing in the later repetitions.

Preview of Mandrake Colored Strip (Currently Under Project)

Completed first 20 pages of the mandrake strip I talked about in my previous post. It is a classic Falk-Davis strip from 1939, 'D017 The Deep South'. Just posting a slide-show for preview purpose.

As suggested by friends, the entire strip will be available to download only when it is completed. You may want to take a look at the pages, so I am just giving a link for small (400 px wide) version.

Download first 20 pages

(400 px wide, just 1.4 MB)

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Original Black and White scans courtesy Balaji. See this post.

Trailer from the new Phantom series and The Veiled Lady (Adaptation of Lee Falk's original story in Novel Form)

A new TV series on The Phantom by RHI entertainment (official website, wiki page) is about to be launched next year (i.e. in 2010). The miniseries will be aired on SyFy Channel (official website, wiki page) that specialises in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and paranormal programming.

A trailer has just been released. Watch it.

TPH Exclusive: Novel by Lee Falk - The Story of the Phantom

Few phans know that between 1972 and 1975, Avon publications in USA had brought out a series of Phantom books (novels, not comics). Total 15 books were released in the series out of which some were written by Lee Falk himself and others were done by ghost writers for him. [Ghost writing on ghost who walks. Funny, isn't it? :-)]

The covers for the series were created by George Wilson, who was also attached with Gold Key publications and had previously illustrated several excellent Phantom covers for them.

While most of the books in this series are regarded as just average by the literary perspective, those written by Falk himself are considered better works.

TPH #068: The Albees (Phantom daily strip D-194)

Today I am going to talk about another Phantom daily strip coming from Mr Lee Falk's own pen. While reading this story one thing which kept coming to my mind, and confirmed my believe, is that the magic of Falk was certainly on a decline during his last phase. He only appears as a shadow of himelf in the stories he created during the 90s. The special Falkian flavour which kept the readers glued to his creations for so long (almost 5 decades) is completely missing. It seems he was finding it difficult to cultivate new ideas and to develop them in some interesting manner, once Sy Barry bid a farewell to the illustration job. That's why we often get to see either the repetition of past events or long references to them. It's tolerable or even good upto some extent but when it overshadows the main storyline the things start to turn boring.

TPH #67: Phantom daily strip by Lee Falk (D-193, The Dakk Pirates)

A repeatitive theme in Phantom stories is 'the eastern dark' and the evildoers belonging to that land. For centuries phantoms have been fighting a constant battle against the ever upsurging crime-waves from the lands of dark. Lee Falk created at least four different stories on this topic.

One of the titles that Phantom holds declares him "the guardian of the eastern dark". The age old rivalry between the pirates/thugs of eastern dark and phantoms have provided Phantom lovers with some great stuff to read. The last of these (from Falk's pen) was the daily strip number 193, "The Dakk Pirates". This is presented in the current post.

Coloring of Phantom Comics: A short comparative study of various publications

I rose this morning and to my utmost horrific surprise witnessed the deletion of my very last post (of 2nd March, 2009) from the blogger. I have no idea at all how it happened. But thankfully I always keep a back up of all my posts and through them I am able to restore any post if need be. The post when got deleted was also having few very interesting comments. It's appropriate to add them to the post.

As I had imagined, with a little practice and experience, now I am able to achieve a speed where one page is not taking more than 2-3 hours to color. That too when minute details are also taken care of. Now my next target is to minimize the time further to something one and half hour per page without compromising with the quality.

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.

Friends, I am feeling very happy in presenting next ten pages (page 11 to 20) of the current strip, Phantom #S136 "The return of the Thuggees". Hope everyone like them. Your feedback will help me improve the quality. Specially, if you can point out any short-comings in the work. So, I am looking for it.

Download Colored Pages 11 - 20

Phantom #S136 "The Return of the Thuggees"

The link for page numbers 1-10: http://www.mediafire.com/?rnnyz0dnm2j

Download complete strip here: http://thephantomhead.blogspot.com/2009/12/completed-phantom-sunday-strip-136-full.html

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Meanwhile I was taking a deeper look at some of the phantom books from different publishers from the perspective of coloring. While most of the coloring work is just OK, some of the publications appear better than the others.

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.
Gold-Key 1963	King 1966	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.

* Illustrated Weelky scans taken from CWs post. Thanks are due to him.

Will continue the topic in the next post - Next time, some very good and some very bad coloring work examples from other publications.

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The following comments were there on the post when it got deleted:

1. Rakesh: PAR EXCELLENCE ---- NO OTHER WORD TO DESCRIBE IT.
MY BEST WISHES
RAKESH
2. JP: Very interesting read! I was a huge fan of comic strips in Illustrated weekly of India. Keep up the good work.
3. The Phantom Head: @Rakesh: Thanks and welcome. I'll try to speed up so that whole strip can be completed in quick time. But it is a mammoth 65 page story. Your support through feedback is much appreciated. @JP: Thanks. Illustrated Weekly of India was one of those rare publications which carried full colored versions of phantom strips. They were very good indeed. The larger than life phantom picture against the backdrop of jungle in the title panel was very exciting. I just loved it. Thanks for your visit and comment.
4. Comic World: Again nice performance TPH.Illustrated weekly was the 1st magazine in which Phantom strip did appeared in India,its coloring was very good and the glossy page of IW gave it a much better appearance,though later on IW shifted on publishing strips in B/W but still they remained quite better in terms of page and printing technology.
5. The Phantom Head: @CW: Thanks and welcome. Excellent info. I didn't know that they also published in b/w. You are having a good collection of IWs. Do they have any complete strip? In case you have it why not post it? It would be an exceptionally good post and unique also. Even if some pages are missing, you can replace them with b/w strip or ijc version. consider it a request.
6. Ciro: Interesting article! interesting experiment!
i hope you continue on this way!!
Ciro
7. The Phantom Head: @Ciro: Welcome Ciro. I am very happy that you liked the coloring. I'll continue and possibly with increased speed.

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