Angst In My Pangst

Why do I get so psyched up about comics?

I don’t have too much of love for funnybooks – Asterix and Tintin are fine, I finished reading them(the entire run available then, minus the new Asterix titles) way back when I was 12 , and now I don’t find them funny enough to evoke laughter ( I remember laughing loudly quite a lot while reading Asterix, forcing the librarian to go “Hush!!” a lot of times, although with an understanding smile on her face. ) Archies were ok, I ODed on them just after I passed my Class X exams, and a month later, I started to find all the stories the same. That went for all the rest of ’em funny-books – they were all stories about characters in a setting, but the stories were all fragments, if you know what I mean. Story A does not necessarily have to follow through into story B; like I said, the characters and the setting remains the same, but something that happened in story A has no bearing in a different storyline. I don’t remember Archie coming and asking Betty, “Hey! Remember the time when Veronica did so-and-so thing?”

Then there were the mandatory Indrajal and Amar Chitra Katha comics too. Even now, if I try to talk superheroes to some guy, the standard names that come out of it are Superman, Batman, Spiderman, He-Man(because of the DD cartoons. Bah! ), and then follows the Indrajal menagerie. Phantom. Mandrake. Flash Gordon. (I have not met too many Flash Gordon fans though, maybe no one except for a distant uncle ) Seems there was a time when Phantom comics were hip and really IN! If you didn’t read the latest Indrajal, you were a loser or you were lying. I had my fair share of purple-clad and top-hat wearing heroes too, courtesy my uncles’ collections. But again, the storylines refused to grow up. Or maybe I got pissed off at the declining quality of the artwork and stories. Every newspaper runs Phantom and Mandrake strips even now, with the Phantom rescuing some dame in distress from some tribal witchdoctor, or apprehending gun-runners, or maybe drug-smugglers, or, on a bad day, a feudal tyrant or two.

Amar Chitra Katha comics are genius, plain and simple. Anant Pai (and Ram Waeerkar, of course) deserves the Bharat Ratna more than anyone else, in my opinion, he has done more for Indian culture than any other psycho saffron-lover. But again, you can’t evolve too much with Indian mythology and history. I think ACK is doing the best thing, reprinting high-quality editions of its titles and maintaining a decent market. Stuff like this deserves to stay on, at least for my kids and my kids’ kids.

That was it for comics in India, at least.( I won’t even consider the likes of Chacha Chowdhary and Tauji and the rot churned out by Diamond Comics, with its bad English and equally horrid illustrations. This guy Pran, he has the temerity to show people’s heads being chopped off and stuff like that and claim these books are for children. What crap! ) Among the regional language stuff, the Hindi comics are ripoffs of Image and DC titles, with characters having weird names like Jozumba and Super Commando Dhruv battling it out in tights in Delhi. (Tights in Delhi !Awk!!! ) I loved just one character – Nagraj, I couldn’t help but love the way his origin was written, and even now I think of making a movie on Nagraj. Real eerie it would be, with snakes and all. I have read some Bangla comics, which had two of the most hilarious characters I ever met – Baatul the Great, a deadpan jock who’s strong enough to have bullets bouncing off his chest ( that’s what was featured on every cover of Baatul the Great comics, Baatul whistling while his scheming nephews shot bouncing bullets at him. ) and Haada-Bhooda, the Bangla equivalent of Dumb and Dumber. Brilliant, both of them.

Of course Target also had its Detective Moochwala (and Pooch) by Ajit Ninan, and Gardhab Das by Neelabh and Jayanto, and for a brief period of time, the awful Tegrat.

Again, the same problem with all the aforementioned titles is the same story-a-has-no-relation-to-story-B syndrome. After sometime, when you’ve read enough stories, you stop giving a damn about the next one. At that point of time, I wasn’t just looking for good stuff to read, I was looking for anything that could be read and enjoyed without being too predictable. Literary value be damned, at least give me something that can keep me at the edge of my seat and make me refuse to have dinner when I am reading it.

That’s when, at about the grand age of 15, I discovered a world that actually gave me what I wanted. I refer to, of course, the continuity-crazy world of DC, Marvel, and Euro-American comics in general.

Nine years later, I am so freaking caught up in the loop that here you are – it’s me in my office at 3:30 AM in the morning, waiting for an eBay bid on two comic-lots to get over. I need those comics. I have waited too long for them.

I am so freaking sleepy.