Steve Englehart wrote Batman in the seventies, with illustrations by Marshall Rogers and Terry Austin, and they are considered to be a very definitive run on the character. He (and his team) are generally ranked very high on the Batman-Guru rung, just one notch below the Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams/Dick Giordano team that revitalized the character in the early seventies.

But honestly speaking, I have NOT read too many of his Batman stories. What I have read are his Green Lantern Corps stories – the run that began sometime in 1984 in Green Lantern, which later morphed to the GL Corps. I was absolutely blown, I tell you, by the premise of not one, but TEN Green Lanterns who come to Earth ( I mean, one GL is supposed to monitor a galaxy – what are ten of them doing on a Mostly Harmless planet as ours?) There was this cartoon-animal story of Ch’pp, a chipmunky Green Lantern who’s the last survivor of his planet along with his arch-enemy, an old villain whose name I forget, but I remember getting extremely emotional about the story. Things start getting interesting when Kilowog, the biggest and toughest of the alien GLs begins to take an interest in Communism and permanently emigrates to the USSR. Which gave us this iconic cover by Joe Staton, who also did the rest of the artwork on the series.

By the way, I never did find issue 209.

Well, a couple of days ago, thanks to newsarama.com, I got to know that Steve Englehart is coming back to work with DC on a new Batman series called Dark Detective II. The site also linked to his website, www.steveenglehart.com, where Mr Englehart had a sterling offer to make –

“ If you’d like a postcard-sized, uh, card, commemorating Dark Detective II and signed by Marshall Rogers, Terry Austin, and me, send a self-addressed, stamped, letter-sized envelope to Inky Fingers Press, PO Box 894, Woodstock NY 12498.”

To cut a long story short, I mailed him, and explained that I was in India and whether the offer is open to us comic-starved Indians. And he agreed. Not just that, he said he would send me the postcard without me having to send in the S.A.S.E.

So my mother got the postcard today in the mailbox, and I am mighty pleased. And grateful. I hope Gotham Comics reprints Dark Detective II in India.

So yesterday I went to The Forum, specifically the Landmark bookstore, to meet a friend sometime after work. Landmark has this uncanny habit of giving me nasty surprises, and yesterday was no exception. Right in front, there was a stack of the trades of Blade of The Immortal, Hiroaki Samura’s gory and occasionally hip look at Samurai lore. Now this is not the first time I’ve seen manga titles at Landmark, they have quite a large collection of teen manga titles like Negima and Ranma 1/2, but I am not too interested in them, really. Paying 400 Rs for a single teen title is too much for me, the last one I bought was for 120 Rs from MR Book Stall, a copy of Mars by Fumiyo Soryo, was not too impressed.

But now Blade of the Immortal? It features on my wishlist, and though I have the digital versions of the series, I would do anything to get the paperback. Or so I thought.

The retards had priced them at 750 Rs EACH. 750 Rupees for a 136 page book!! Stupid, stupid rat creatures!!

Anyways, there were also copies of David Lapham‘s crime series Stray Bullets Volume 1 ( 900 Rupees), Flight Vols 1 and 2, two anthologies of comics by independent creators, with very lush artwork ( 932 Rs and 1050 Rs, respectively), Mike Mignola’s Hellboy ( 750 Rs) and even The Art of Hellboy in softcover ( for 1025 Rs)

Ironically, I was about to bid on a complete run of Stray Bullets a couple of days ago on eBay, but very wisely managed to stop myself in time, because my credit card hasn’t quite recovered yet.

In other news, Vasu is back from his US trip with my package. Complete runs of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira and Brian Bendis and Alex Maleev’s run on Daredevil ( issues 19-70), woo hooo! Mucho thanks, gotjanx-sir, for all the help.