The World of Comics

I have found a new world. Or to be more accurate have got renewed my acquaintance with a long lost world. The world of comic books. It was the early nineties when I had got hooked on reading comics. And my reading covered the entire range of the hindi comics available at that time. Whether it was the slightly kiddish collection from the Diamond Comics (Chacha Choudhary, Billu, Pinki.... )group or the slightly grown up version from the Raj Comics (Super Commando Dhruv, Nagraj, Bankelaal, Parmanu ..... )stable or the bit more grown up editions of Indrajaal comics (Phantom, Mandrake etc) I would eagerly read all of the them. Of all these my favourite was undoubtedly Super Commano Dhruv, whose most endearing feature was that he did not have any super human abilities and relied totally on his brain power to overpower his opponents. I eagerly awaited the release of new Dhruv comics, speciall the ones in which he comined with the other Raj Comics superheroes mainly Nagraj. My comics source was a local neighbourhood shop which gave out the comics on rent. In parallel I moved from Champak to Nandan to Suman Saurabh.

However as time passed, slowly this attraction towards comics passed as my reading habits changed. The major change was in the language. From Hindi I went on to English. First came the abridged classics, then moved on to Enid Blyton, later to Hardy Boys. As time passed, came authors like Agatha Christie, Desmod Bagley and Alistair Maclean. This was followed by a very lean period in which my reading dwindled. The novels were now few and far between picking pace at times and dropping off completely at others. Now it was mainly the modern writers like Michal Crichton, John Grisham, Jeffery Archer.

And then came J.K.Rowling. I give her total credit for arousing my interest in reading again. I awaited the Harry Potter books with the same eagerness like the way I used for the next Dhruv comics book. Only the waiting period here was much longer. To fill this time I started exploring other options, specially the works by Indian authors in English. In the meantime also read some of the Hindia classics. And now I have been reading up on everything that I can lay my sight on.

Some time back I found a website with the links available for all the Dhruv comics. It was like an entry point to the old times. Since then I have downloaded all the available releases. Re-read the old ones and caught up with all the action which I missed over the last few years. The comics have also changed and tried to keep up eith the modern times in their looks and appearance. But as they say "अब इनमे वो पुरानी बात नही रही". But who cares, I love downloading and reading them.

At present I like the following Nagayan series by Raj Comics , The Virgin Comics new entries, and the weekly comic strip Arbit Choudhary (http://www.arbitmba.com/).