Indrajal Comics

Indrajal Comics was a comic book series launched by the publisher of The Times of India, Bennet, Coleman & Co in March of 1964.

History

The issues of Indrajal Comics alternated between various King Features Syndicate characters, including "Mandrake the Magician", "The Phantom", "Flash Gordon", and "Buz Sawyer". Later it also published "Bahadur", an Indian comic hero created by Aabid Surti.

A total of 803 issues of Indrajal Comics were published, ceasing in April of 1990. #123 and 124 were never published due to an industrial strike.

The Indrajal books often contain colorized versions of Mandrake stories, edited with expanded, reduced or omitted panels, to fit the format of the comic book. The stories were mostly daily and Sunday stories, with a few King Comics stories.

Language versions

From the first issue in 1964, Indrajal Comics was available in several language editions. The first Indrajal Comics was in two different versions, an English and a Hindi editions. If we look at issue 46 from 1967 (the first Mandrake issue) it was printed in five different languages; English, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi and Bengali.

A Tamil version came in 1969, then an Arabic version in 1977, a Kannada from issue 349 (1980), a Malayalam version from issue 381 (1981) and then a Telugu version.

The different language versiones were sometimes released with a different periodicity than the main editions. Each language edition had a different registration number with the Registrar of Newspapers for India

Issue overview

1960's

1964	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1965	11	12	13	14]	15	16	17	18	19	20	21	22
1966	23	24	25	26	27	28	29	30	31	32	33	34
1967	35	36	37	38	39	40	41	42	43	44	45	46	47	48	49	50	51	52	53	54	55	56
1968	57	58	59	60	61	62	63	64	65	66	67	68	69	70	71	72	73	74	75	76
1969	77	78	79	80	81	82	83	84	85	86	87	88	89	90	91	92	93	94	95	96	97	98	99	100

1970's

1970	101	102	103	104	105	106	107	108	109	110	111	112	113	114	115	116	117	118	119	120	121	122
1971	125	126	127	128	129	130	131	132	133	134	135	136	137	138	139	140	141	142	143	144	145	146	147	148
1972	149	150	151	152	153	154	155	156	157	158	159	160	161	162	163	164	165	166	167	168	169	170	171	172
1973	173	174	175	176	177	178	179	180	181	182	183	184	185	186	187	188	189	190	191	192	193	194	195	196

This article, in the version of February 12 2008, includes information from Wikipedia: Indrajal Comics.