The translation of these American comic books into Hindi made them more accessible to a large section of young readers in India. The first 32 issues contained stories of American cartoonist Lee Falk’s character Phantom, but after that Indrajal also started to publish characters such as Falk’s Mandrake, and superheroes designed by other American cartoonists such as Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, Rip Kirby and Phil Corrigan, Roy Crane’s Buz Sawyer, Allen Saunders’s Mike Nomad and Kerry Drake, and Steve Dowling’s Garth. But the history of Hindi comic books, according to Kunzle’s definition, can be traced back to 1964, when Indrajal Comics, an offshoot of Times Group, published the first ever Hindi comic book titled Vetal ki Mekhla (The Phantom’s Belt). The forerunners and prototypes of comic books existed in India in the form of cartoons and strips that were found in Delhi Sketch Book and Awadh Punch, which started publication in 18, respectively.
According to him, the medium has to be more visual than textual, and it must be possible to be produced on a mass level. Kunzle says that a comic book must have a sequence of separate images that tell a story which is both moral and topical. David Kunzle’s definition is most suited to the idea of comic books in India. Comic books are an integral component of contemporary media culture, and extending their studies into a new and fascinating realm of non-Western popular culture certainly seems timely.Īs an object, comic books have been defined by several scholars. They are no longer synonymous with banality, and have captured the interest of a growing number of scholars working in the field of historically oriented social sciences.
The notion that comic books are unworthy of serious investigation has given way to a widening curiosity about them as artefacts, commodities, codes and pedagogical tools.