Saturday, May 4, 2013

252 - D160_TheThieves_(01-20-75_to_08-16-75)

I am posting here a daily strip that has never been presented before completely in English. I had earlier presented D158 & 159 in this blog, which was printed as one story by Indrajal Comics in 1976 as No 253 (The Nightmares). Indrajal Comics subsequently printed D161 & D164 in 1977 before coming around to this story.








But they did not print the full story. The first part of the story is very important, as it casts some doubt on the subsequent revelation of the person behind the robot in Inter-Intel. Part of this story came as No.286 (The Magic Mantle)  in Indrajal Comics in 1977.

Now to the pertinent scenes.Here is the 9th panel in the story:









What we see here is Mandrake and the robot speaking with one another and Mandrake even lighting a cigar for the Chief!

Now take a look at the very next panel in the story:









Here we see Hojo, Narda and Karma under the watchful eyes of the thieves. Take a look at Hojo's hands. They are tied behind his back!

A very interesting story indeed! This story was sent to me by my Australian friend Donald Ladhams. The whole story was taken from microfilm of one of Australia's leading newspapers. They were sent to me as small PDFs and JPGs of the full sheet containing various comic strips. So I increased the size to 250% and then snipped the Mandrake strip using SnipIt. I saved the strip as JPG and then did minimal edits. I have not done extensive edits. So you will be still seeing some dark lines and black spots. Another familiar Mandrake fan Paulo Marques, helped me with editing and was also instrumental in getting one missing strip.

Enjoy the story.

Download MF version here

Download RS version here

Venkitachalam






4 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks for the story, but where is the download link

Venkitachalam Subramanian said...

The links are out there. Sorry about that

Anonymous said...

Hi,

I started to read the story and want to share two things:

Who is Elizabeth Moxley ?

How Hojo can be at Xanadu dealing with thiefs and talking into the Intel-Intel chief robot at the same time ?

Anonymous said...

Ahhh !

No answer ?

Two solutions:

a. you do not care.
b. you do not know.

Elizabeth Moxley is Lee Falk widow (wife at the time).

Hojo: this is a good question and I do not have an answer for this one.

Emile