Friday, April 25, 2014

#282 - S007_TheTreasureHunt_(09-05-1937_to_03-20-1938)

Balaji had posted the version of this story as published in Feature Book 49, published by David McKay publications, in this blog quite a while ago. Many if not all of us have that version, which unfortunately was incomplete.

I was able to get a Hi-Resolution color version in Spanish from Teo, a Mandrake fan from Spain. I was also able to download the complete English version, though in Low resolution from AWW. Magnus Magnusson was magnanimous to provide me with a complete version of this story in English and in color. But unfortunately, it looked like the textual material had been translated from Swedish. I also had a Hi-res incomplete Black & White version of this story.

I sent all these to my friend, the well known and talented blogger TPH, who runs a wonderful blog where he showcases his talent converting Black and White strips into color. And for the last 29 weeks he has been posting a strip every Sunday, by using his PS skills to insert the English text into the colored Spanish strips. Click on his name in the above line and you will be transported to his magical blog, where you can enjoy his talent.




















You can download the full story here and shower your thanks on Teo and TPH.

Enjoy,

Venkitachalam

UPDATE: Looks like the link reflected an older version instead of the correct version. I have updated it. Please download again.

Monday, April 14, 2014

#281 - Yet another Vishu and another twist on the meeting between Mandrake & Lothar

This is the third Vishu after I started helping out Balaji to keep the stories about the acknowledged first super hero in comics, coming in this blog.

Here is a picture of the Vishu Kani of last year from my home.
 















Happy Vishu to all visitors to the Blog.

Now on to the matter at hand. Most of us still fondly remember the story of the first meeting of Mandrake and Lothar.

Mandrake meets Lothar - Classical version:
A dreaded killer is on the run after murdering quite a few people including Mandrake's friend. Mandrake goes in search of the killer and meets this young strong man, who mistakes Mandrake for the killer. After the misunderstandings are worked out, both Mandrake and Lothar work together and bring the fugitive to justice.

Here is the first panel of that story S101:


Download the story from here.
(Thanks to Magnus for the color strips)

Another take on the meeting of Mandrake and Lothar:
In the daily story - D214_TheEarsOfTheEarth_(07-19-93_to_11-27-93).cbr - Lee Falk and Fredericks fumble on the first ever meeting of Mandrake and Lothar.  This story was published earlier in this very blog. (Thanks to Paulo for extracting images from newspaper PDF files)


Continuing from where the second version left off:
Now in this black and white Sunday strip that ran for nearly a year - S172_RevolutionInLotherton_(01-29_95_to_01-07-96) - we have a story that continues from where it left off in the above daily strip. For those of us who grew up on the classical tale, this one was a big let down.

Here is the first panel of this story:











Enjoy the story.

Venkit