#178: MEGA Mandrake Flame Pearls Sundays Post

How are you all doing? Here is a mega mega Mandrake post that I always wanted to read all of the stories at one stretch. It is one of my biggest posts covering a period of almost 2 years.

Happy Ugadhi/GudiPadwa (Happy New Year) and Shri RamaNavami (Lord Rama's birthday) to all.

Thanks a lot to all these fabulous people (in no particular order): Paulo Marques, Lothar, Magnus Magnusson, Venkitachalam, Steve Cottle (Ilovecomix) for their priceless contributions and efforts.

They have been very instrumental in searching for these stories, scanning them, cleaning them, organizing them and making it available to all of us who do not have access and resources to these stories.

Thanks also to Australian Women's weekly for publishing Mandrake Sundays and making it available.

If some publisher were to publish all these stories in full color, I will be very glad to buy it. Hope that day comes around soon. Enjoy reading them.

It will take a while to read them all in one stretch and is worth your time.

Here are the Flame Pearls adventure stories:

S014 The Flame Pearls Pt.1: Attempted Assassination From 21 Apr 1940 to 26 May 1940
6 Weeks

S015 The Flame Pearls Pt.2: Magnetic Island From 2 Jun 1940 to 11 Aug 1940 11 Weeks



S016 The Flame Pearls Pt.3: The Three Cows From 18 Aug 1940 to 22 Sep 1940 6 Weeks



S017 The Flame Pearls Pt.4: The Amazons From 13 Oct 1940 to 22 Dec 1940 11 Weeks



S018 The Flame Pearls Pt.5: The Ghost Ship From 29 Dec 1940 to 20 Apr 1941 17 Weeks



S019 The Flame Pearls Pt.6: The Witch of Tago From 27 Apr 1941 to 22 Jun 1941 9 Weeks



S020 The Flame Pearls Pt.7: Land of the Giants From 29 Jun 1941 to 2 Nov 1941 19 Weeks



S021 The Flame Pearls Pt.8: The Hungry Isles From 9 Nov 1941 to 12 Apr 1942 23 Weeks

#177: D049_TheBigTyme From October 04, 1948 to December 25, 1948

Happy International Women's Day to all Women!!!

To commemorate this International Day decided to post a daily where women have a key role.

Thanks a lot to Venkit again for providing me this daily, for taking the efforts to procure the scans, clean it up and make it available for all of us to have a great time enjoying reading this daily strip.

Mandrake's magic really comes in handy in this strip and using his hypnotic power outsmarts the thugs. His ability to read a mind is incredible. Enjoy.


Download the Strip Here

Do You all use ImageShack? Read this email!!!

I was wondering if any of you still use Imageshack for viewing comic strips? It appears they are now going to enforce a limit to the free users.

Since I have 5918 images...most of the images will get deleted which is not an issue for me, but I wanted to let you all know about this in advance. As you all know, I do not make any money by posting these strips so I do not see any advantage to pay them for hosting the images.

Appreciate your feedback. Have a great weekend.

Here is the email I have received.

Dear User,

We noticed that your ImageShack account has reached or close to reaching maximum number of images allowed for free accounts.

We wanted to notify you in advance that free accounts now have a limit of 500 images. After you reach this limit, older images above 500 will expire within a month and will be subject to deletion. You can increase the capacity of your account by subscribing to our basic subscription plan. It is only $2 per month. There are multiple benefits of using our premium service. Some include: unlimited number of uploads, uploads of files of up to 10MB, automatic image backup, high availability and uptime of 99.9%.

Please protect your images by purchasing a subscription at this link: http://imageshack.us/content.php?page=subscribe

#176: S022 Pacifica From 19 Apr 1942 to 1 Nov 1942

Happy Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) to all.

Also Happy Shivarathri to all Shiva devotees.

Surprised to see updates on this blog? I am too.

A very good friend of mine passed me some strips and wanted to share with you all. This one especially is very hard to come across.

It is a 1942 Sunday strip which is complete and in COLOR!!! Rarely one comes across such a Mandrake The Magician strip.

Thanks a lot Venkit for getting me these stories and for all the efforts taken to clean the scans.
A ton of thanks to Paulo Marques for sharing this strip. I hope to see you visit the blog someday.


Download the strip here.

#175: D003 The Monster of Tanov Pass From 25 Feb 1935 To 15 Jun 1935

Posting after a while. One more Daily that has a weird professor keeping monsters as pets.

Nice imaginative story here.

Thanks to the Australian Women's weekly archives for having this story published and made available. Thanks to Venkit Subramanian for extracting the scans from the PDFs and cleaning them.

This particular strip shows how brave Lothar is, I would guess nobody would like to be in his situation facing a monster snake.


The scans are much more readable...As always, liked the drawings of Phil Davis. Enjoy.

On another note, regarding World Cup Cricket 2011, this coming weekend India plays England at Bangalore, how do you see India's chances at winning the game? Are you all watching cricket on a daily basis or only following particular teams?

Download Strip Here

Download PDFs Here

Lee Falk the Story Teller a very good article

Found an excellent article on Phantom and Mandrake and wanted to share with you all.

Really well written and what a good blog this one is.

Enjoy reading....

http://john-adcock.blogspot.com/2009/06/lee-falk-storyteller.html

#174: D002 The Hawk (Mandrake Meets Narda) From 26 Nov 1934 To 23 Feb 1935

What a story this is! Mandrake meets Narda for the first time. She does quite a lot to Mandrake which I had never known until now....well I won't give away the story.

With all the recent chaos in Egypt, it is such a coincidence that Mandrake and Lothar in the story are in Alexandria, Egypt.

Thanks to the Australian Women's weekly archives for having this story published and made available. Thanks to Venkit Subramanian for extracting the scans from the PDFs and cleaning them.

For, the first time, the story in black and white has a few colored panels. I guess, Phil Davis was experimenting how it would turn out. The black and white scans were back soon enough.

So many magic tricks in this story are very creative of Lee Falk.

Also, I had never seen Mandrake use some harsh language on Lothar before. The last panel was a little disrespectful.

The scans are barely readable, but these are the first ones I can find for this daily in English. I have the PDFs of the story if someone wants to read it that way.


Download Strip Here.

Download PDFs Here.

Missing Page in Feature Book 46 Mandrake On The Moon

Thanks to Venkit Subramanian for pointing out that I had a page missing in the story.

Here is the page.

I have updated the CBR file with this page. You can download the entire file again or add the missing page to your CBR file.