#102.Indrajal Comics 52

Some people are not only a fan & collector of Indrajal Comics, but know how to keep there priceless gems for years. Simply Great. It’s a photo of Shekhar Chandra’s IJC collection. He has almost all Indrajal comics.

One month ago while we were checking scans, Ajay found that he have IJC #58 (already available at net) without cover. The following cover is photo taken by Shekher’s father (who is 80+) by a digital camera.

Ajay added cover in his old scans, cleaned with shop & send me. I add last 2 more pages form Raj's Hindi scans. Enjoy.

Good news for Hindi IJC lovers, RAJ is back. 30th January, he posted Hindi version of #58. Visit his blog to encourage him.

058-1968-Phantom-The Phantom The Sixth Man

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Col. Worobu's choice:

174-1973-Phantom-Romantic Witch (Complete)

For these comics all thanks & credits go to Ajay.

IJC #58: Very thankful to Raj for 2 more pages; and for cover & nice photo of IJC collection to Shekher & his father.

#101. Indrajal Comics 51 (Hindi)

048-1967-Phantom-Kiyanga Aur Tuluk


Password: bookscomics.blogspot.com

English version is available online.



It's contributed by Anurag Dixit. All thanks & credits go him.

Single Issue Review: Batman #93

While working on the Dick Sprang tribute post yesterday, I noticed this August 1955 issue and thought it would be fun to review as it has three very different tales that have one marvelous thing in common. They were all drawn by Mr Sprang, making this one of only three all-Sprang issues published by DC in the Silver Age.

Early on, Sprang's style was so different from the other Batman artists (primarily Jerry Robinson) that it was quite common to see an all-Sprang issue followed by an all-Robinson. In fact, Sprang did every story in Batman #s 19, 21, 23, 24, 26, 29, 30, 32, 40 and 46. After that there were only one or two Sprang stories per issue, so this one was a real treat.

What were the other two all-Sprang comics that DC published in the Silver Age? I'll let you folks ponder that for awhile and append my answer in a day or two. Update: The other two "wall-to-wall" Sprang issues published by DC were Superman #123 (a Supergirl tryout issue), and World's Finest #161 (a reprint 80-pager which has the distinction of having the most pages of any comic ever drawn by Sprang).

The issue starts with Journey to the Top of the World. A plane has crashed in the Himalayas. It jettisoned a cylinder carrying microfilm with the names of several major international criminals. Can Batman and Robin retrieve the cylinder before the crooks do?

This story is obviously inspired by the ascent of Mount Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay two years earlier, and is heavily focused on mountaineering.

After being summoned to FBI headquarters by J. Edgar himself, Batman and Robin become part of a team already intending to ascend K-4, which is described by Robin nervously as "The world's most unclimbable peak! T-the place where the mystery snow creature of legend is supposed to live!"

That this will be a "Whodunnit" is pretty clear when we get this panel:



Plot problem, here. If Batman and Robin were given the assignment, isn't the FBI going to notice that Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson did the job and make the obvious connection?

The story is filled with little bits of information about mountains and mountain climbing. We learn that a couloire is a steep gully on a mountain, and that a bergschrund is the crevasse at the head of a glacier.

Some of the climbers go off in pursuit of the "snow creature", leaving it to Dick and Bruce to pursue the summit, with a killer after them. Robin saves Batman's life on two occasions:


And in the end they retrieve the cylinder while the villain falls from a cliff and dies (leaving nobody to ask questions about how Batman and Robin were on the mountain).

Comments: An exciting story with a dramatic backdrop. As always, Sprang makes you feel like you are there.

The second story is very much off-beat, as you can pretty quickly gather from the splash:



Heheh. For some reason, Bruce was encountering a whole slew of relatives around this time: Aunt Agatha, Cousin Bruce N. Wayne, Great Uncle Silas Wayne, and in this story, Cousin Jane. Her husband is ill in the tropics and obviously she can't bring Junior so can she leave the baby with him, thanks, bye!

Well, no sooner said than Junior launches into a bawling jag. How can they shut him up? They're out of milk so they go in search of a milkman, but unfortunately he's made his final delivery for the day. And the stores are closed, so:



Batman milking a cow? Alfred suddenly the funny Alfred of the mid-1940s? And a secret identity crisis, all on one page? Wonderful, wonderful stuff!

Batman and Robin manage to defeat some crooks in a helicopter, but:



They manage to calm him down with a top, and in order to keep Alfred from resigning Bruce makes a deal:



Batman winds up the case alone and in the end, the secret identity crisis is averted by Dick's quick thinking:



This one is clearly played for grins and it delivers. As a change of pace from the usual Batman story it gets high marks, and Sprang's artwork is note-perfect. Check out the expressions on the faces of all the characters in that last set of panels.

The final story is The Caveman Batman. An archaeologist working for the Gotham Museum (where Bruce is a trustee), uncovers an ancient painting of cavemen running from a Tyrannosaurus Rex. But T-Rex died out well before the cavemen, so the painting is deemed a hoax and the archaeologist's reputation is ruined. Bruce and Dick decide to go back in time to the caveman era to find out the truth.

After changing into their costumes, they encounter a man dressed in a sabre-tooth tiger outfit, who discloses that he's fighting against the evil caveman Borr. Rog is the prehistoric equivalent of Batman! They give him some pointers:



Rog reveals that Borr has a T-Rex with which he terrorizes the villagers. It turns out that the dinosaur is frozen in a block of ice. In a desperate gamble to free Robin from Borr's clutches, Batman melts the ice with a fire, and the creature comes to life:



Thus proving that the discovered painting was legitimate. As added evidence, Bruce and Dick point the archaeologist to a companion drawing of the T-Rex frozen in the ice. And the story closes with a final mention of the significance of Tiger Man:



Note: This is the earliest appearance of Batman in Earth's chronology.

Overall this issue is terrific with superior art and stories. Although the Silver Age of Batman was not in general his finest hour, this was an exceptional comic.

Number 462


What the Heck...?



I was never a big Don Heck fan, but I like the job he did on this well-drawn strip. It's obvious he put a lot of work into this five-pager from Strange Worlds #1, 1958. You'll probably recognize the last panel of this story It's a tale told in various forms over the years, with the same punchline.

I've now posted all of the stories from Strange Worlds #1, which was the reintroduction of the old Atlas line after a hiatus of over a year, when publisher Martin Goodman sold his Atlas distributing company.

A Tribute to Dick Sprang

Dick Sprang was a longtime Batman artist, starting in the early 1940s and ending (except for a few special appearances) in the early 1960s. Sprang was the master of perspective, and some of his best work featured overhead oblique views of large areas. Here's a crowd getting a view of the trophies of Batman and Superman from World's Finest #86:


A similar overview of Mechanical City from Batman #114:



In a story from WF #87, Superman has lost his powers, while Batman, Robin and a crook named Eldon Craig have gained them. Look at the camera angles Sprang chooses for the first three panels:

They are carefully selected to show maximum action against an immense backdrop. Note that due to the scale, some of the characters are just blobs of ink. This is a signature of Sprang's work, something that appears in almost every story he drew. The guy could draw the details when required, but he also knew when to step back and show the action.

Check out this amazing little panel from Detective #229:

Is that beautiful or what? And check out this panel from WF #92, as Superman encounters Skyboy:

Another Sprang specialty is to reverse the camera angle from one panel to the next; this gives greater flow to the page as you can see in these two consecutive examples:

Noted for the realism of his historical objects, Sprang drew the lion's share of the Professor Carter Nichols stories in Batman comics.




Update: See also Bill Jourdain's post on the Secrets of the Batcave lithograph. I have the second Sprang litho, entitled Guardians of Gotham, hanging on my wall. They are beautiful pieces, an essential for any Batfan.

Update II: I had to add this sequence, even though it's from the Golden Age:



That last panel is breathtaking.

Number 461


Oh, you Boodyful Babe...


Boody Rogers' exquisite creation, Babe Boone, returns to us in this story from Babe #8. The story is bizarre, the dialogue, told in dialect, practically needs translation, but as always, the drawings are hilarious.

Single Issue Review: Rip Hunter #20

As I have discussed in the past, time travel was a frequent topic in the Silver Age. Almost all of DC's superheroes had some method or another of going backward or forward in time, whether it was the Flash with his cosmic treadmill or the Atom with his time pool. But Rip Hunter was solely a time traveler; that was his entire schtick.

It should have been enough; time travel is an inherently fascinating concept, and the ability to travel to famed historical events would seem to offer endless possibilities for stories. But DC was in the middle of its gorillas and monsters and dinosaurs phase and thus the actual historical content of most issues was somewhat lacking.

Fortunately this was one of the issues that concerned itself with real-life monsters, in the form of Adolf Hitler and his Third Reich. Rip and his pals, Jeff, Bonnie and Corky are filming action on the Eastern front of World War II when they are shot down (Rip's time machine was able to fly as well). The machine is recognized by the Nazis, and Rip explains:



Now of course that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Rip appears to be late-20s, early 30s at most, and so unless he was inventing his time machine in grade school it seems unlikely that 20 years earlier (the comic was published in 1964) he was being featured in news magazines during WWII.

At any rate, Rip is brought to meet Hitler:



Rip is assigned the task of bringing Napoleon back from the 1800s so the Nazis can learn his secret escape route from Russia. To ensure he returns, Hitler orders Jeff held as a hostage.

Comments: Excellent premise for a story, putting incredible pressure on Rip. If he succeeds, Hitler manages to get his crack troops out of Russia, meaning they will be available to repel the D-Day invasion later that year. And if he fails, Jeff gets the firing squad.

Part II brings us back to July 14, 1815. Unfortunately, the history starts to go a little off the rails in this section. This was after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. The story emphasizes that the Prussians (i.e., Germans) are in command, which is reasonably true, but only as part of a coalition force that included the English. Indeed, there's this comical scene:



Lafayette wasn't a particularly good friend of Napoleon's, and while Napoleon did surrender aboard the Bellerephon the next day, it wasn't as if he was "escaping". What's going on here?

I suspect that the writer and editor decided that explaining to the readers that the Germans and English had been allies against the French back then was too complicated, so they make it appear as if Napoleon was a good guy. After all, his old buddy is Lafayette, a hero of the American Revolution.

The Prussians are closing in, but Rip manages to decoy them while Corky makes last-minute repairs to the time machine. Rip asks one favor of Napoleon before escorting him to the Bellerephon, and thus the historic meeting takes place:



Rip then takes Napoleon to the Eastern Front, where the Germans are desperate to escape. Napoleon shows the secret exit, through a mountain pass, and the Germans take it. But:



The German general sends a radio message to Hitler advising him of Rip's betrayal. Can he get back in time to prevent the Nazi from killing Jeff?



Comments: A very entertaining story overall. I enjoyed the artwork more as I read on, but Bill Ely (credited at GCD) did not do a very good job on the faces. Everybody has that mannequin look as you can see in the panel where Hitler meets Napoleon.

One very oddball feature about the comic is that each chapter ends with a house ad for the very next issue of Rip Hunter. Here they are:




It's an interesting teaser.

An aside: Don Markstein notes that the Rip Hunter "team" was comprised of four people: Smart guy, strong guy, woman, kid, which was the template for another fantastic foursome that debuted two years after Rip Hunter's first appearance.