Tinkle Twinkles

I mentioned previously that one of the things that first attracted me to comics from India was Tinkle's collections of Folk Tales; and not just from India - tales from around the globe. For a quick introduction, let's take a look at some of those today.
Here's a half dozen tales from ...

Russia..

...China...

...South India...

...Romania...

...Arabia...

...and Greece...

pages from Tinkle #s 2, 11, 21, 256, & 503 (1981-2004)

Inimitably Witty Birbal

One figure with great personal appeal to me whom you might find in comics from India is Birbal. Part Wise-Man, part Wise-Ass, he's highly relatable for me. He was a real person from the 16th century, Mahesh Das or Raja Birbal was a Hindu advisor to Akbar, the Mughal emperor. He is the subject of a great number of folk tales known alternatively as Birbal Tales or Birbal/Akbar Tales. Still highly popular today, the Cartoon Network in India has a couple of animated series based upon his tales - Chota Birbal and Akbar & Birbal.

Not surprisingly, many have been adapted to comic book form. So let's run a few short ones here, and if the connection allows, we'll be back with a 16 page tale later today.

You don't suppose that's where the expression "to curry favour" originated?

artists and years of publication unknown

Covering India

Oh, the infinite joys of failing technology...

I had planned to break this post up in two or three parts and write a bit about some of the comics, but lost the work in progress to net crash earlier today. So we're just going to do a big cover gallery right now, with almost no comments. But don't worry, we'll come back and look inside some of these later.

Excluding a couple short comedy comics, we've never looked at the comics of India here. Since i've been having those connectivity problems, i indulged in some offline work pulling covers from about 100 Indian comics, some English and some Hindi. About 50 of those are here today, spanning about three decades.

This first cover features Sinbad (and the Roc, of course) -

I don't seem to have included any of the reprint comics featuring The Phantom, Flash Gordon, and Mandrake. (Ever wonder why those guys were chosen to be Defenders Of The Earth? Maybe it was because they were all globally popular characters?) Nor any of the old Bruce Lee comics. Another reason to come back and visit with some of these books.

But for now, let's cross our extraneous digits and attempt to post this into the queue...

covers, or so many covers...