Indian, male, comic-book lover, comic-art appreciator and collector.

Right. A couple of things about myself.

I was into comics since I was a kid. There is this series called Amar Chitra Katha, which means "Immortal picture stories" published in India from the 60's to the 80's. These were comicbook renditions of stories from Indian mythology and history, and while the content was a little watered-down, it was enough to pique my interest in graphical storytelling. Especially because I would remember all the details I read in the historical stories and use them in exams. There has never been a better way to get history grades.

(Just for the record, I ended up writing the Wikipedia entries for both Amar Chitra Katha, and Anant Pai, the educationist who founded and editted the series. I had the good fortune of meeting the gentleman last year, and spent a pleasant hour talking to him about comics and art.)

Tinkle was another Indian comic that I grew up on, it was an anthology of folk tales, humourous cartoons and interesting facts in graphical form, also the brainchild of Anant Pai.

There was the fascination of characters like Phantom and Mandrake the Magician, both of which have attained popularity in India through the virtue of having been published as daily strips in a National newspaper ( The Times of India) and later collected and reprinted through Indrajal comics, an imprint of the same newspaper.

I got into DC and Marvel comics in the eighties, sometime when I was in high school, and once I read issues of Swamp Thing, Ambush Bug and Justice League International, there was no looking back. I was hooked for life. I would read Mile High comic catalogues and fantasize about owning full runs of Spiderman.

One of the good things about my exposure to comics at that time was that I had access to both European releases like Tintin and Asterix and Yakari - and US comics ( though there was a 3-4 year lag between the date of release and the comics I got to read - for instance, I was reading issues of Swamp Thing published in 1986 six years later, in 1992 - which was when they were becoming available in the bookstores. Also, there was no order to the comics being available, I found issues 48 and 49, and then had to hunt around for about two years before I found issue 50.)

I joined college, got a degree and found a job. And thanks to a friend in the United States, could finally buy comics I want on eBay. In the last five years, I have painstakingly built up a decent comicbook collection. I also got into collecting original comicbook art, and currently, I spend 90% of my monthly salary buying comics and art, so that tells you the kind of life I lead. My parents are ok with my obsession, I have a girlfriend who's a bigger Frank Miller fan than I am and paints like the best of them. We are planning to do a graphic novel sometime in the future - but then, half the people reading comics plan to create their own comics, so I can't really say there is anything special about that, eh?

You can follow my daily adventures on my Livejournal, which is nothing more than a bragspace for myself.

My Livejournal
My Comic Art collection