Saturday 14 November 2015

The Fly-By-Night Operators - AFI Comics

Hey hey hey Barbarians! If you have gone through my last post HERE on rarity by Number Crunching, you would find that there’s a chunk of the pie which goes to Fly-by-Night operators. Fly-by-Night operators were publishers or series who joined the publishing boom but wrapped up quickly for various reasons thus leaving a footprint so small that it takes decades to track them.
This series of posts (which will be updated as and when Yours truly accumulates info on the go) will introduce to the readers to some such Series or publishers. A word of caution since information is scant readers are advised to share information with this blog so that posts can be updated with correct information.

First up is AFI Comics

Published by New World Publishers of Mumbai in early 70's and started with 3 characters in their line-up.
Rip Kirby, Agent Corrigan and Cisco Kid. They are the one who introduced characters Rip Kirby and Agent Corrigan to Indians much before Indrajal. The print quality of these books were very good and had Black n White interiors with a coloured cover page.
The books were sized at 4' * 6' which was odd even for that period being even smaller than the pocket sized books.
The fact that paper supplies had caused delay in prints maybe a reason or to cut printing,between 73-74 they had pretty much wrapped up and changed their business model. They held the rights to these characters and later supplied them to Indrajal comics in the early 80's.(Click HERE to know about first issues of Rip Kirby and Agent Corrigan)
Judging by their numbering it's possible that they had some other titles since yours truly have only seen numbers in 100's denominations.
Print run was also small the fact that AFI comics was priced at 1.75 in 1973 while the more popular Indrajal comics was priced at 1 and coloured with popular characters while AFI had literally unknown Characters,which lead them to close their shops by 74.

AFI #101 - First Issue (Photo courtesy Vineeth Abraham) 

AFI Comics #102 (Credit:Indiancomiccovers.com)
 AFI Comics #106
AFI Comics #108
 AFI Comics #112

 AFI Comics #116

IYTHO (In Yours Truly Honest Opinion) the AFI comics Agent Corrigan series was much ahead of it's times especially when you are talking about Virus warfare a step ahead of James "Shaken not Stirred" Bond!