Your's truely's romanticism with Gotham

Greetings Barbarians,
Though i have no allegiance to Old Crom but in true sense i have an affinity to the sword and sorcery hero hacking and slashing till his last breath.
Conan had caught my imagination when i had just crossed 9 moons, and to this day i have been following his exploits throughout Hyperboria.Imagine my happiness when i found out that Gotham was printing Conan in India !
After the unsuccessful run by Falcon (which i have covered in my blog not 1 moon back !) , of which i could only own up one .This seemed to me a golden opportunity but to this day i have not been able to complete the Gotham's run of Conan.
Gotham's  run of  Conan   had foxed me for quiet some time,being an ardent Conan fan and collector for so long I couldn't place their issues,I was sure that they had been reprinting "Savage sword of Conan" and renaming it as "Conan the Barbarian". The problem was that though they had used SSOC covers and stories but they had chosen to do so out of sequence(from Marvel's original run of SSOC) which had made it difficult to fix the start of the issue. 
My luck break came in issue #14 where they had reprinted #200 of SSOC (both cover and story being the same, further the opening splash page clearly mentioned #200). Actually Gotham had started from #186 of SSOC and reprinted them in sequence in India as Conan the Barbarian.

Still i lack a few in my collection but here's the rest-

Finally got the #1 Conan published by Gotham whew!!!

Covers for issues #5,6,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,24.
That's all i could collect so far ,Let Crom know that I tried my best!

Second Coming of Gotham

Greetings barbarians!

Taking up from the first run of Gotham and their closure , they had a change in their strategy and tied up with the who's who of the industry namely Richard Branson to form Virgin Comics.
In 2007 Gotham started printing Virgin Characters in India as the original were only meant for US consumers.
Interestingly the characters were mostly from the mythology pantheon and i must say they were good actually i enjoyed them with great artwork.

Not only did they set an outstanding standard in printing and artwork and original theme they showcased and introduced great artists to the world.

Jeevan Kang,Samit basu, Mukesh Singh people who had set the Indian Comic Screen on fire just to get a feel of what I'm saying I'm uploading the covers from my collection.

Devi (India Issues)

The Sadhu

RAMAYAN 3392 A.D VIRGIN TPB (U.S)

Cover Art : Alex Ross

The US versions of the TPB were priced at 15$ and they also had some original series like-

Voodoo Child - Nicolas Cage

Seven Brothers - John Woo

Shadow Hunter - Jaemma Jameson

Gamekeeper - Guy Ritchie

Along with India Authentic and Tall tales of Vishnu Bhagat. Sorry i couldn't afford all of them as they were released only in US. In all they had all the ingredients to make this a Marvel of India but Old Crom had some different plan!

Fall of the Titan - Gotham Comics

Greetings Barbarians!
Hope my posting on Kiran comics have been able to access the 'dangling pointers' of your memory cells to plug the memory leaks! Coming back to the recent past the Indian comic book fans would inevitably agree that in late 90's and early 2000's best thing was Gotham Comics.

Gotham registered in the US had a very innovative concept of tying up with established publishers like DC,MARVEL,DARK HORSE and PANINI to name a few and reprint the content in India and introduce it to the Indian readers at Indian prices.Which effectively means to cushion the exchange rate which had made the Marvels and the DC's untouchables for the average Joe's.

Back in 1999 they had started capturing the Indian market , I was a student and couldn't believe my eyes when i first saw Superman and Batman dangling at local book store in mere 10 INR! I had my doubts the print quality was not like the earlier cheap prints but was on good paper with great artwork it was a coup de' grande that they had achieved.

I couldn't afford to subscribe to them (i was a student..no discounts were offered to them) but in the sly i used to buy their Super Specials which was priced at 90INR and had six issues together.
Due to the meager resources at my disposal I started only with #1's and Conan series,although I'm yet to complete the Conan series as few issues are still missing.

Eventually they winded their business sometime in 2005-2006 (Don't know the exact reason but maybe because of falling subscriptions and high material costs) but this left us high and dry ,though they came back sometime in 2007 with their titles under Virgin Comics (will be uploading the original covers and also the US versions of the same) it was too late.

According to me we can classify the Indian comic scene into 3 ages
 Indrajal Age - (60's to late 70's)
 Independent Age - (late 80's where true Indian characters were introduced by Raj,Manoj,Tulsi and others)
 Gotham Age -( Late 90's to 2005)

 

 

 

 

Wolverine - The End Series

Wolverine Regular Series - Includes Enemy of the State #10 - #17

Wolverine - MTU #1

The good thing is I still have the posters and the stickers in all the books intact! by Crom.