Wednesday, April 2, 2008

A Re-telling??

Who can forget the famous meeting of Mandrake & Lothar(S101:The Meeting of Mandrake and Lothar;1967)?? Later a great friendship was formed & that becomes one of the greatest Crime-fighter duo!!


Yesterday I bought a Diamond Mandrake(DC #71) which consists two Mandrake dailies & one of 'em was 'The Ears of Earth' .This particular daily is from the Post-Indrajal era (D214:19 July,1993 - 27th November,1993).

As I went through this strip,it seems Falk had completely changed/re-told a couple of facts those are inherent part of Mandrake adventures!

One of those was Theron's age ....which was clearly mentioned many times in past as 308 years & he was 275-year old when Mandrake born! But,in this strip,surprisingly Theron's age becomes 408 years & he was 380-year old during Mandrake's birth!!
Anyway,Falk was never consistent over the statistics & it's somewhat ok...but the second 'change' was really like a re-telling of some inherent tale & needless to say,quite puzzling!

It's about how Mandrake & Lothar were first met and in this daily:'The Ears of Earth(1993)' ,Falk completely changed that famous tale!! Only common thing was their meeting place:the deep African jungle ....otherwise,it's completely different tale!

In the ORIGINAL tale of 1967,it has been shown that Mandrake was looking for a cruel killer:Mad Dog Dill. Lothar was also looking for the same killer,when his father,then king of his tribe ,ordered him to do so! In this way they met & later Lothar left his kingdom & joined wid Mandrake...

But here,in this 1993-daily,the situation was completely different. After death of his father,Lothar's uncle became the king & as Lothar refused to marry some tribe-girl,her brother attacked him wid his gang....,,that's when Mandrake appeared in the spot & saved Lothar wid his mighty magic.Between,this time Mandrake was intend to explore the ruins of Lothar's ancestor(and NOT to after any killer)!

I donno why Falk re-told that tale which's itself a real classic(n special too!) thriller for all Man-Fans !!
Anyway,in this 1993-daily,all though story began wid Collage of Magic,Theron,Mandrake-Lothar's meeting etc....but the basic plot was completely different and quite thrilling as I can say! :-)

Between,DC #71 has another daily,from Davis era:The Chief(D125 :1964) which had publicised in Indrajal Comics twice(The Mouse Trap :Ijc #90 & Vol.24 No.39)..

4 comments:

Chatur Cheeta said...

Great research and analysis by you as usual. Can you please post the mentioned D214 so that we also may read the same??

adibud34 said...

Cool job, Sagnik. Yeah, it sounds very intriguing. Waiting eagerly for you to post it! :)

HojO said...

@Chaturji:
Thnx 4 d compliment!! :-)
Btwn,this is a nice tale,,,ok,I'll try to scan it sometime..

HojO said...

@Adibud:
Yeah!Initially,I was shoked wid such a complete re-telling,but the whole strip is quite entertaining n it'a long strip ,occupied as many as 64 pages of the digest!

@ALL:The 1st Anniversary of "Lost World.." is going to be withing a couple of days(6th April)...and I promise for a big release @ zat day!!
Just allow me for some 'preparations'!:D