HOW FOUR PASSIONATE FANS BUILT IMPRESSIVE COMIC COLLECTIONS

AJAY MISRA, PHANTOM ENTHUSIAST

Ajay Misra is a busy man these days. Both he and his daughter are preparing for their CA (chartered accountancy) entrance exam. Born and brought up in Lucknow, the 47-yearold now lives in Delhi. But it was in the streets of Lucknow that Misra discovered his first comic books. “I found them at the Sunday markets. There were kids like me who were prepared to exchange comics. That’s how it started. You just borrowed from each other,” Misra says. But the kind of readership and community-like engagement that the Ministry of Commerce employee talks about began disappearing in the mid-nineties and vanished by the turn of the century.

Over the years, Misra, who has worked and lived in many cities, retained his passion for comics. “Between Lucknow, Hyderabad and Delhi, I scoured every bookshop for comics. Hyderabad is where I found a big part of my collection,” he says.

Misra owns a variety of comics, from Amar Chitra Kathas to every issue of Phantom (from 1936 onwards), Adarsh Chitra Katha, Mandrake and many others. But now, his trips to Sunday markets have become rare, as he concentrates on collecting comics online.

It was sometime in 2008 that Misra’s daughter suggested he could simply put digital versions of comics online, instead of lending physical copies to other fans. “I started scanning comics and she would upload them. We didn’t have a lot of time and didn’t do all of them. Eventually Diamond Comics and Raj Comics raised concerns. But it was a way to share comics, better than physical lending,” Misra says.

His idea grew and a group of collectors came together and began doing something similar. A select group of people now upload and view each other’s collections online, a personal circulating library, so to speak.

Out of all the comics that Misra owns, he says the Phantom Belt ones are the most precious for him. But all is not rosy in the comic collector’s world. “It has become a business. If someone finds something at Delhi’s Daryaganj, or anywhere else, all he is looking for is to sell it for ten times the value. I don’t do that.” Despite the renewed interest in Indian comics, Misra says he finds it difficult to continue collecting.

“It has turned into a business that I neither have the time nor energy for. I don’t have any motivation left. I might still buy a comic and read it a hundred times. But that’s about it.”