VINEETH ABRAHAM, GOLD KEY FAN
Earlier this year, 54-year-old Vineeth Abraham took voluntary retirement and moved back to his home in Kerala to look after his ailing mother.“My mother is 89 and my aunty, who is 93, lives here too. They live alone. I had to come back,” Abraham says. His father was in the Army, which meant that while growing up, Abraham stayed in different cities and towns.
Of these, the one that introduced him to the world of comics was his childhood home in Mathura during the ’70s. “I was always a voracious reader. Besides, there wasn’t much else other than radio – TVs were rare – to entertain yourself with. So my dad would get me comics from the train station in Mathura,” he says.
At that time, there weren’t that many comics to begin with, except for Indrajal and some Amar Chitra Kathas. “I started with American comics – Gold Key and Dell. They are still my favourites. I eventually moved to others, like DC and Marvel, and the odd Indrajal etc. But my most prized possessions were the American ones,” says Abraham. He owns the complete set of Gold Key, right from the start of their year of publishing in 1962 to the mid-Seventies, and Dell, from the 1940s to the mid-Sixties.
From 1989 till earlier this year, Abraham worked at a government office in Delhi. During his three-decade stay in the city, he visited the Daryaganj pavement book bazaar every weekend, almost like a ritual. “That’s where I got most of the comics. Even the week before I shifted back to Kerala I went there,” he says.
But Abraham’s relocation may halt his pursuit of comics for the simple reason that Kerala simply doesn’t have secondhand markets like Daryaganj where you can accidentally find gold. “Kerala has a lot of readers. But they are into serious reading,” explains Abraham.
That said, the way comics are now bought or exchanged has changed. Abraham says there are unofficial channels, like WhatsApp groups and Facebook communities where collectors, buyers and sellers meet.
But a collector, one who has personal favourites, will still go the extra mile. “The first comic I connected with was Phantom. Some years ago I found out that there was a publisher in Australia, Frew, that published Phantom. So I established contact with fans in Australia, and through years of networking, I assembled a major collection of Frew’s Phantom, more than a thousand editions,” he says.