a comic story(with a sad ending)

i wrote this initially as a comment at this Kung-Fu Monkey comment thread about comics, but it got so long that it deserves a post of its own.

i grew up in india, so my reading list is a little different from your standard comic-book nerd... my first comic ever was a spiderman that my dad read to me from the local circulating library(late 80's... i was about 3-4 years old with a slightly worse grasp on english). then i remember something about a few he-man comics, then there were the 'phantom' comics, as well as the 'mandrake the magician' which your grandparents probably read to keep themselves entertained and which i could buy dirt-cheap at the used book store, to which my uncle would take me on his bike repeatedly.... ah good times, good times.

and then there were the indian comics... Tinkle(hehe) was the first one i got into,and featured an assorted group of short stories either from mythology or some other folk tales structured like an SNL skit, with a few recurring characters like the incompetent hunter, Shikari Shambu and the village-idiot Suppandi (both of whose names may be derived from a derogatory term) Kalia the Crow, Tantri the Mantri and many more.

also collected were Amar Chitra Katha comics for the regular dose of Indian/Hindu mythology and diamond comics, home of the real indian superheroes like Chacha Chaudhry and Sabu as well as a few borrowed ones like James Bond. these were the cheapest books in the world and sure felt like them. i amassed a collection of a good few hundred comic books of assorted varieties by the time i was 15.

but then (in discovery channel style) disaster struck. somehow our house developed a termite problem and the bastards ate through nearly my entire book collection, and what they didn't eat they destroyed significant portions of and made them worth nothing.

and that, readers is how this poor blogger came to be disenchanted with comics. needless to say, i have not collected comics again to this day.