DARA - The Indian 007 Bond!

When the Indrajal Comics was first released, way back in 1964, it featured only Lee Falk's The Phantom & that too for first 3 years! Then after some odd releases like Disney, Zorro they settled with Phantom, Mandrake & Flash Gordon and published their adventure-strips/comic-book stories on a regular pace.

It was 1974 when readers got some test of Indian comics like Sultana - Indian Robinhood etc. However, those tales failed to create much excitement among the readers. After another two years or so, in 1976 Bahadur was introduced in IJC & since then we got a regular dose of our own Indian hero alongwith the regular western series. Later ToI added some more Indian heroes like Aditya in 1987 and Prince of the Spies -Dara in 1988. 

Eventually he would become the last cover-hero introduced in Indrajal.

Scripted by Kamini Uppal (any relation with J.Uppal - the famous Bahadur script-writer ??) and illustrated by Pradeep Sathe, this Prince of the Spies did create lots of interests among the readers, specially among the then newcomers in the fabulous world of IJC like me! Dara was an Indian representation of James Bond with some shades of Agent X-9.
Dara, originally an ex-prince of Kashmir, known to his people as Rana Vikram Bir Singh and fondly referred as 'Raja Saheb',  first appeared in Indrajal Comics in 1988 : The Enemy Agent (Vol.25 No.43) .He has this code-name as the No.1 secret agent of Intelligence Wing and except the Chief Mr.Rao, very few were aware of his true identity!

There are only 8 Dara-Indrajals published as after Apr,1990 IJC suddenly cancelled and this series wasn't continued elsewhere!!


Here I'm giving a brief review of first two Dara comics, so that you guys can understand his stories better!
As I gave said earlier,Dara was introduced in The Enemy Agent (Vol.25 No.43). In this story the IW had to face a real danger when one of their agents betrayed them by leaking the confidential information to some gang-leader and in this process they even tried to kill the Chief, Mr. Rao! Unable to nab the culprit,Chief asked Dara to take the charge. Then how Dara nabbed the gang-of-culprits is in this 25-page thriller! Also, it was a perfect intro. of this spy-hero! Next was  The Savage Mercenary (Vol.26 N0.7;1989) .In this particular title readers would experience a deadly cold-blooded hired killer with 'international fame'', namely Nemo. He,being a smuggler too, killed people like mosquitoes and that too hardly showing any emotion (the golden-haired guy in the cover)!! Nemo takes amazing risks to accomplish his mission. Dara had to nab this deadly killer and being a one-man-army he done some terrific stuffs that worth to watch(or read)! The way Dara waited lonely in the ravines situated in the Northern India and then Nemo's amazing skiing which he used as a smuggling-route simply because everybody feared to entered those places during winter(except Dara)! Besides the gripping plot, the great art-work by Pradeep Sathe was another attraction of this series! In this series, natural back-drop (of India) was used quite beautifully, specially in this particular story...those pics depicting snow-covered hills are awesome.

For the readers, it's pleasure to have some terrific Indian artists in IJC like P.Brahamania (Bahadur fame),Sehab (Chimpoo/Birbal fame with many IJC-covers) followed by Mr. Sathe.

 P.S.- In the next post, reviews of the remaining six adventures will be there.