Some Mysterious Editing!

It's very known fact that ,whenever comic-publication houses decided to publish some newspaper-strips,they had done some editing/inking job to fit with their fixed format. But,sometimes they did some weird stuffs ! Among them,most common was some dressing-up of skimpy-dressed female characters....to suit with respective cultures/tastes etc. It was specially very common practice in most Asian comic-publications & that's most probably to avoid unnecessary controversies! Still ,it's quite understandable .....

But,then some editing were beyond ALL explanations n even though some fans tried to reasoning with it,those are hard to believe!!
One famous example is how ToI edited a Shaikh and present him as a European billionaire! Also,the name has to be changed accordingly & it was Count-Petro from Ali-Petro!!!

It was Indrajal Comics No.340 (Curse of Gold;1979) and Originally a Falk/Frederricks sunday strips (S138;Mandrake and Ali-Petro;1978).

Some fan tried to justify that 'editing' & according to them,then India had a very good political relation with UAE ...so it was quite play-safe act by ToI guys! Well,it's a good try but no....that was NOT the reason for sure!I'm saying it with a certain surity,because just after 3/4 years,there was another strip (Prince Nasdaq;S148;1982) which was published in IJC as The Avaricious Prince (Vol.20 No.32;1983) in which that Sikh,Nasdaq, retained with his original identity!

Now,if we give a quick-look to BOTH stories,while the former Shaikh was only a typical representation of his stubborn-n-dictator ancestors ,the later one,Nasdaq ,was quite nasty !! It was mentioned that he'd 51 wives and looking for the 52nd ,so that he can spend one-week with each n every wives,annually! ;-) That nasty prince even tried to set a deal for Narda n Karma and was rightly kicked by Mandrake for that ,after being a 'victim' of some fascinating hypnotic tricks ! It follows some further dangerous n scary encounters that ONLY exposed the darker side of a Shaikh-kingdom!

Anyway,I don't think that was any decent representation of Shaikhs,hence doesn't help either UAE-INDIA relation....still it was published in original format!!

Ohh well...some things are always remain mysterious!!!...;-)