Thursday, October 23, 2014

Rip Kirby Strips AND the Amur Sisters...

 In India, Rip Kirby was introduced through the newspapers and a lesser-known comic-series in the '70s but the proper(and vast) introduction happened when ToI added adventures of this sophisticated detective in their then-active comic series Indrajal Comics....on 1982. 
 And soon after, readers became familiar with Rip and his friends like Desmond, Honey Dorian and...Amur sisters(Tutu and Mumu)!! Well,Indrajal readers will have to put no effort to remember these beautiful and wealthy sisters who were quite frequent in the Rip's adventures. But then, Amurs were introduced in the strips way before their appearances in the Indrajal-pages, on 1961.
 In the '80s they were portrayed as quite sober and bit rich-girls-have-nothing-to-do sort. They used to accompany Rip in his adventures, always jovial and the good rapport within the sisters was quite visible.

BUT....it was NOT the same back in the swinging '60s, when they used to take each others as sore rivals, were quite wild and...men-hunters!!

Besides, they were more beautiful back then.. :-))

Amurs were first appeared in the strip titled 'Too Much Amour(D054)' on 1961, drawn by John Prentice. It was quite a story to read where nobody knew how to handle these wild beauties!! And yes, in that strip Wiggers was also introduced.
[This strip, along with 7 others were published in the 296-pager RIP KIRBY Vol.6(1959-1962) edition by IDW. I would recommend this edition for every Rip fan.While IDW's some of the previous editions were not upto-the-mark(reproduction-quality wise), this 6th vol.is just fine(it will cost some around 2,500 INR from on-line Indian book-stores)]
Posting some of the moments from that story....as the book is quite big so scanning was almost impossible,so I had to click from this book...

  First...the introduction!! And what an introduction??
 They are both outta grab Rip and poor Rip,he couldn't bear either of Amur girls... :(
 Then...Tutu and Mumu were plotting quite a devilish scheme!! And both ended up adding themselves in an expenditure on ancient Mayans with Rip... 
 That wasn't a peaceful nor a smooth expenditure...
 And finally,they had some hard time there which somehow changed their perspective towards life...(I wudn't spoil the fun by divulge the climax here,so read by yourself!)
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 Now another Rip Kirby strip.From Alex Raymond's era - RK08 : Terror at Thames(1948). This has been already appeared in the 1st vol. of IDW's reproduction,but the IDW versions' panels were chopped at the bottom and,some of the finer lines were blurry.So I am posting some pages that I got from a fan who is collecting from different sources, just to show you how the originals strips were back then...
 Story is just fine, about a madcap wealthy woman,who is fond of gambling and hence got the nickname..Betya!!

2 comments:

ranjan gangopadhyay said...

thanks for posting rip kirby .........

HojO said...

@RG : give ur mail-id