Wednesday, February 3, 2021

Comic #129 : All 197 Rip Kirby daily-strips in English

 Finally it has been achieved - the availability of all 197 RK strips in English, specifically the last 40 odd strips from the late '80s to late '90s, when this series was cancelled after the sudden demise of John Prentice. While the first 131 strips were already available long time ago, and as strips from D119-153 were reprinted in the Indrajal Comics in English & other regional languages, so only those post-Indrajal strips were left to be tracked down(except few of those were reprinted elsewhere/e-vers posted online). And this has been finally achieved within the last few months, so I thank every person involved in the whole process of finding and sharing these too elusive strips!

You can download all from this fine site, if not already have done.

Now, the quality of the strips, specifically of those later ones, are only 'readable' but that's ok, as it was primarily required to have all RK strips at least, and now that has been done, hopefully better quality strips will be tracked down eventually! The current publisher of the RK strips, IDW has released 11 volumes(D1-103) till now, and still 9 volumes are required to complete the whole run - i.e. total 20 volumes. Few months ago, publisher Dean Mullaney told me via mail that they have no immediate plans for next RK volumes - probably due to the ongoing pandemic situation - and hence we can safely assume that we have to rely on the online strips for the post-Indrajal period(D154-197) for quite sometime, if not forever!

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Few years ago, much before all of these happened, I have had culled out last RK-Indrajal & few post-Indrajal strips(D153-155, 157) from a USA newspaper's archive. I have previously shared these & now re-sharing here. Plus, there was an old blogger who have shared few more(D159 & onwards) from his own newspaper cutting(although majority were incomplete). Quality wise, these are slightly better(and in places, inferior too!) than the above lot, and definitely fall under "readable" quality too, but there is no harm having a 2nd version of these rare strips(plus, you will find few "missing dates" from that lot in this version).










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