The Indian publisher Regal Publishers has just announced they will be printing a separate stand alone ongoing Phantom comic series in English and colour. At this stage there is no official date of the first English comic to be released. We assume the release date will be around a month or so after when lock downs have been relaxed in India with the current COVID-19 world pandemic.
We understand this will be a separate series to run alongside the current Malayalm language comics featuring Sunday coloured Newspaper stories from the 1990's and early 2000's.
Issue #5 of this current series was released in December 2019 and featured the George Olesen and Fred Fredericks version of "The Wharf Rats" story. Romanized as "Phantavum Akramisanghavum" (ഫാന്റവും ആക്രമീസംഘവും) which was originally redrawn for the newspaper after the passing of Lee Falk in 1999.
The comics can currently be purchased through shops in Kerala which is an Indian state on the south west side of the bottom tip of India. Outside of Kerala, orders for shops and for phans like us can be made directly from Regal Publishers.
We believe single issues will be priced at around 60-100 Indian Rupee's which is roughly $1.30-$2.00AU, $0.80-$1.30US & 8-15 Swedish Krona.
No news as of yet on the stories to be published or if their license includes non-newspaper stories. We did ask Regal Publishers on why they choose these stories from the 1990's to early 2000's and seeing these stories have never been published in a comic inside India, majority of Indian Phantom phans have never read these stories before.
Recently we interviewed Swaroop Chand, a local Indian Phantom comic collector in X-Band: The Phantom Podcast Episode #144 and in the podcast he explained the importance of colour comics and the comics to be printed inside India plus much more. We highly recommend this podcast to listen to gain an insight into the Indian comic culture.
Between the 1960's and 1990's, The Phantom was very popular among Indians with the Indrajal comics. I truly believe for the Phantom to continue as a house hold name worldwide in the future, we need a long term Indian publisher publishing and printing local Indian comics. This is a huge step in the right direction. We hope Regal can also ensure that these English Phantom comics are distributed in shops inside shops throughout all of India and not just their own state.
The best way to order your own copies of either the English copies and or the current Malayalm language comics is to contact Regal Publishers themselves via their Facebook page.
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