When I was a kid in the fourth grade, one fine afternoon a routine bout of channel surfing gave me a completely new channel with a wonderful concept – they broadcast Cartoons right through the day. The channel was then called Cartoon Network, and they used to broadcast mostly Hanna Barbera stuff – which I was new to, back then. I saw a lot of classics I knew (Tom & Jerry, Looney Tunes), new stuff I came to love (Scooby Doo, Huckleberry Hound) and a feature that looked too interesting for words – The Power Zone. I remember this part all too well as it was a two-hour programme that featured only action cartoons.
At the outset, I remember running home from school to thrill to the adventures of The Fantastic Four, The Centurions, Jonny Quest, Thundarr The Barbarian and Super Adventures – a gamut of H-B studio works, like Space Ghost, Birdman, Mightor, The Herculoids, Shazzan, Moby Dick, Dino Boy and the Galaxy Trio. These cartoons and the ones that followed – Swat Kats, Captain Planet, Sky Commanders, Galtar and the Golden Lance – inspired me to look for comics featuring action heroes, and to be honest I wasn’t reading a lot of foreign comics, so my action comics were limited to Indrajal Comics and Diamond Comics’ Mahabali Shaka, Agniputra Abhay, Fauladi Singh and Lamboo Motu. Only after viewing these did my interest in foreign comics, as well as in Indian publications featuring other foreign characters (IBH & Dolton both printed Indian editions of DC Comics long ago), and my chief inspiration was The Fantastic Four (1967)
