Vidyarthi Mithram

Vidyarthi Mithram
Biographical information
Founded:
Country:	India
Website:

Vidyarthi Mithram ("Student friend") is an Indian publishing company.

History

Vidyarthi Mithram was a dealer of scientific and laboratory equipments for schools. In 1974 they started to print an Indian version (in English, Hindi and Tamil) of the Swedish Tarzan magazine by Williams Förlag AB. Vidyarthi Mithram kept the original Swedish covers, changing the Swedish story title(s) printed on the covers, but keeping the serie title "Tarzan, apornas son" (Tarzan, Son of the Apes). The first eight issues even kept the original Swedish (and Finnish) price printed on the covers.

About when the "Tarzan" series ended (mid 1975?) Vidyarthi Mithram released two new series: "The Phantom" by Lee Falk and Sy Barry (in Malayalam and Tamil) and "Mandrake the Magician" by Lee Falk and Fred Fredericks (in Malayalam). The issues were released without any date on the covers or inside. The stories inside are newspaper stories from the years 1972-1978, and it looks like the publishing scedule was 3-4 issues a year. Ads inside the issues indicates that Vidyarthi Mithram had a back-issue catalog, either for mail orders or re-releasing in comic book stores.

About when the "Mandrake" and "The Phantom" series ended (mid 1978?) Vidyarthi Mithram released several new series, like: "Inspector Eagle" (English, Hindi and Malayalam) and "Inspector Vikram"/"Secret Agent Vikram" (English, Malayalam and ?) among others.

Mandrake publications published by Vidyarthi Mithram

Title	Year(s)	Issues
Mandrake	1975(?)-1978(?)	at least 13

Note

Only a few of the Vidyarthi Mithram comics are known, and this article is therefore built on a limited basis. It also seems as if the various issues are printed in several editions (back issues), and that there may be different variants of the same issue. Further research is needed for the article to be as correct as possible.