My Theron, My Superhero

-- By Arulnambi K.

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My first memory of a comic book was when I was in kindergarten, and somewhere between four and six years old.  Appa had bought an Indrajal comic featuring the Phantom, in which the Phantom meets the Hzz character for the first time. I remember Appa reading the comic to me while I looked at the pictures in fascination. Until that time, I had only heard stories narrated to me by my Amichi (maternal grandmother) and Amma, so the book holding pictures that gave life to imaginary worlds was a spectacular discovery for my young mind.

As children, Thambi and I had voracious appetites for fiction and stories. Graduating from the baby stories narrated by Amichi when we were infants and toddlers, Amma satiated our thirst for stories in one way, by narrating the great Indian epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharatha, and later, when we were a bit older, by reading us aloud Tamil classics like the great historical novels of Kalki. It was Appa, however, who introduced us to comic books. Appa himself had a strong reading habit, and I remember him reading novels when I was a small child. When he started buying comic books, he would enjoy them himself and not just read them to his children. Comics were purchased outright and also borrowed from local lending libraries. When Thambi and I started reading the comics ourselves, Appa would be second in line to read the comics, waiting for his sons to finish them first.

My Father's Day greeting from 2005

Indrajal comics - with the Phantom, Mandrake the Magician and Bahadur, Tarzan comics, Asterix, Tintin and so many others were devoured by all of us. Thambi and I got started on novels too, English and Tamil alike. We discovered many comics and novels by ourselves too. Both our parents did not hesitate to purchase whatever books we wanted to own, and we built a tidy collection over time. Appa used book binding services to get our comic collection bound into several volumes that survive to this day.

For the longest time, even well into my adulthood, Appa's favorite way to kick back and relax would be to grab one of our bound comic book collections and read something. There was one comic that was close to his heart and a bigger favorite than others. It was the Mandrake comic in which it was revealed that Theron, Mandrake's magic teacher and headmaster of the College of Magic, was Mandrake's actual father. Mandrake already had the greatest respect and love for Theron, and this revelation would elevate their relationship even further. Appa would read and reread the scenes with Mandrake and Theron's initial interactions as father and son, and share his enjoyment of the human aspects of that story with us. Even while diving into the fiction and imagination of those comic book worlds, Appa's deep humanism always connected him more to the relationships, emotions and motivations of those characters.

​As much as I enjoyed the comics and other fiction introduced to me by Appa, he always remained my real-life superhero - the impregnable rock in the face of the greatest difficulties. His confidence and courage were truly defining traits, and something I always looked up to. I never saw him be afraid of anything. He had little respect for man-made conventions and norms and always looked for "out of the box" solutions to any problem. In my final year of college at the College of Engineering, Anna University, my classmates compiled a booklet self-profiling each of us. One of the facts we had to fill in about ourselves was who we secretly admired. For the first time in my life, when faced with that question, it became immediately apparent to me. It was something I had hardly realized until then. I secretly admire: My father - my Theron, my superhero.