# Phantom Diamond Comics

We already know that Diamond publication issued around 100+ Phantom digests right from year 1990 in full color but the printing and paper quality of these digests were not the very best with the only consolation of their being in unedited format.

Recently Diamond publication issued few more Phantom Digests(information about exact no. of issues is not yet confirmed) with better printing and page quality in B/W format.

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With B/W format and better printing the quality has certainly been improved and i am sure serious Phans won't let go the opportunity to have these in their collection.

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According to the information available at present four such digests(No.9,15,18 and 21) are in the market priced at Rs.50/-each(As already pointed out by Ajay Misra at his daughter's blog) in English and Hindi language.

Diamond publication seems immovable of falling comic popularity and sale and goes on churning out huge volumes of comics with lakhs of copies all over India featuring mainly Chacha Chaudhry,Billo,Pinky and digests such as Pitara,Comic World which also contains those Phantom and Mandrake strips which were not published in Indrajal comics or in previous Diamond Phantom digests.

For eg. have a look at this strip No.D-176(Blackie) which according to my information was never published before in Indrajal comics or in Diamond Phantom digests but its available in one such Comic World/Pitara Digest of Diamond publication.

  

Though the printing is so-so and also the panel proportioning is not proper and has been compressed to fit in the given space but still its nice and worth collecting to have a Phantom strip in color which was not available before in Indian comics. 

If we compare between two major surviving Hindi comic publications i.e. Raj and Diamond comics then sales-wise Diamond comics is far above than Raj comics and the reason behind which i can analyze is that sensing the comic market downfall Diamond comics sticked  to their most popular characters(Chacha Chaudhry,Billoo,Pinky etc) rather than flooding and experimenting with a galaxy of characters,the policy,which their counterpart Raj comics didn't adopted and now are finding it very hard to maintain the sales graph of all their comic characters.

On the other hand Diamond also didn't experimented much with modulation of story line according to the changing taste(?) and rather glued to the very basic of their characters which suits most to the typical Indian middle class parents mentality who still prefers to buy Diamond comics simple,clean and fair characters comic for their kids rather than going for the high tech Raj comics printed on glossy paper with a high price tag and 'objectionable' covers.  

So in a nutshell Diamond comics are still flying in colors while Raj comics can be often seen giving hue and cry about its falling sales in specific and comic popularity in general.