“At the moment,” Thacker declares without any hesitation, “we are tied with the library of University of Michigan, but we are very confident we will have the largest collection in the United States soon, because we are growing, and rapidly.” And becoming the largest in the United States could make her collection, when it crosses that milestone, the largest in the world. Whichever collection wins the race in the United States, wins the world with no competition, apparently, from Europe or even, and that should be a cause for some shame at home, in India. She has even set up a “Google Alert” to catch anything new or old popping on the Internet. He has been into comic books from childhood, some of which was spent on train between Thane and Delhi, with Amar Chitra Kathas bought on the go, with parents’ approval, from an AH Wheeler.Īcross Lake Michigan, one of the five Great Lakes, Mara Thacker, an assistant professor and librarian of South Asian studies, has been diligently constructing her collection of comic books from India at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, through trips to India, visits to Comic-Cons, at least one, palling up sceptical comic-book fanatics online and in person, publishers and collectors - it took her a while, a personal visit, to convince on collector she was serious. “You go, you buy, and you bring back,” says Chandra, director of the Asian Studies Center at Lansing, Michigan, and the driving force behind its rapidly growing collection of comic books from the region, including Indonesia - he is a big fan of them - and, improbably, North Korea.
That’s how he has built Michigan State University’s collection of Indian comic books, one of the largest in the United States: suitcase by suitcase, three times a year, for the last eight years. One, the smallest of them, is for his personal belongings, and two of them, big ones, go completely empty. Siddhartha Chandra always carries three suitcases for travels to Asia.
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