The toon collector: Aalok Joshi's comic books

By: Pravin Palande/ Forbes India

It's 8000 and counting for Mumbai's Aalok Joshi. Along a narrow, congested, traffic-choked street off Sarojini Naidu Road in suburban Mumbai stands Ganesh Laundry. A neat little affair that you could miss while you are trying your best not to get your clothes nicked by the jagged edges of the innumerable two-wheelers parked on either side of the street. Behind the laundry is tucked a nondescript one-room-kitchen apartment that houses the Joshi family, their eight cats and close to 8,000 comic books.

Twenty-two-year-old Aalok could pass for Clark Kent in the Metropolis he was born to occupy. By day, this son of a Bombay High Court advocate studies to be a dentist at Nair Medical College. At home, cats weave around his feet, assured of warmth and security. His alter ego is one of the best known comic book collectors and traders in India, owning 7,000 singles and 920 graphic novels.

It was his mother, Kirti, who had introduced a three-year-old Aalok to a world where a masked man in a purple suit lived in the jungle, rode a white horse named Hero, had a wolf