Merry Christmas - The Cold Deck Switch (Rip Kirby)

*** Merry Christmas - Happy Holidays ***

Cake Shopping on Christmas Eve - Hogg Market,  Calcutta
[Source: Wikimedia]

Christmas has always been special since my childhood days, though at that time we did not have much jazzy lights, or sparkling decorations - no Santa or Christmas trees - no new gifts, dresses or toys... all we wished for: 'cake', 'cake' and nothing but the 'Christmas cake' !!   Our annual exams used to be over in the first week, or definitely by the 2nd week of December. So rest few weeks all we cared about: kite flying, reading lots of story books, picnic planning, playing cricket with 'Cambis ball', and last but not the least, having a cake on Christmas morning, 'বড়ো দিন ', the Dec 25th!!! Looking back now I hardly believe how simple and amazing were those days, and how little were our expectations !

On the eve of Christmas my dad or sometime my elder brother(s) would buy a large, fruit cake from "Hogg Market" (New Market), together with a bunch of big, puffy Oranges and Singaporean Bananas. Throughout that night we kept on taking a peek of that 'dream cake', inhaling its sweet aroma as much as, and as close as possible. On next morning after brushing the teeth we all hurriedly sit together, and eagerly waited for the cake to be served. One of my elder sisters would cut and distribute that mysterious cake among us. 

Something must be special inside that Christmas cake, which I still could not figure out --- was it the smell?  or taste, texture or its color.... but definitely there were always lot of complains & suggestions on her cutting mechanism, and of course the sharing size of the cake!!  Within next few minutes I would finish eating my allotted cake portion, leaving only a couple of oranges and banana in the plate.... I hate orange/banana in morning hours !!! 

Moving into the 21st century, we realize those good years are well gone by. Things began to change in the late ’90s, and the joy, excitement, glamour started fading. Today’s youth does not care about the Christmas Cake, or having family Christmas breakfast together - rather  heads to discos to dance to Bollywood numbers. Though the times may have changed and we have fast-forwarded into a new world — but still, the spirit remains the same...

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 * *  * Merry Christmas to every one * * *         

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Rip Kirby is a beautiful portrait of the beginning of America’s transformation into the world’s dominant force. After World War-II, literally millions of men returned home to find themselves in a country that was both triumphant and unsettled. They needed new ways of looking at themselves, new stories and new heroes to fill them.  

Rip was more the cerebral type - sorta cool, albeit in a geeky sort of way. He's a renowned scientist and freelance criminologist. He possesses a superior intellect and a brilliant wit, and enjoys classical music, chess and fine brandy. Rip Kirby delivered a two-fisted intellectualism, a guy who might be baffled at first, but who would eventually get all the answers. Reading his stories a half-century later, we can still see how much he influenced us, and all the ways we have tried to live up to his example, and too often, all the ways we have failed.

Rip was a genuine intellectual, he lived in a swank apartment with a butler, and took in plays and exclusive clubs with his much younger blonde girl friend. He wore a tie and glasses and smoked a pipe. Since Rip was an ex-Marine, he could take a punch or a bullet as well as deliver them. There were spies, gangsters, scientists, femme fatales, and Kirby handled them all like a homegrown James Bond.

Rip Kirby was certainly one of the most successful and longest-running private eye in the comics world. The strip ran for an amazing run of over fifty years, from 1946 to 1999. Written and drawn by Alex Raymond until his death, Rip Kirby is often surprisingly sophisticated in its plots, and it’s cool to see where many of the tropes of later crime shows came from. ("CSI" owes a huge pile of gratitude to Rip and his methods of "scientific detecting").

Read here one of the vintage Rip Kirby adventures, "The Cold Deck Switch" in B&W - it originally continued from September 1952  to  January 1953.

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The Cold Deck Switch

   (Size: 55 MB)