Deewana

The Deewana comics from India were an older MAD competitor series in Hindi language, which featured a very similar looking Alfred E. Neuman as the mascot and covery boy of this comic series. Only rare information about this comic series is available. Most issues were published in the 60s and the 70s. It's also unknow how many Deewana comics were published. The numbering system is hard to understand, because the numbers are also written in Hindi language.

Today these comics are very hard to find. Even in India collectors pay high prices for single issues.

Allegedly about 960 comics were published. This information could not be verified until now.

Update from July 2022

The journalist Kamayani Sharma wrote an interesting article about Diwana, which was published here: https://scroll.in/magazine/1029953/indias-answer-to-mad-magazine-has-been-sadly-forgotten.

Here is a small excerpt:

Christened Chilli, this Indian cousin of Alfred E Neuman, became the cover boy for Diwana magazine, the first full-fledged Hindi humour and parody periodical addressed to adults. Brought out by the Delhi-based media house Tej, Diwana ran till 1986 as a bilingual weekly in both Hindi and English, with the English edition commencing in the early ’70s. Featuring some of India’s finest comic strip artists and illustrators from the mid- to late-20th century, the periodical, like its American inspiration, reflected the zeitgeist of the post-Independence decades through recurring cartoon characters, visual gags and topical satire. In the years after Diwana’s inception, other illustrated comic magazines followed, such as Lotpot in 1969 and Madhu Muskan in 1972, each of which left its own mark on Hindi popular culture. But while these latter magazines have at least a Wiki page dedicated to them, the quarter-century legacy of Diwana seems to have been largely forgotten. Tej has not preserved physical copies of the magazine, and the few that have been digitised and uploaded onto the internet by readers are limited to a short period from the late ’70s to the early ’80s.

Read the full article here: https://scroll.in/magazine/1029953/indias-answer-to-mad-magazine-has-been-sadly-forgotten.