The inhabitant of 27, Rajani Sen Road is back. Armed with his Charminar cigarettes, the rarely used Colt revolver, his cousin Tapesh and dear friend Lalmohan Ganguly, Pradosh Chandra Mitter, better known as Feluda, will hit bookshelves this month in a new, graphic avatar. The adventures and mysteries of the Bengali detective, created by Satyajit Ray have been adapted into graphic novels by children’s author Subhadra Sen Gupta and illustrator Tapas Guha and published by Puffin. With the rains finally gracing the city, pick a hot cup of tea, with some biscuits and curl up with the first two titles, Beware in the Graveyard and A Bagful of Mysteries. (Rs 99 each)

“Tapas and I were approached by a Kolkata-based daily in 2004, to convert the Feluda mysteries into a graphic format for their children’s page. We realised how popular the venture has been when we heard that children were cutting out the pages from the paper and pasting them into a scrapbook, making their own comic books,” says Sen Gupta. The idea of a graphic novel for Feluda was born and Sen Gupta and Guha found that they had plenty of material. “We have already adapted five books and we’re working on the sixth now. Puffin showed interest and we’ll be bringing out more titles with them,” adds Sen Gupta whose criteria for choosing which book to adapt is simple: She looks at plot, location and the presence of Lalmohan Babu, aka Jatayu.

The new graphic format stays true to the original plot but is visibly modernised in terms of art and text. The originals, written in the 1970s, have been revamped for the present day in the Puffin books: Feluda carries a cell phone, one of Tapesh’s bedroom walls is adorned with an Angelina Jolie poster (yes, the young man has hormones), the Kolkata landscape is crowded with buildings and there’s a smattering of Hindi, Bengali and English slang in the text.

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