With the World Cup starting this fortnight, it’s time to dig out your Gavaskar comic books, says Naresh Fernandes.

As anyone who ever saw Sunil Gavaskar stride into the field at the peak of his career knows, nothing was impossible for the Little Master. He could tear apart a bowling attack with a mere flick of his wrists. He could have his opponents tearing their hair out in frustration as he heaved ball after well-delivered ball to the boundary. He could detonate bombs, overpower kidnappers and fly through the air like Superman.

Unfortunately, the last set of activities haven’t been recorded in the pages of Wisden. Instead, they’re recounted in a short-lived comic series titled Sunny The Super Sleuth, which transformed India’s doughty opening batsman into a superhero who battled cricketers from Bandookstan and England on the field and, between games, took on evil magicians who lived beyond the outer range of the Himalayas.

Sunny The Super Sleuth, three issues of which appeared over a few months in 1984, was the brainchild of journalists Bharat and Shalan Savur. “Action heroes weren’t a new idea, but turning a cricket hero into one was,” said Bharat Savur. The Shavurs said they were loosely inspired by another Indian comic-book series of the time, Supremo, scripted by the lyricist Gulzar, which featured Amitabh Bachchan as a caped wonder.

As it turned out, Bharat Shavur and Gavaskar had been friends at St Xavier’s College in the mid-’60s, and the cricketer immediately jumped at the idea. “I was surprised and excited when it was proposed,” Gavaskar said in an email interview. After auditioning several illustrators, the Shavurs chose adman Prabhakar Waikar to turn their stories into comics. They organised a long photo shoot with Gavaskar, clicking him from every possible angle to give them ample visual reference material for the strip.

The Shavurs would brainstorm about ideas after work (he was at the men’s magazine, Debonair, and she was at the women’s magazine, Saavy) to generate a script for Waikar. He then visualised the situations, drawing local landmarks – Regal Cinema and the Willingdon Fountain, among them – into the panels. Gavaskar didn’t need to approve the stories before they were printed but Bharat Savur “would let me know before hand what it was going to be”, the cricketer said.

After enthusiasm for the books petered out, a fourth book (which featured an actress suspiciously looking like Sarika and the wonderfully named Sheikh Vell Befo Yuse) was serialised in newspapers around India.

In the age of graphic novels, it’s now belatedly obvious that the Savurs were pioneers in giving comics a contemporary Indian context. But at the time, not everyone was impressed with their efforts. “These personality-oriented comics are a retrogressive step,” tut-tutted an article by Angana Parekh in the Sunday Express in 1984 about Sunny and Supremo. “The Indian psyche is very receptive to the personality cult and to make heroes out of ordinary people is not a difficult task in this country. These comics are reinforcing the tendency to attribute superhuman qualities to ordinary humans, in the same way that commercial Hindi films do.”