Comic books might be good at imagining alien worlds and gritty fictional cityscapes, but when it comes to depictions of real-life countries, they can fall down.
DC’s Superman/Wonder Woman annual release recently accidentally allowed a placeholder caption to go through to production which said the dialogue in one scene was translated from “Pakistanian” – there being no such language, of course, with Urdu being the primary tongue spoken in Pakistan.
Spider-Man in Cuba with the Puerto Rican flag mistakenly used.
Days later Marvel had Spider-Man visit Cuba in his own title … where the Puerto Rican flag was flying. The book’s editors quickly moved to apologise on social media and rectified the error in the digital edition.
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Africa and African characters have particularly had a raw deal in US comics. A diverse continent seems to get boiled down to one or two stereotypes. Afua Richardson, one of the few African American artists working for the big companies such as Marvel (she’s actually African Native American, and the recipient of a Nina Simone Artistic Achievement award for her comics work) says, “You may only see the starving, warring, barren wastelands or the dangerous mosquito-ridden jungles of the Congo.
Afua Richardson an artist working for Marvel and others.
You’ll only get simple lives of tribal men and warlords because someone didn’t want to do a little research. Or, if there is to be some kind of fictional narrative of African hierarchy it will be reserved for an over-dramatisation of Egyptian dynasties, totally overlooking the recent accomplishments the entire continent has advanced to in the last several thousand years. It’s lazy, really.”
Things might be looking up – New York Times bestselling writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has been brought on board by Marvel to write the adventures of one of its few truly African characters, the Black Panther, aka T’Challa, ruler of the fictional African country Wakanda – but it’s hardly surprising that after decades of a landscape mainly populated by white supermen, African creators and companies are finally doing it for themselves.
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Artwork by Afua Richardson.
Enter Comic Republic, a Nigerian publishing house set up in 2013 which has a stable of titles and characters that are being dubbed the “African Avengers” – among them Guardian Prime, an almost messianic Superman analogue; super-smart bookworm Nutech, gifted with “teletechnopathy and magnetism”; fearsome warrior woman Ireti and super fast Maxspeed.
