The Institute for the Palestine Studies’ blog Palestine Square recently featured coverage by writer Khelil Bouarrouj entitled, “The Role of Comics in the Palestinian Narrative.” In it, Bouarrouj considers the impact of works including Joe Sacco’s Palestine, Leila Abdelrazaq‘s Bawaddi, Harvey Pekar and JT Waldman’s Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me, and Palestinian-American Marguerite Dabaie‘s Hookah Girl, among others.
Read more here.
WARNING: This is a spoiler concerning JLA: Justice League of America #1, just out this week from DC Comics.
Continue reading Who Gods the God/Men? (Or, Is There a Chapel in the Fortress of Solitude?)
Back in March, The Guardian newspaper reported on the successful Kickstarter campaign for Super Sikh, billed by its promoters as “a modern hero in a turban.” The comic features Deep Singh, a secret agent and Elvis-phile who encounters international intrigue during his sojourn from India to Graceland.
The four-issue series pits Singh against crazed Taliban commander Salar Al AmokTaliban, explains Siri Srinivas for The Guardian in talking with the series’ co-creators and Eileen Alden and Supreet Singh Manchanda:
Deep Singh’s battle against terrorists in Afghanistan is used as a device to address the often confused American views of Sikh people.
The pair say this misunderstanding is a particularly American phenomenon. “Remember, in the British ethos, Sikhs don’t have that same [identity]: they may be victims but there’s a lot of respect,” says Manchanda who grew up in Ethiopia and Zambia and went to college in the UK, before moving to Silicon Valley.
“But in the US there’s no positive foil. There’s no Sikh military, there’s no Sikh policemen and that is only now starting to happen,” he says.
Reviews of the premiere issue have been mixed, with The Hindustan Times questioning whether Deep Singh is too much like Raj Singh, another titular Super Sikh and protagonist of an entirely separate comic. At the same time, when awareness-raising and role-modeling is the goal, do similar concepts double public recognition — or threaten to cancel each other out?
Or, best yet, could they team up?
Over at ComicMix, writer Mindy Newell takes The Jewish Daily Forward to task for its piece, “Do Marvel Movies Have An Anti-Semitic Problem?” Newell minces no words, calling it “the dumbest article I’ve ever read on their site.”
The Forward article by Susan Mohall seems to hinge on Magneto, identified in the movies and (most) comics as a Jewish Holocaust survivor, being a villain as well as the nefarious HYDRA organization having its Nazi roots effaced. Newell quickly dismantles their Magneto argument and, in terms of HYDRA, goes on to say:
Oh, Susan. I guess you never saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier and you never have watched Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. HYDRA evolved, my dear. It’s gotten smarter, its adapted, it’s gotten smoother – just as our own rat-fuckers learned from Watergate – but it is certainly is still fascist, and it’s certainly not “shy[ing] away from its Nazi roots.”
For what it’s worth, Hal Jordan’s partial Jewish heritage was never featured in the Green Lantern movie, and Ben Grimm’s Jewish background has never been noted in any Fantastic Four movie. Then again, neither has Bruce Wayne’s potential tie to the Christian Sir Gawain of Grail Legend or, say, Colossus of the X-Men’s atheistic Communist roots.
Perhaps the issue that Mohell misconstrued was less some form of antisemitism in these superhero films but, instead, a compulsion towards secularizing their characters? (Even Thor, a “god,” isn’t worshiped…)
Is television’s Matt Murdock (aka Daredevil) the first of these cinematic characters we’ve seen seek spiritual help from a real-world religious institution?
To paraphrase The Sound of Music, how do you solve a problem like Habibi?
Collected here, S&S’s own Jeff Brackett, Dave McConeghy, and A. David Lewis take to Twitter to examine the issues with bringing Craig Thompson’s 2011 graphic novel into the college classroom. (And Nick Sousanis and Chris Dowdy each make a special appearance!)
