Category Archives: interviews

interviews

Discussing the First Muslim Superhero’s Return to Comics

Cover to Volume 1 of KISMET: MAN OF FATEComics scholar and Sacred & Sequential founder A. David Lewis opens up about both the process and the motivation behind his new comic book Kismet, Man of Fate – Volume 1: Boston Strong. The series, which is a modern-day update of the 1940s Muslim superhero, had been delivered in online installments for much of the past year, but it now comes to comic shops in print for the first time this week.

Derek McCaw of Fanboy Planet conducted the new interview with Lewis, who had this to say about Golden Age superheroes like Kismet or the Green Turtle:

[F]or the more liberal-leaning comics creators of the Golden Age, I think there was a fascination with other cultures, even if it was only at the surface level. […] I doubt there was any real thought given to the real-life practitioners or inheritors of this lore, just as I think there was little deference given to Muslims or Asians with Kismet and Green Turtle, respectively. There may be something complimentary in comics creators seeing the potential for this non-Western material to fuel their stories, but it was largely Orientalist and filled with Anglo-centrist presumptuousness.

Lewis teams with artist Noel Tuazon, Rob Croonenborghs, Taylor Esposito of Ghost Glyph Studios, and Kel Nuttal in bringing Kismet back to publication. Publisher A Wave Blue World (AWBW) also secured Heathen‘s Natasha Alterici for the cover art and The Tempest‘s Laila Alawa for the Foreword, with book and logo design by Nicola Black.

It’s Kismet For A. David Lewis

interviews, online

What Do Superheroes Tell Us about Ourselves?

In November, radio station KUOW sat done with both G. Willow Wilson and Reza Aslan to explore the question “What do our superheroes tell us about ourselves?” The conversation, of course, addressed morality and religion, what with Wilson being a Muslim writer perhaps best known for the Muslim superheroine Ms. Marvel and Aslan being a Religion Studies expert.

Aslan pointed out that superheroes have changed a lot since their conception nearly a century ago. The stories are darker. The heroes dwell in gray areas more often. The moral dilemmas are more compelling.

“We have to make these characters interesting by making them reflect the morality the world in which we live,” he said.

Wilson and Aslan said that one thing is clear: Change is constant, as is our resistance to change.

Authors Reza Aslan and G. Willow Wilson. KUOW PHOTO/GIL AEGERTER

The over-thirty-minute conversation covered a range of issues and superhero properties, and it can be heard in full at the KUOW website.

contributors, controversy, cultural, interviews, online

UPDATES: Baron Leaves Alt-Right “Based Stick Man” Comic, Alt★Hero Looms

VOX DAYIn a recent e-mail to Sacred and Sequential founder A. David Lewis, Eisner Award-winning comics creator Mike Baron wrote the following:

I am no longer involved with this project.

Baron was writing in reference to the Based Stick Man Graphic Novel, whose Facebook site, at the time of this writing, still features his name prominently as its writer and has made no further announcement. Sacred and Sequential spoke with Baron in August for his views on the project at that time.

Offering no additional explanation, Baron steps away from this alt-right project both as its Indiegogo fundraising page has disappeared and as provocateur Vox Day’s Alt★Hero series (discussed previously by guest columnist Sean Kleefeld) has apparently raised over ten times its campaign goal on the new “free speech” crowdfunding platform FreeStartr. Whether the BSM project could resurface on FreeStartr is unknown at this time.

As of last month, comics writer Chuck Dixon remains attached to the Alt★Hero volumes. Vox Day (aka Theodore Robert Beale) continues to tweet publicly about the project:

https://twitter.com/voxday/status/914164822119473152

https://twitter.com/voxday/status/914112394749730818

 

controversy, cultural, interviews, podcast

Writer Mike Baron on Based Stick Man, the Alt-Right, and Free Speech – 001 Sacred & Sequential Audio

Promotional cover art to Based Stick Man
Promotional cover art to Based Stick Man

A. David Lewis speaks with Mike Baron in August 2017 about the upcoming Based Stick Man series, the politics of the series, and Baron’s own views on free speech and violence.

“Sometimes our heroes aren’t the people we’d most like them to be. You’ve got to take who you can get.”

interviews

Ron Regé on Drawing from (Outside) the Qur’an

Ron Regé Jr.If you missed this year’s Free Comic Book Day, then you likely didn’t hear about Fantagraphics’ Worlds Greatest Cartoonists collection featuring such creators as Ed Piskor, Richard Sala, or Liz Suburbia. Additionally, the FCBD offering — intended, says the publisher, to “Features a Breadth of Styles and Visions and World-Building” — also included a notable piece from Ron Regé entitled “From the Star and the Clot,” a visual retelling of the Quranic visit of the angel Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad.
Given the frequently cited tensions between comics and Islam, Sacred and Sequential had the opportunity to interview Regé  about the origin of and his goals for this work. (Note: “From the Star and the Clot” was first presented as a minicomic and is still available for purchase as a stand-alone work.)
S&S: Where did “From the Star and the Clot” come from? What was your source of inspiration for it?

THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESSRR: I was inspired to draw this sequence after reading about it in a book called The Alphabet vs The Goddess. I think I happened upon it in a bookstore, strangely enough. In it, Leonard Shlain lays out his theory about how the development of written language helped bring about a patriarchal hierarchy of power and control that was absent from previous image based, matriarchal societies. It’s not a perfect work, but it brings up questions and ideas that I’d been curious about for my entire life.

S&S: How long ago was this, approximately? That is, was this a recent discovery or something that’s shaped your thought for some time?

RR: I guess between 2008-2012 I was putting myself through a sort of self-directed course, reading dozens of books related to spirituality, history, philosophy, etc. I found myself attracted to figures & people with some pretty out there philosophies & ideas. Tesla, Mesmer, Wilhelm Reich, Swedenborg, Gurdjieff, etc & so on. This was all in the period that I was working on The Cartoon Utopia.

The idea that laws and rules written in books could be used as instruments of control by men in power, that a literate class could control the rest of society with such tools is a pretty powerful & obvious argument when looking at the misogynist horror that is Western Civilization. Is it wishful thinking of the modern age to think that oral traditions and societies of the past were more holistic, matriarchal, and malleable when dealing with matters of their moment? Perhaps, but it brings up fascinating conflicts between left & right brain, male & female, science & spirituality that continue to cause much confusion in the world today.

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