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articles and essays, from the Internet

Didactic or Dynamic? Superheroes from the Middle East

(The following article by Fredrik Strömberg was originally posted on the Mizan Project website. It is copied here with permission.)

Superheroes from the Middle East: Adaptation of the Genre?

A selection of comic books published by AK Comics and Teshkeel.
A selection of comic books published by AK Comics and Teshkeel, including The 99 (photo credit: Fredrik Strömberg).

This is the third essay published here on Mizan Pop in our Muslim Superheroes series. The first and second installments in the series can be read here and here.

America has been exporting superhero comics for more than seven decades; nevertheless, there have been few commercially successful comics created in that genre in the rest of the world. Given that there have been several violent conflicts between the United States and Arab or Muslim-majority nations over the last few decades, it is intriguing that attempts at establishing a line of original superhero comics were made in the Middle East in the first decade of the twenty-first century by two different publishing houses: AK Comics in Egypt and Teshkeel Media Group in Kuwait.

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academic, from the Internet

MUSLIM SUPERHEROES Begins “In Earnest”

Mizan logoIn advance of the Spring 2017 release of Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam, and Representation, Mizan has been featuring a series of related articles on its Mizan Pop site. The first, dated this past summer, provides an overview of that category’s — “Muslim superheroes” — history.

The study of Muslim superheroes has only quite recently begun in earnest, with scholars like comics historian Fredrik Strömberg and French scholar Shirin Edwin publishing some of the first scholarly articles in this specific field in 2011. There has been a small but steady stream of work on the subject since. Regrettably, while some of this scholarship is of high quality, it has, to date, been scattered over multiple disciplines, and new work has only rarely been in dialogue with what has come before.

In theory, Muslim Superheroes, edited by A. David Lewis and Martin Lund, is intended to further that dialogue and provide stronger connective tissue between the disciplines on the topic. Their promotional Facebook page features links to some of that “steady stream on the subject” and a preview of the book jacket (featuring art by Qahera artist Deena Mohamed).

Muslim Superheroes