ABSTRACT
Comics writers and artists seeking to address young adult (YA) audiences in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have sought to overcome the dominance of and stereotypes within western media and culture, while at the same time distancing themselves from the medium’s common association with young children. One strand of comics concentrating on questions of language, identity and history in their narratives have been performing a kind of cultural diplomacy, battling with mainstream commercial productions in an attempt to bridge and foster understanding and provide culturally relevant protagonists. The characters in Naif al-Mutawaa’s The 99 (Kuwait) and Marwan El Nashar’s Jinn Warriors (Egypt) play out their differences against a backdrop of global political conflict, each providing less stereotypical heroes and heroines in order to overcome negative portrayals of Arabs in mainstream media (see also Deeb 2012) but at the same time retaining the markedly DC and Marvel style in the drawing of their characters. Mai El Shoush’s Drawn (Sudan) seeks to construct a character who is not “objectified” like typical female superheroes or even the scantily clad Jalila and Aya of Ayman Kandeel’s AK Comics (Kuwait). Joumana Medlej’s Maalak (Lebanon and published in Arabic, English and French) attempts to counter the more dominant commercial productions of comic book titans produced by Marvel and DC with a “local production” lest YA readers find that they do not have heroes that they can identify with and who “otherwise may feel that their country has nothing valuable to offer” (Gravett 2012). Anxieties about identity are an important component of comic culture in general, with superhero comics in particular offering children “metaphors for their own isolation and longing for power, identity, and acceptance” (Wolk 2007: 72). Such texts are especially appealing among subaltern cultures, where questions of language and the dominance of American and European productions and political turmoil contribute to the feeling of alienation. Consistently, these characters discover or display the richness of their own culture by drawing on Islamic heritage or reconfiguring ancient mythology – with jinn characters frequently appearing to offer a non-human being with extraordinary powers as an alternative to the western superhero. In contrast, the two texts discussed in this chapter demonstrate that children’s comics can combine fantasy, romance, humor and adventure without defaulting to the popular superhero genre.
