Black Panther is NOT the Messiah of the African Comic Book World
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Africa. The word has a sort of magic to the way you say it. That magic runs deeper still when you close your eyes and speak its name to transport you there. It’s a spell so powerful that it takes you there even if you’ve never set foot on her shores.
Africa. It’s an ancient chaotic magic that conjures a different vision for everyone who speaks it. Fifty-four unique national boundaries for independent countries, each with its own set of laws, cultures, customs, tribes, traditions, and stories to tell. That’s always been an important part of shaping history, what shapes myth, what warns of failure, what inspires generations to come, and more importantly, who tells those stories.
In February 2018, the spell was spoken again and people all over the world were transported to the halls of a grand monument to human potential. Marvel Studios’ Black Panther had taken audiences on a breathtaking journey unlike anything Hollywood had shown before. The weeks and months following the film’s premiere kept the magic alive. From the Wakanda greetings to Black Panther fanart, to proudly wearing African dress on social media, and of course: finding more Black Panther stories, finding more comics featuring the hidden land of Africa, and searching for more African comics.
News outlets, long time comic readers, fiction enthusiasts, and people with a casual interest in trends had an eye-opening moment that there were writers and artists creating fantasy and fiction comic books across the continent. They needed to know more about us to keep the magic alive.
That magic has been all around me going back as far as I can remember. Growing up in the capital city of Zimbabwe, Harare, the ebb and flow of Shona culture and globalization was normalcy. There wasn’t anything particularly special about me that you could distinguish from a 5-year-old in my city. Except maybe, we were the first family in our neighborhood to get satellite TV.
I spent a fair share of my free time being charmed by Hanna-Barbera:
2 Stupid Dogs, Dumb and Dumber, Dexter’s Laboratory, SWAT Cats, Johnny Bravo, Cow and Chicken, I Am Weasel — you name it. Early Cartoon Network, when the channel used to close at 10 pm, was the genesis point for my love of all things fiction and animation. I started drawing on any piece of paper I could find because I was buzzing with ideas, but because of the nature of the shows I was watching, these 10-minute episodic humor-filled antics didn’t do much for my writing.
A decade later, I went to university to study Commerce. The idea of art and animation as a career was a massive gamble, and it was decided by my family that I’d do something safer with my future. With some health issues and the passing of a family member, I left university early and had the chance to gamble again.
I used to swallow hard lumps before telling people that I was a comic book artist. There was no validity to it. There were no comic book companies in Zimbabwe, or so I thought. The internet makes finding people so much easier. After some time Googling, I discovered that there wasn’t a company that produced comic books, so to speak; it more so created a platform for comic book artists to meet.
2016, the first year of my career, brought me a handful of hard pills: longtime traditional artists, animators, authors, and graduates from art schools overseas. In front of people who had been creating magic as a profession, I felt like a fraud. The pangs of imposter syndrome held my nerves hostage. But this feeling wasn’t new. I had been told to give up this dream more times than I can recall.
For the next two years, I spent every waking second either improving my craft or connecting with as many people in the same industry as I possibly could. “I am a comic book artist and writer” got easier to say after a while. I created and self-published two comics born from my childhood aspirations. The first was Captain South Africa, a comic that championed all the themes of my Saturday morning action cartoon: social justice, coming of age, dismantling systems of oppression, all within the context of the country I spent 4 years studying in. And second was Razor-Man, which more so resembles manga and anime from Japan in production but navigates southern African myths and tales of masked secret societies that have been in the shadows since before colonization.
Before I knew it, I was invited to be a guest at the first Comic-Con Africa hosted by Reed Pop. I was shoulder to shoulder with artists and writers for Marvel and DC Comics, as well as other self-publishing creators with internationally recognized works.
It was daunting and humbling to be interviewed and given a seat at the table to discuss comic book writing. In one of those all-or-nothing professions, it’s nice to be given the spotlight and a chance to share our stories with the world. But along with the spotlight came the dull heat from a heavy question that was difficult to process.
“Were you inspired by Black Panther?”
Yes and no. Yes, because in this article/interview/podcast, I suddenly realize it’s not about me, it’s not about my work, nor is it about African comics — it is about Black Panther. So in order to get media coverage, some 2 minutes of fame attention, and some recognition for the work we do: yes, I was “inspired by Black Panther.”
The truth? No. No, I was not inspired by Black Panther to make these comics. There are so few comic book stores across in Southern Africa that you can count them on your hands. More likely than not there would instead be a book shop that so happens to keep a small stack of old comic books on one of their “for toddlers” shelves. Somewhere between ‘our geek and nerd spheres are rooted out of us at a young age because it is culturally aberrant’ and ‘it would cost more than it was worth to have comics shipped over from the United States’ it was difficult to be a comic book fan. So if you even had one comic book, you were, in some capacity or another, gang rich!
For the most part, we didn’t grow up with superhero comics. I mean, sure, you could find a copy or two of Beano, Tintin, or Asterix in a local library. And, yes, we had comic strips in our newspapers, but they were almost always targeted away from children so the content, format, and delivery never really hooked someone, let alone inspired them to become a creator.
We did, however, grow up on 90s cartoons. Nineties X-Men, Spider-Man, Hulk and every Saturday morning cartoon whose opening theme song featured the word “power.” This is unknowingly where the tokenism problem had its silent birth. I’m sure millions of Black American children sat through many shows that had only one Black character and were forced into the predicament of identifying with them or characters that looked nothing like them. Said Black character held the weight of an entire race on their shoulders. An unspoken, “this is who is allowed to inspire you,” pulsed through them that is hard to pinpoint but is felt deeply.
Random aside, thinking about it now I was definitely inspired by the Black Red Ranger from Power Rangers Turbo.
Black Panther was always a B or C-list character that I had heard of in passing but had barely ever seen or even knew that he was from an African country. It’s sad, but the marketing for the character was next to non-existent on African shores before the arrival of Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes (2010) and then his big-screen announcement for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
With the former ending in 2012 and the latter only showing in cinemas early 2018, the general consensus among African comic book creators is that Black Panther is very cool, but we were making comics long before “Wakanda Forever” touched our hearts.
So if Black Panther didn’t inspire us to make African comic books, there are new questions. What inspired us then and what inspires us now? What makes an African comic book? And when did it all start?
The question “when did the initiative for African comic books start?” is the one that doesn’t seem that important but holds quite a bit of weight. The timing of the interviews, the release of Marvel Studios’ Black Panther, the most recent Comic-Con Africa events, and other surrounding media has happened all in the space of two years while African fantasy/fiction/superhero comic books were in publication almost two decades before that.
Then something special happened: there was an almost continent-wide breath of fresh content in the 2014/2015 period. Old and new artists began to publish superhero and speculative fiction content while being almost completely unaware of each other. Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ghana, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa all launched superhero comics, African superheroes, set in African countries.
That may not seem like a big deal, but when you grow up primarily on Western cartoons with predominantly white characters, you end up drawing white characters in the fiction you create. At some point whether by internal or external prompt you ask yourself: why have I been avoiding drawing Black characters? The psychological impact of only seeing White faces in sci-fi is a topic for another day, but that wake-up call isn’t.
That wake-up call is: “What makes a comic book African?” Is it who made it? Is it who it’s for, the intended audience? Is it where it’s made? Is it a combination of these things, or is it something deeper?
These interrogations of authenticity are at the base of the magic of storytelling. I don’t believe the Black Panther movie is any less African than any other comic/story told here because it made me feel African. The intended purpose was to pull you into a cultural melting pot that was both respectful of traditional practices, aesthetics, and that faux nostalgia of a regal presence. It ticked all the boxes it set for itself, and I firmly believe if we had gotten this movie pre-Robert Downey Jr. era Marvel, it would have missed those targets. (I love Coming to America, please don’t come for me.)
Knowing what marks we want to hit and having already gotten out of most of the growing pains of an industry, we ask ourselves: what inspires us?
I think that what inspires us is the fact that we have been left out. Left out of conversations about the future. Absent in debates about magic systems. Muted on matters of alien languages. The canvas is blank for us; inspiration by its nature is derivative and those two things rarely ever intersect, but when they do, you get African storytelling.
There’s a wealth of African myths and legends that are ripe to be mined into bestsellers and blockbusters: the practice of Juju magic, an entire pantheon of Yoruba religion gods known as the Orisha and their unique fables, the shapeshifters of Zulu traditional religion, the North African fairy tale of “Udea and her Seven Brothers”, the Zambezi protector god Nyami Nyami, and countless cursed and blessed artifacts. Oral traditions that only new storytellers born into families who laid witness to events so secret we question if they ever happened have the means to inspire great odysseys.
What inspires us are the stories that haven’t been told yet, stories that make this place home, stories that pull you across the planet to visit the essence of a memory of a Saharan sun, stories about us.
Bill Masuku is a Zimbabwean comic book artist and author of the urban fantasy series Misforunism, exploring mental health as a form of magic. Half man-half meme, but at this point more meme than man. Follow him Twitter @billmasukuart and Instagram @billmasukuart or at Billmasuku.com
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