Okay, you asked for it. It's pretty much hack-work - I bashed it out in half an hour. So excuse the mistakes and the fact that it's aimed at a non-comic reading public.
From the Telegraph & Argus, Bradford, Wednesday February 9.
Forget Batman - Ali's the new comic hero on the block
A comic from the publishers of Batman and Superman which hits the shops tomorrow features a pair of never-before-seen heroes: two teenage Muslims from Bradford. DOCTOR SAX reports
Even the most fervent comic book fan would be hard-pressed to name a superhero series featuring positive portrayals of Muslims.
In the post-9/11 world, most Islamic characters who appear in American-produced comics from the likes of publishers such as Marvel and DC are usually fanatical, gun-toting terrorists who posture with their AK47s for a couple of pages before getting their teeth kicked out by Captain America or Green Lantern.
Which makes it all the more surprising, then, that tomorrow speciality comics shops such as Where The Wild Things Are on Sunbridge Road, Bradford, and Forbidden Planet in Leeds will take delivery of a major new comic series which stars a 19-year-old British Muslim called Ali, the son of a shopkeeper in Bradford, especially as the comic - Vimanarama - is produced by one of the "big two" American publishers, DC comics.
DC is the home of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and a host of other iconic, gaudily-clad crimefighters who have been adventuring through the minds of generations of comic readers.
Following on from a minor comics boom in the 1990s in which the publishers turned their hands to producing more adult-orientated material to service those who had grown up with the medium but who were fed up of the usual childlike fare, DC comics established its Vertigo imprint, through which it publishes more experimental comics.
It's through Vertigo that Vimanarama, written by Glaswegian Grant Morrison and illustrated by fellow Brit Philip Bond, is released.
DC comics describe it thus: "Imagine a modern-day Arabian Nights in the form of an Indian romantic comedy and set on a celestial stage. East meets West with a burst of colour, song and cosmic violence."
Vimanarama comes from the pen of Grant Morrison, who - if he was a bit younger - could be described as the enfant terrible of comics writing.
He is renowned for tackling difficult and obscure topics; his last two comics have variously turned the "animal adventure" genre on its head by having three lab animals armed to the teeth with genetic modifications escape and turn against their government masters, and featured a rather pathetic superhero called Seaguy who has a talking fish sidekick and who accidentally uncovers dark secrets about his day-glow world.
The pitch for the three-part monthly Vimanarama says: "The son of a successful grocery chain owner, 19 year-old British Asian Ali can't relate to his family's traditional customs.
"He feels much better when he finds that Sofia, the girl he's arranged to be married to, is gorgeous and vivacious…until he accidentally unleashes a subterranean army of fossil demons, restarts an ancient god war, and brings the whole world to the brink of destruction."
Just another day up Manningham Lane, then.
So why choose to set a comic book in Bradford and feature as its heroes British Muslims? Hardly the stuff to get the American comic-buying public excited, you would have thought.
Speaking to online comics news site Newsarama, Grant Morrison has said: "The seed was planted after 9/11 when I started reading up on Muslim culture in an effort to comprehend the world political and religious situation a little more clearly.
"Apart from the Sufi mystical fringe, I'd never been interested in Islam at all but I found a rich vein of visionary weirdness I'd never known was there."
Does he expect the Muslim communities in the main comic reading centres of the US and Britain to take Ali and Sofia to their hearts, then?
Hesaid: "Islam frowns on representational art and I'd imagine that, for some sects, comics are possibly the most blasphemous art form imaginable. I just liked the idea of taking all the pomp and high holiness of one of the world's great religions. . . and turning it into a Jack Kirby comic."
For the uninitiated, Jack Kirby was one of the masters of the art in the Sixties and Seventies, creating sprawling hippy space-opera epics, and he was also responsible, along with writer Stan Lee, for coming up with the Fantastic Four, who are to grace cinema screens this summer.
Does this mean that Morrison isn't too concerned about upsetting people by turning a faith that most artists or writers would be very wary of appropriating for their own ends, into a comic book?
He says: "Vimanarama is pretty operatic in scale but the focus is on smaller feelings and emotions and on the interactions between humans and the world of the divine beings.
"Every single character is either Pakistani or a god. The sprawling family structure of this book is the kind of thing I rarely write and the huge cast of babies, grannies, aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters provided me with a lot of opportunities for weird comedy.
"There are devout Muslims in the book and there are couldn't-careless Muslims so everyone gets a shout. Basically, I did all my research but you won't see much of it in the book. All the concepts are translated, so 'Allah' is referred to in the text as 'god' and 'hajj' as' pilgrimage', for example, in an effort to avoid the stuffy, self-aware 'ethnicity' of using Arabic phrases for 'colour.'
"I think the story is human enough at its core to mean something to anyone who's ever been a teenager in the grip of immense and ridiculous forces beyond one's control or understanding. Which is surely everybody who gets past the age of 12…"
Vimanarama is published by DC Comics' Vertigo imprint. The three-part series is out monthly and costs $2.95 (about £1.65) and will be available from specialist comic shops. |
