CAIRO: Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s Jalila, the new Arab super heroine, coursing across the sky, black hair flying, in her battle to right the wrongs and ensure that justice prevails in the Middle East.
“I’ll make you swallow your teeth, killer!” she threatens her foe, muscles rippling under her skin-tight garb, as she lands a hard right to the chops.
Tough as she is, Jalila, the creation of 36-year-old Egyptian Ayman Kandeel, is not left on her own to fight the forces of evil.
There are also Aya the Princess of Darkness, Zein the Last Pharaoh and Rakan the Lone Warrior. Each month, an entire issue is dedicated to just one of the four.
Kandeel founded AK Comics in Cairo in 2003 to create a comic to compete with Superman, Batman and other Western super heroes, in hopes of dominating the local market.
“AK Comics characters are to represent a role model for Arab youth and also to promote, advocate and endorse a positive as well as civilized image of Arabs in the West,” according to the company’s mission statement.
Zein, Aya and Jalila live in an imaginary era, sometime after a 55-year-war, which ended with a peace in the Middle East that is maintained by the United Arab Forces.
Rakan, on the other hand, lives in the past, in a time when his parents perished in the Mongol invasion.
Of the four, who all have a profound distaste for violence, only Rakan kills his enemies, and then with the greatest reluctance.
“This sad display of man’s evil nature makes me sick,” Rakan muses, as he surveys a battlefield littered with the arrow-pierced corpses of soldiers.
Though the guidelines stipulate that ‘there are no direct references to political disputes’, politics is heavily suggested in some stories.
For example, Jalila lost her parents in the explosion of the Dimondona nuclear reactor, whose name is remarkably like that of Israel’s Dimona reactor.
And Aya’s arch foe is the chief of the underworld gang, Jose Darian, a name reminiscent of the late Israeli general, Moshe Dayan.
The comic first appeared in Egypt in February 2004, with only 400 copies printed. A year later, the figure was up to 6,000, and by July it had reached 11,000.
AK Comics say 54 per cent of the readers of the magazine, published in both Arabic and English, are between the ages of seven and 14.
In a country where the average monthly wage is just under 100 dollars and an imported comic book can cost around three dollars, AK Comics has come out with a black-and-white version that sells for only 15 cents.
Earlier this summer, the comic appeared for the first time at bookstores in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. It should hit the shelves in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan next summer.—AFP
