Comics pack political punch
We knew comics were a source of distraction for kids everywhere, but who knew they could potentially divert youth from a life of terrorism?
In his column, Newsweek’s Middle East editor Christopher Dickey posits that Kuwaiti comics company Teshkeel’s ongoing comics series The 99 could inspire the impressionable eight-to-14-year-old set with its Marvel-esque group of Muslim superheroes.
[…]when [anthropologist Scott] Atran went back to Washington to brief National Security Council and Homeland Security staff in January this year, he went armed—with comic books. He wanted to show that nothing cooked up by the Bush administration’s warmongers and spinmeisters comes close to delivering the kind of positive messages you can find in a commercial action adventure series called The 99.
The comics are the creation of Kuwaiti psychologist and entrepreneur , and—let me make a confession here—I’ve been reading them since my colleague Florence Villeminot first wrote about them early last year. My reasons for following the series are probably as atavistic as analytic. I grew up with Marvel and DC comics, spending my impressionable pubescence getting deep into the gothic drama of Batman, delighting in the athletic insolence of Spider-Man, savoring the unsublimated sexuality of the women in X-Men. And, yes, there’s something of all of that in The 99, with its hulking fighters and sultry enforcers.
Dickey ultimately concludes that a comic book with a run of only several thousand is unlikely to trump the jihadist messages that have far-reaching influence in the Mideast and beyond, but that it’s heartening to see The 99 and its ilk go head-to-head with the bad guys.
