Comics Responding to the Election

We Want Your Comics

A core part of Crucial Comix is that we’re invested in supporting new and emerging artists, so we are always open for submissions and all contributors are paid. We publish narrative nonfiction comics; you can submit original or republished work (like if you put up a comic on your Instagram already). We review pitches once a month. ✨ Right now we’re particularly looking for pitches of personal, place-based stories about environmental justice. ✨ Do you have a story to draw about an environmental issue in a place you love? Tell us all about it.

Anti-Capitalist Superheroes

Yazan al-Saadi is a Syrian-Canadian comics writer who is currently living in Lebanon and who has a lot of strong opinions about superheroes. He’s leading the upcoming workshop for Crucial called Decolonize the Superhero: New Approaches to Writing Superhero Comics, in which he’ll ask participants to reflect on how the history of superheroes has been dominated by capitalist narratives and to imagine how heroes could subvert ruling powers.

Did you grow up reading superhero comics? And when did you start questioning the premise of those stories? 

I grew up on a whole range of comics that I could get my hands on in the different places I grew up—including European (Tintin, Asterix), Japanese mangas, and American comics, particularly Superman. Then, I got access to up-to-date comics in English during the late 1980s and onwards, but also comics in Arabic, which had collected jumbled stories from the Silver Age and earlier decades. 

I started questioning the premise in my teens, especially in the late 1990s and early 2000s, because the stories that I read in these superhero comics were blatantly pro-war and anti-Arab. The ads were for the US military in these comics too! So while I enjoyed some of the stories, I was also aware of the inherent problems the ideologies of these (predominantly, white male Western) writers were displaying in the text. And then I found by reading more and more there were other types of stories that deconstructed, critiqued, or played with the genre.   

What do want people think about when writing their own superhero stories? 

I think people should be aware that these are not neutral characters, devoid of meaning or ideologies. We bring in our biases, our subjective conceptions, and pour them in these superbeings. They are power fantasies and modern myths. Like olden myths, they can be a great shorthand to make a point. That point can be good or bad. So what I want is to have an ongoing conversation about: What do we want from these superhero stories? Can we even make that point with this tool?

Have you ever created a superhero? Can you tell us about them? 

Yeah, there's a few roaming around in my head, but nothing out there yet. One of them is reappropriating the Superman mythos: Rather than this alien refugee baby landing in June 1938 (the cover date of Action Comics #1) in Kansas, USA, and adopted by a couple on a farm, what if this Kryptonian alien refugee baby landed in June 1938 in Northern Palestine (the upper Galilee region) and was adopted by a Palestinian couple on a farm? Same rules of powers for the character (faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, etc), but different context with our timeline. He will be 10 when the Nakba happens. That’s where my imagination goes, and I wonder what yours would do with that type of set-up. 

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