Arab superheroes leap pyramids in a single bound

AK Comics is Marwan Nashar's regional challenge to Marvel and DC

He’s a mild-mannered philosophy professor who wears button-down shirts, lives in a drab, anonymous apartment and pronounces maxims such as "There is no glory without virtue’’ and “Free will pushes toward creativity."

But beneath the meek and pedantic exterior lies a buff, masked fighter in tights who is endowed with supernatural strength and a mission to “fight evil until the end of time”.

Not another self-effacing Everyman who is actually a powerhouse, the stuff of comic book creations ranging from Batman to Spider-Man through Superman to Zorro! No, this is new - at least for the Middle East.

The professor is Zein, aka the Last Pharaoh, billed as the first Arab superhero in a year-old line of comics. It’s time, his creators say, to move beyond Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, those Westerners labouring in Metropolis and Gotham City.

Bring on Amgad Darweesh, Zein’s alter ego, who is 14,000 years old and lives in Origin City, which, with its pyramids, museums, traffic and random chaos, looks a lot like Cairo.

“Why can’t the Middle East have its own heroes?’’ asks Marwan Nashar, managing director and editor at AK Comics, an Egyptian publishing venture.

AK Comics intends to flood the Arab world with Zein and three other action idols: Rakan, a hairy mediaeval warrior in Mesopotamia; Jalila, a brainy Levantine scientist and fighter for justice; and Aya, a North African described as a “vixen who roams the region on her supercharged motorbike confronting crime wherever it rears its ugly head”.

AK Comics, which publishes in Arabic and English, sells in Egypt and is beginning distribution in Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Gulf states. It plans to move on to Lebanon, Syria and North Africa this year and next. Like Zein, AK Comics is on a mission.

As spelled out on the first inside page of various issues, the goal is “to fill the cultural gap created over the years by providing essentially Arab role models, in our case, Arab superheroes to become a source of pride to our young generations”.

“I grew up reading Spider-Man and loved him,” says Nashar. “But I couldn’t get into Peter Parker. I mean, he lived in New York. I always wondered why there weren’t any Arabs leaping off buildings.”

AK Comics creators say they can hold their own with the Marvel and DC comics of the world and encourage Arab empowerment.

“I believe this region will see much chaos for some time,” says AK Comics founder Ayman Kandeel. “But after that, the dust will settle, peace will come, through development and a rediscovery of our true selves.”

For all this inward-looking pride, AK Comics is very much a product of globalisation.

Nashar said the inspiration for an Arab superhero series was rooted in contact with not only Western comic books but also Japanese animation and even the Kill Bill movies.

Kandeel, like Zein a university professor, albeit of economics at Cairo University, gleaned styles and production methods from contact with other publishers at comics trade shows in the United States.

Because Egypt has no homegrown tradition of comic strips, AK Comics decided to outsource the drawings to a studio in Brazil. English dialogue is honed by a writer in California.

In the tradition of Western comics, tales of the Arab superheroes play obliquely on current events and the fears and hopes of its readers.

The 1940s-era Justice Society of America featured Superman, Green Lantern, Batman and other heroes who battled Hitler on behalf of Franklin D. Roosevelt and J. Edgar Hoover.

Zein, Jalila and Aya operate in a world recovering from the “55-Year War” between unnamed superpowers. Their main aim is to keep this universe from sliding into the hands of evildoers.

Zein was born the son of a wise pharaoh whose astronomers foresaw the arrival of a giant meteor that would destroy the magnificent civilisation - a fantasy version of a chronic preoccupation with Golden Eras of the past.

Anyway, the pharaoh put Zein into a time capsule that would keep him alive until he was rehatched in some distant future.

Armed with exceptional strength and agility, not to mention immunity to bullets, he would resurrect the old way of life.

In one issue he saves a United Nations secretary-general from assassination, and in another stops terrorists from blowing up a soccer stadium full of 100,000 oblivious spectators.

One thing distinctly missing from the AK Comics series is any direct reference to the religion of the heroes.

A note in one issue explains why: “The religious backgrounds of the heroes remain undisclosed so that no religion or faith can be perceived as better than another.”