Newspapers censor “Doonesbury” strips about abortion news || Feministing

All this week, “Doonesbury” is running a series of comic strips about the ultrasound laws that have popped up recently. The first strip features an abortion patient being sent to the “Shaming Room.”

I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise in our current political climate that some newspapers have decided not to run the strips about abortion. Or that the list of papers that have opted out of running the strip is dominated by publications in states where ultrasound laws have come up.

Frank Miller’s Holy Terror Is Fodder for Anti-Islam Set

Holy Terror, Miller’s long, long, long-awaited statement on 9/11 and counterterrorism, hit comic book stores Wednesday. Longtime Miller watchers have viewed it with apprehension, hoping that his dark views about the source of that national trauma wouldn’t turn the comic into a vulgar, one-dimensional revenge fantasy. They were wrong. It’s even worse than that.

Miller’s Holy Terror is a screed against Islam, completely uninterested in any nuance or empathy toward 1.2 billion people he conflates with a few murderous conspiracy theorists. It’s no accident that it’s being released ten years after 9/11. This comic would be unthinkable during the unity that the U.S. felt after the attack.

Instead, it’s a perfect cultural artifact of this dark period in American life, when the FBI teaches its agents that “mainstream” Islam is indistinguishable from terrorism and a community center near Ground Zero gets labeled a “victory mosque.” Call it the artwork of 9/11 decadence, when all that remains of a horror is a carefully nurtured grievance.

Holy Terror, the inaugural offering from Legendary Comics, starts out with the Fixer, an ersatz Batman, enjoying a tryst with an ersatz Catwoman when they’re interrupted by a nail bomb. The culprit: a “humanities major” named Amina, an Islamist version of the psychopathic Rorschach from Watchmen, who sneers that the “haughty” skyline of Empire City is like “sharpened sticks aimed at the eyes of God.”

The Fixer’s response is to go to war — indiscriminately. “We give them what they want, minus the innocent victims,” the Fixer thinks as he opens fire. To bring the point home Miller draws 14 stereotypical Muslim faces around the righteous anti-hero. Naturally, the only way to learn more about the next attack is to torture a surviving terrorist — which Miller illustrates pornographically — even though the Scary Muslim says “pain means nothing to me,” so it’s not like the Fixer is torturing, you know, a human being.

“So Mohammed,” the Fixer says, “Pardon me for guessing your name, but you’ve got to admit the odds are pretty good that it’s Mohammed.” Naturally, the terrorists are amassing an army in a mosque, against whose walls “the night winds blow away seven centuries.” That’s the tenor of the book, though I won’t spoil the ending.

The tragedy is that Miller is no hack. Throughout his 35-year career, he’s been one of comics’ few undisputed geniuses. Check the resume: from Daredevil to Ronin to Sin City, Miller excels at exploring the dark side of humanity without reducing his characters to simplistic killing machines. His Dark Knight Returns was one of the game-changing comics of the 1980s, the greatest Batman story ever told, a book that rivals Watchmen in its ability to prove that comics are literature. As an artist, Miller’s forte is in stark black-and-white color schemes, yet he creates worlds where the morality is a subtle gray.

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The 99 comes to America - ILLUME Magazine

This week DC Comics, the same comic book company that churns out Wonder Woman and Superman comic books will publish a set of six crossover issues featuring The 99, a group of Islamic superheroes who will be fighting along with the Justice League of America.

The 99 have been in print since 2007 and are continuing to garner attention from Muslim and non-Muslim fans.  Forbes Magazine named the series “One of the Top 20 Trends Sweeping the Globe” and   the series creator, Dr. Naïf Al-Mutawa was recently named as one of “The 500 Most Influential Muslims in the World” by The Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center of Jordan.

With characters like Hadya “The Guide”, a 17-year-old Pakistani girl with superhuman abilities to track and locate or Fattah “The Opener”, an Indonesian man who has the ability to manipulate the space-time continuum, these are bona fide superheroes with super human abilities.  The only difference is that their characters are based on Islamic ideals.

That’s not to say that these are “Islamic” stories.  Dr. al-Mutawa prefers to call his characters “inspired by Islam”.  The majority of the female heroes do not wear head coverings (although at least one of them does wear a burka) but both genders stay away from the usual skin-tight-every-curve-revealing suits that most western superheroes wear.

The series boasts an unprecedented diversity among its characters.  Different ages, races, cultures and genders are represented as heroes, far more often than you will ever see in western comic books.  As a true reflection of the global Muslim population, the characters are drawn to accentuate their differences, which as it turns out, are also their greatest strengths.

In a PBS.org interview last year, Dr. al-Mutawa elaborated on the differences between The 99 and western style superheroes:

“The American superheroes wear red, white and blue. Spiderman’s red, white and blue. Captain America’s red, white and blue.  So THE 99 are from 99 different countries. There’s a hero that represents each country, and each is equal in terms of strength but different in terms of their attributes. It’s the circumstance that dictates the ability to solve a particular problem, not who are, where you’re from, what your dad does, how much money you have or what passport you carry. It’s more the context. This problem requires these skills. So it democratizes, if you will, the idea of a superhero. It’s about teams, not about individuals. It’s a group culture, not an individual culture. You know Superman and Batman are very much based on western archetypes. It’s the Achilles heel-type of hero. He’s got all powers but kryptonite brings him down.  Very western.”

The first of the six DC collaboration issues hits the stands on Wednesday, October 27, 2010.

It’s not a bird, or a plane… but a Muslim superhero - in a wheelchair.

Comic books fans will soon meet at an “unlikely new superhero” – created by a group of disabled young Americans and Syrians who were brought together last month in Damascus by the Open Hands Initiative, a non-profit organization aimed at “improving people-to-people understanding and international friendship.”

The initiative was founded by U.S. philanthropist and businessman Jay T. Snyder.

Though the superhero’s appearance hasn’t been finalized, an early sketch shows a Muslim boy who lost his legs in a landmine accident and later becomes the Silver Scorpion after discovering he has the power to control metal with his mind.

“The first comic book is set to come out in early November in both Arabic and English,” said Sharad Devarajan, co-founder and CEO of Liquid Comics. Devaranjan’s company is currently turning the group’s ideas into pictures and a story line.

A Muslim Superhero in a Wheelchair - ILLUME Magazine

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