It’s rare that you hear public radio talk about Middle Eastern countries that exist only in the world of DC Comics, but that’s what was in one of PRI’s The World’s GeoQuizzes earlier this month.
For today’s Geo Quiz we’re looking for a country - with a twist. The country we’re looking for belongs in a list that includes these other states.
Tropidor is a country in Central America - it was the subject of illegal U.S. Government arms trading many years ago.
Kooey Kooey Kooey is an island in the South Pacific, in case you didn’t know.
Ah, yes, Pokolistan. Pokolistan is a former Soviet republic. It used to be a military dictatorship ruled by General Zod. And General Zod, you might recall, was killed by… Superman.
It goes on to talk about home-grown Middle Eastern superhero comics:
Of all the places in the world that needs a hero, Lebanon is probably high atop the list. After an Israeli invasion in 2006, and a 15 year civil war before that, much of the country has been wracked by war. So in many ways, just as the United States had Superman and Captain America in the 1950s, Lebanon now has Malaak.
“Malaak is basically the Lebanese superhero, super heroine I should say, as we never had one in Lebanon.”
28-year-old Lebanese artist Joumana Medlej created Malaak — a new online and printed action comic.
“Actually we’ve never had an action comic in Lebanon. She was born of the situation where everybody was starting to wish we had some kind of superhero to come and fix things once and for all.”
Medlej says Malaak — whose name means angel in Arabic — fights against supernatural and evil beings — known as “jinn” — that are creating a war in this fictitious representation of Lebanon.
“She definitely has powers, but she’s discovering them as the story goes. So we don’t know the extent of them. But so far she can generate some kind of energy that destroys the jinn that are responsible for the war.”
While Malaak is clearly drawing from elements of Lebanon’s recent past, another comic has a much newer take on a significantly older story — Islam. “The 99″ is a comic with wide distribution throughout the Muslim world. It’s almost like a religious version of the Justice League. Naif Al-Mutawa is the CEO of the Teshkeel Media Group in Kuwait, which publishes “The 99″. He explains that the name refers to the 99 attributes that Muslims believe come together in Allah — and which in turn give Allah power.
“Things like generosity and strength and wisdom and foresight and mercy. And dozens of others that unfortunately are not used today to describe Islam in the media. So, the idea, very simply is a series of heros, each of which embodies one of these traits. And they need to work in a team of three to solve a problem.”
Al-Mutawa says part of the reason comics haven’t taken off in the Middle East before is government censorship, which restricted what could and couldn’t be published.
Joumana Medlej’s a pretty good artist, if the sample shown is any indication. I could definitely see a stateside publisher taking a chance on Malaak. I’d certainly want to try an issue.
I guess I’m a serious word nerd, but I find myself in agreement with a New York Times article cheering an unexpected appearance of the semicolon on the New York City subway system:
It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the train.
“Please put it in a trash can,” riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good news for everyone.”
Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.
Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.
“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,” Kurt Vonnegut once said. “Old age is more like a semicolon.”
In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a “New York sentence.” In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.
Semicolons are supposed to be introduced into the curriculum of the New York City public schools in the third grade. That is where Mr. Neches, the 55-year-old New York City Transit marketing manager, learned them, before graduating from Tilden High School and Brooklyn College, where he majored in English and later received a master’s degree in creative writing.
But, whatever one’s personal feelings about semicolons, some people don’t use them because they never learned how.
In fact, when Mr. Neches was informed by a supervisor that a reporter was inquiring about who was responsible for the semicolon, he was concerned.
“I thought at first somebody was complaining,” he said.
A surprisingly fun and funny article, even if you don’t care about the semicolon. (Although you should.)
Once upon a time, bigger newspapers routinely had reporters write up the obits or, at least, flesh out the ones of general news interest. In Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, James Healy gets just such an obit.
A brief excerpt:
When he wasn’t defusing roadside bombs, Army Sgt. James K. Healy often could be found drawing, taking out the stress of each day by creating cartoon characters of family members and friends.
“Any time he would sit down in the evenings, he would have a sketchbook with him. He was always drawing something,” said his wife, Shannon, 23. “I have books and books full of his drawings.”
Family members said Healy, 25, an avid “Star Wars” enthusiast from Hesperia, was the unofficial artist for the Ft. Knox, Ky.-based 703rd Explosive Ordnance Detachment while it was fighting in Afghanistan. He designed a logo for his company and made signs that some of the soldiers hung on their doors.
At home with his wife and 15-month-old son Wyatt, he “would draw Wyatt and I as comic characters and himself as well,” his wife said. “He would do little comic strips of the three of us . . . as he did one of us when Wyatt was first born.”
Healy was killed Jan. 7 on his second tour of duty when his vehicle struck a roadside bomb in Laghar Juy, Afghanistan, southeast of Kabul and in a mountainous region on the eastern border with Pakistan. Also killed in the attack was Army Maj. Michael L. Green, 36, of Chagrin Falls, Ohio.
Well worth the full read.
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