- Jan 7, 2002
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CAIRO, Egypt - 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."
Holy banality! 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, a.k.a. 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 laboring 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 medieval 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."
http://www.bergen.com/page.php?qstr=eXJ...Y2NTg5NjkmeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk3
CAIRO, Egypt - 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."
Holy banality! 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, a.k.a. 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 laboring 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 medieval 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."
http://www.bergen.com/page.php?qstr=eXJ...Y2NTg5NjkmeXJpcnk3ZjcxN2Y3dnFlZUVFeXk3
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