With the recent confirmed sighting that Roger Wong, the creator of Pluto Man is still alive and the sale of Captain V #1 for $150 at SGCC by kalibak komiks ( but SivaChoy, the writer of Captain V remains very dead), it begs the question: whither the Singapore superhero.
This year is also SG60 so maybe all Singaporeans are superheroes.
Especially Singa the Courtesy Lion and Teamy the Bee. My childhood heroes. Damn kilat one.
Some observations:
The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye just marked its 10th anniversary, so there is some talk about Roachman as the Singapore superhero. Is Roachman a veiled comment of the Chinese as roaches, 小强 and they cannot be exterminated? Isn't that kind of racist? More on that later..
But way before that we have Roti Kaya and Guyu as the kopitiam superheroes. Then Singapore prime minister, Goh Chok Tong made an appearance at the end of the book. Writer Johnny Lau was worried that they would get into trouble. This was the dark ages known as the 1990s when political portrayals or caricatures of local politicians were a no no. But all went well without a hitch. Johnny was not arrested, lived to tell his tale and recently celebrated 35 years of Mr Kiasu at Sgcc.
Talking about Sonny, he also drew The Shadow Hero, which was like the origin story for the Green Turtle, the first Asian-American superhero. Some years ago, when I did a google scholar search, The Shadow Hero was the most written about of Sonny's works. Maybe it's Charlie Chan these days.
10 years ago, The New York Times ran an opinion piece on That Oxymoron, the Asian Comic Superhero. The article's starting point was Ms Marvel aka. Kamala Khan, which was written by G. Willow Wilson, a guest of SWF some years ago.
SWF itself was the site of superhero-like fights about Singapore superheroes. In 2017, it organized a panel on Colour Outside the Lines: Diversity in the Comics World. The synopsis read:
A Middle-Eastern Doctor Fate. An Asian Monstress. A Black Spider-Man. When classic comic book characters undergo cultural transformations, they are often greeted with resistance from some quarters. As the comics world grapples with issues of racial and gender diversity, fans are split between purists and progressives. This panel, comprising a writer, a graphic novelist and a cultural historian, zeroes in on the tensions and implications.
The panelists were:
Marjorie Liu - writer of Monstress, X-23, Black Widow.
Boey Meihan - Vice-President, Writer & Editor of the Association of Comic Artists of Singapore (ACAS), Writer of SupaCross. (The creator of SupaCross was Jerry Hinds, the president of ACAS)
Ian Gordon - Australian scholar of American media and comics at the National University of Singapore
I was the moderator and I wrote to the panelists:
This is a very pertinent issue as it is a cultural war of sorts between old time fans who do not wanttheir favourite characters to be changed and new fans who felt the comics should evolve with the times.
https://time.com/4012852/everyones-a-superhero-at-marvel/
For the more cynical ones among us, there is also an issue of whether some of these changes are done for tokenism or to chase the pink / ____ dollar, ie market considerations. Even if it is for the latter, some execs have claimed it is not working.
http://variety.com/2017/biz/news/marvel-exec-blames-diversity-women-comic-sales-slump-1202021440/
There is also the issue of cultural appropriation, and the question: can you speak for others? And the issue of white washing of Asian characters in movies like Dr Strange, Ghost in the Shell, The Last Airblender and Hellboy.
The SupaCross comic series was of interest because it features characters of quite varied racial origin - Malay, Chinese, Indian, Jamaica Born Black, America Born Korean/Black, Caucasian British and more.
I have known Meihan for some years. She is a good writer and has since gone on to write novels like The Formidable Miss Cassidy (co-winner of the 2021 Epigram Books Fiction Prize and winner of the 2022 Singapore Book Award for Best Literary Work) and The Enigmatic Madam Ingram (finalist for the 2023 Epigram Books Fiction Prize).
Unfortunately at that SWF session, when she presented on the character, The Kreaper, it became a showstopper for all the wrong reasons. As part of character diversity, Hinds has created characters of different ethnicities and nationalities. It is like having the UN in a Singapore superhero comic.
The Kreaper was a villain, who looks really creepy, all masked up and wearing a hat. He is from Bangladesh and works as a ... grass cutter. His weapon of choice is ... a grass cutter.
The Singapore audience went ballistic. How can you be so racist? If it is not bad enough that we treat our domestic workers so badly and sometimes we ill treat them, beat them, starve them, and do not give them days off and we made them clean the houses of our relatives, we are now maligning our migrant workers as baddies as well? How can??! An old Chinese man was especially aggravated - aren't you ashamed of yourself, how can you even call yourself a Singaporean, he asked, almost foaming in the mouth, choking up in tears and choking in his own salvia. Have you no shame? Have you no decency?
I exaggerated, of course. Meihan tried to put up a defense but the audience would have nothing of it. I tried to defuse the situation by asking Liu and Gordon other questions but they would not want to have anything to do with this either. They knew better to touch this with a 10-foot pole. We were left to burn and to roast. Like Kenny Rogers.
After the event, Hinds emailed me to be apprised of the situation. I told him no need, there would be no follow ups one. Our care for our helpers, maids and foreign workers only extend to so much. Once over, it's back to the same old. Siti, come and clean this cup ok? Hurry up liao, why so slow?
There are other public outrage about Singapore superheroes during the first few months of Covid in 2020.
ape shall never kill ape, as the tee shirt says.
but sometimes we sabo each other.
But why?
There is also some discussion / list of the Singaporean superhero on the scc fb.
And this article:
http://www.shout.sg/7-singaporean-superheroes-and-where-they-are-now/
Some more:
The Singapore X-Men
Sacred Guadians Singa
Kang Jing's The World My Arena
Collin Yap's Zodiac
Edison Neo's Snake Claws
CS Comics' Crimson Star, Scalemail & Ixora, Genforcer and others
Joshua Chiang's Five-Foot Way Detective is a superhero of sorts?
And brother Ken Foo's sibei Cockman.
https://singaporecomix.blogspot.com/2022/11/review-of-cockman-by-ken-foo.html
Like everything and anything else, this article is part factual, part cbl cho bo lan research, part satirical, part parody, 100% self deprecation and not meant to offend anyone, anything, anywhere, anyhow, and so how like that?
Please don’t sue me, flame me or destroy me on socials. I have no money, no influence, nothing at all, I am a nobody.
I only have friends like Kang Sheng who passed me a copy of his VR Man comic, which is the best Singapore superhero hands down. Nuff said!
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