The Four Color Media Monitor

South Africa's Independent Online interviewed a woman who wrote up a comic out of her love for the medium, using pals as templates for the cast of characters:

Lauren Bianca from Chatsworth has published her first comic book and is already planning the next.

The 26-year-old channelled her love of writing, cosplay and Marvel superheroes into ‘The Shadower’.

[...] When her friends, Stacey Lee, Shevan Hemraj, Avumile Nyangintsimbi and Kashveer Singh came up with an idea to write a comic, she decided she would write it herself.

“They wanted to do a comic about me and I said ‘no’. I said, let me write a story that would feature us as superheroes,” she said.

“It took me a month to write the story and a couple of months to get it published. The difference with this comic book is that this one is pictures taken of people and turned into characters instead of sketches,” she said.

From the photos they presented, it does look like they used "photorealistic" images of the cast for the comic, and it can be a pretty clever idea. I wish her good luck with selling this project, but, I continue my wish to make the point that superheroes and superheroines can't be the only kind of adventuring role modern creators should think of adhering to.

Update: and since we're on the subject of Africa, here's another article on Forbes about Black Sands Entertainment, which I'd spoken about earlier.

Labels: Africa, indie publishers