Comic Books That Are Aimed At Adults

Do you still think of comic books as kid stuff? Well, the people at Marvel Comics, the home of such superheroes as The Incredible Hulk and The Amazing Spider-Man, want to change your mind.

In an effort to reach a more mature audience, Marvel Comics has initiated, under its Epic imprint, the Tales From the Heart of Africa series. The first book, The Temporary Natives, focuses on Cathy Grant, a young white Peace Corps volunteer assigned to a village in the Central African Republic. The story is loosely based on the real-life experiences of Peace Corps retiree Cindy Goff (who co-authored with Rafael Nieves.

The Temporary Natives, in an often cinematically-inspired art style (by black Chicago artist Seitu Hayden), traces Cathy's odyssey from her graduation day at the University of Minnesota to her first year in the Peace Corps. We witness her day-to-day interactions with the local people and their customs. We also witness Carthy's role as a mediator when the local people become alienated by the condescension of Jack Glaser, a Corps colleague, during the building of a schoolhouse.

"This book," said 26-year-old Marcus McLaurin , Marvel Comic's only black editor, "can be more broadly interpreted as the Peace Corps in a lot of the underdeveloped countries, and the kind of culture shock that some of the volunteers run into and in general the feeling of hopelessness which tend to pervade a lot of the work. They've come to devote two years of their lives to do something good and yet they come away with questions of whether they did more harm than good."

The next book, continued McLaurin, himself an illustrator (he drew a comic book aimed at teens for the Brooklyn AIDS Task Force), "will be more about the country at the time [the mid-'80s] and the politics of the region, such as a massacre of local college students which really didn't get a lot of press coverage. It was a relatively minor protest which was met with excessive force."

McLautin believes The Temporary Natives's bookshelf format--quality paper between book-size softcovers--is the appropriate way to present this form of comic book storytelling because "you can tell longer stories, you can do interesting things with color, and a lot of people can afford it, adults as well as younger people."

Although the series is primarily  "seeking a mature audience," observed McLaurin, it is "applicable to any age group. Too often comics talk down to kids. If you present something to them in a mature manner and with thoughtfulness, it [the subject matter] becomes accessible to them."

With The Temporary Natives, McLaurin went on, "[w]e really show how powerful and versatile the comic medium is."

This article was originally published in the New York Amsterdam News (August 25, 1990).