Fully paid-up members of Middle East Film & Comic Con’s geek fraternity might already be familiar with the work of the Jordanian comic-book writer Zaid Adham and the Saudi artist Yasser Alireza.
The artwork for Adham's work-in-progress, Wayl, won the convention's Best Original Artwork award in 2012, while Alireza's artwork won last year's joint MEFCC/Dubai Moving Image Museum competition that allowed him to submit his work to comic giant Marvel.
The pair have now teamed up, appropriately enough after a chance meeting in a comic shop, to complete Wayl, which has yet to be published following its 2012 plaudits.
Alireza will be at this year’s event live-drawing original covers for issue one on the crowd-funding website Aflamnah’s stand. The finished works will be auctioned off during the event, with the proceeds going towards bringing the comic to the shelves.
Adham explained the long evolution of the project.
“We had the completed artwork back in 2012, but Yasser has now redone the whole thing closer to my vision,” he says. “Initially I was only really looking for a colourist to complete the original artwork, then I said to him: ‘Why not just have a go at a cover page?’
“When he showed me, my jaw dropped to the floor – he took everything I had in mind and condensed it into one cover. It had a lot more potential than the content we already had, so I said: ‘How about you take one of the pages and redo it?’”
It was a big challenge for the artist, one he initially found intimidating.
“I panicked,” says Alireza. “I figured if he hated it I’d be depressed, but if he loved it, we were supposed to be launching the issue at Comic Con, and I’d have a whole comic to redraw.”
Adham continues: “The latter happened and I said you’re doing this from now on. Start on issue number one, and I want you to do number two, too, which we already have scripted.”
The dilemma the pair then faced was whether they would be able to plough through the redrawing work in time for the planned launch and ultimately they decided on a change of plan.
“We tried powering through it, but we realised that it wasn’t going to happen,” says Alireza. “We talked and argued and ultimately agreed that we wanted to put out the best comic out there, not rush something out.
“Zaid contacted Vida [Rizq, the co-founder of] Aflamnah because it was just too much for two of us to handle, and she’s been really helpful and taken some of the stress off by helping with marketing and so on.
“We came up with idea of live activities at Comic Con instead of the launch. We figured it wouldn’t hurt the comic to have some presence at MEFCC and also to show people that it is still happening, so we first came up with the idea of selling some signed pages with certificates of authenticity. Then I suggested doing variant covers – it’s quite common and collectors love it, so we talked about that and I suggested creating covers live at MEFCC and auctioning the original artwork off.
“We’ve not made strict plans for numbers. As long as I get one finished I’ll be happy, but it’s a three-day event, so if I manage three, then great.”
Wayl tells the story of Sufyan Al Taher, who returns to Jordan from living abroad to take over his late father's business. His struggles with the company's chief executive ultimately led to the creation of Wayl, who the creators describe as the Arab world's first superhero.
Unusually, while superheroes often inhabit fictitious cities such as Batman's Gotham or Superman's Metropolis, Wayl is set in a real location, the Jordanian capital Amman.
“There’s something scary about Amman and that really adds to atmosphere of the comic,” Adham says. “It has a sort of split personality. It’s very vibrant and lively in the daytime, especially in summer and spring, but the city has a soul of its own, even if you take the people out.
“It’s one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world and you can kind of feel it looking back at you. There’s something ominous about it, especially at night. I wanted to take that and juxtapose it with the social issues, the crime and the corruption and the greed that comes with it.
"I feel the location gives Wayl a real spiritual background."
Alireza agrees: “I felt we were creating something really valuable for the region, without trying too hard to be ‘Arabic’.
“I really felt I understood what Zaid wanted. I’ve never been to Jordan but I really connected with the story and it resonated. We both agreed the whole concept of corruption and apathy was something very personal we both related to.”
• You can watch Yasser Alireza creating the covers at Aflamnah’s stand at MEFCC from Thursday, April 9 until Saturday, April 11. Learn more about the crowd-funding campaign at www.aflamnah.com/en/wayl-comic
cnewbould@thenational.ae
