Design and Criticism of Pan African Judges
The concept of a Pan-African Judge first turned up in a poster for the 1988 Judge Dredd Mega-Special drawn by Brendan McCarthy. The design would make a brief cameo at an international summit in the Judgement Day storyline but after that it would be replaced by a Siku design, starting with 1993's first Pan African Judges. In an article in Judge Dredd Megazine #238, Siku said he got the job after criticising the McCarthy design as too stereotyped: "I asked, why do people think all Africans run around in animal prints? Dave Bishop challenged me to come up with something better."
In the same article, Siku referred to Paul Cornell's first Pan African script as being well researched but flawed in its approach - "imperialism, jungle safaris, that's the way Westerners see Africa". (The second Pan African strip was written by Siku alone and had Yoruba gods attacking the continent.) He did enjoy having a "token white guy" Judge. Cornell himself referred to his work as "a trudge", feeling it had too many competing ideas in one story and that his dialogue was "overblown"; he was happy, however, with his decision to deliberately show Islam and a Muslim Judge, as he felt the Judge Dredd universe was "a little too disconnected from the real world" by turning all the world's religions into the worship of Grud.
Read more about this topic: Pan-Africa (comics)
Famous quotes containing the words design, criticism and/or african:
“You can make as good a design out of an American turkey as a Japanese out of his native stork.”
—For the State of Illinois, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“The soldier here, as everywhere in Canada, appeared to be put forward, and by his best foot. They were in the proportion of the soldiers to the laborers in an African ant-hill.... On every prominent ledge you could see England’s hands holding the Canadas, and I judged from the redness of her knuckles that she would soon have to let go.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)