In the second article of a two-part series, Andrew Selth takes a look at superheroes and more in Myanmar comics.
Over the past 75 years, Western comic books with a Burma theme have been dominated by stories set during World War II. There were some noteworthy exceptions but, even when new characters appeared and the plots changed, descriptions of the country and its population rarely did so.
During the Cold War, Western governments exploited the power of comics to influence public opinion, including in Burma. For example, in 1950 the British embassy in Rangoon persuaded a local newspaper to run a comic strip based on George Orwell’s anti-totalitarian fable Animal Farm. In 1961, the US government recruited Roy Crane, creator of the comic book hero Buzz Sawyer, to help save countries like Burma from communism. In a series entitled ‘Your United Nations at Work’, a 1963 Action Comics story portrayed a young Burmese woman who saved her village, thanks to her training at a WHO school in Rangoon. While described as part of a public service program, such stories were designed to garner support for the then pro-Western UN.
Burma also continued to provide the setting for adventures by a range of heroes, heroines and superheroes.
Between 1942 and 1953, for example, Fawcett Comics published a series called ‘Nyoka the Jungle Girl’. It was based on a film serial inspired in turn by a 1931 pulp fiction story by Edgar Rice Burroughs, about a Cambodian princess. The later Nyoka character lived in Africa, but this did not prevent her from appearing in two multi-part stories set in Burma. ‘The Burmese Expedition’ was released in 1947, followed by ‘Adventure in Burma’ in 1948. In these stories, the smartly-dressed Nyoka frequently encountered wild animals, with mixed results, and in one tale had to deal with a ‘Chinese head hunter’.
In 1961, DC Comics published a story in its ‘Greatest Adventure’ series entitled ‘I was the Burma Tiger-Man’, about a shape-shifting white hunter determined to track down and kill a man-eater terrorising the local villagers. From the illustrations, which depicted turbaned ‘natives’ and large stone Mughal-style buildings, readers might be forgiven for thinking that the action took place in India. However, the story relied on the usual Orientalist tropes (thick jungle, wild animals, cave-dwelling hermits, magic potions and so on) to paint a picture of Burma that was both exotic and exciting.
Please click here to read the full “Heroines, heroes and villains” article in the New Mandala by Griffith Asia Institute Adjunct Associate Professor, Dr Andrew Selth.
