About a decade ago, I was on my phone on a Wednesday, scrolling through all the comic books I was following at the time. In one of them, Suicide Squad, to be specific, the writers introduced a new anti-hero the Squad had picked up during one of their many battles. She was a girl with techno-powers, another run-of-the-mill villain tossed into the relentless churn of comic book publishing schedules. What made her unique enough for me to still remember her years later was that she was from Nairobi, more specifically Korogocho, where I happened to be reading the comic book from.
Batwing Unmasked: An African Super Hero, directed by Thomas Letellier, opens as an introduction to the allure and compelling draw of comic book mythos that have taken over the global film and TV industry, viewed through the eyes of Africans across the continent, all enamoured by its characters and stories that defined childhoods. The documentary is predominantly a kaleidoscope on Batwing, a superhero story originating from Africa, and the thoughts surrounding its conceptual ideology.
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Through conversations with people in tune with the comic book culture, and through reflections on what David Zavimbe as the first Batwing represents to Africans engaging with a superhero rooted in their continent, it becomes clear early on that, like many African stories told through a foreigner’s gaze, there are inconsistencies and generalisations of Africa as a whole and not as the sum of its individual parts.
On the technical side, the documentary fully absorbs itself in the medium of its narrative, offering beautiful transitional overlays and animation. This creates a dynamism that contextualises every frame through the story it’s dissecting, but also through all the different cultures and interiority of every city the film covers.
Produced by Warner Bros. Discovery France for TNT Africa, Batwing positions itself as an act of cultural reclamation, giving back to the continent a superhero that DC quietly shelved a decade ago. That framing holds up only until one begins to question why the people doing the giving are the same people who did the taking. The criticism of institutional failure embedded in the documentary is, structurally, a corporation critiquing its own failures while simultaneously setting up its own redemption that ends with a product pitch.
And there is a product pitch at the end. Actor Chukwudi Iwuji addresses James Gunn directly, urging the DC Studios co-CEO to revive Zavimbe. And based on the discussions and ideologies the documentary perfectly lays out, there is reason to believe more conversations are needed before this product pitch can turn into something worthwhile. With so many voices on screen, each expressing their own impressions of this character, a lot is either too summarised or left unaddressed.
At one point, I cringed as one commentator suggested that an African superhero would ideally defend the dictator of Burkina Faso from his enemies, while another argued they would prefer an African hero become rich first and only then choose his battles.
At fifty-two minutes, however, Batwing Unmasked never overstays its welcome, playing out like an informative session of a comic book club of Africans discussing a Batwing run on a warm casual afternoon. It never gets the chance to fully reckon with its own position though, and perhaps, it never really intended to.
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