Home-grown superhero Kwezi morphs into collectable
COMICS featuring African superhero Kwezi, brainchild of visual artist Loyiso Mkize, are now available as a collector’s item.
Published by David Philip trading as New Africa Books, the Collector’s Edition packages the first three comic books about the narcissistic teenage boy named Kwezi who discovers he has superhuman abilities.
This Collector’s Edition forms part of the Exclusive Books Homebru promotion.
In the first three books, Kwezi is an anti-hero obsessed with selfies, Twitter and his adoring fans, but he quickly finds out that his powers come with a cultural responsibility.
“The timing couldn’t be better. We need a superhero,” says publisher Dušanka Stojakovic.
She was a huge fan of Superman as a child, and knows there is very little by way of African comic book heroes for local children to identify with, “so in that sense it is groundbreaking”.
Stojakovic, of New Africa Books, says she discovered Mkize’s comic by chance when she was talking to a Cape Town bookseller about the importance of mother tongue books for children.
The bookseller introduced her to Mkize and showed Stojakovic his comic books.
“I said yes, please. Thanks,” she remembers.
Stojakovic has since picked up the first three books for publishing as one volume – Mkize had self-published up to now because local publishers didn’t believe that a South African superhero would be popular – and hopes to publish the fourth comic book in August.
If all goes as planned, issue 5 comes out in October and they will publish a second collector’s edition, encompassing books 3 to 6, in time for Christmas.
“We won’t release the sixth comic book as a stand-alone, but as part of the second collection. I’d like to play with that idea,” she said.
Stojakovic was attracted to the character and the storyline, and would be keen to find more good local comic books. – Theresa Smith
IN BOOK publishing, there is James Patterson – and basically everyone else. His author bio: “James Patterson has written more best-sellers and created more enduring fictional characters than any other novelist today.” Beloved by critics and peers? Not so much. But his popularity among readers remains incontrovertible. He is an industry unto himself.
And now the author of popular thrillers – and children’s books and young adult novels and romance and mysteries – has launched “BookShots”, a series of short, cheap, plot-propelled novels directed at an audience more prone to reading smartphones than print. (Naturally, there is an app for it.)
“In this day and age, when so many people have decided to spend so much of their lives not reading books, I think to create a new habit for them is a smart thing,” says Patterson, 69, perched in the summer study of his Hudson Valley home, the room dominated by a sleigh bed where he reads and edits.
The trick? “I’ve taken the fat out of commercial novels,” he says. “In an awful lot of novels, there’s more in them than there should be.”
Not in these books. The sentences are simple and declarative. And frequently double as paragraphs. “Every single chapter is conceived to move the plot and the characterisation forward,” he says, “and to turn on the movie projectors in our heads.”
Movies loom large in Patterson’s world. Television, too. “BookShots” editorial director Bill Robinson has a background in both fields and serves as executive producer of
the CBS series based on Patterson’s book of the same name. More than once, Patterson refers to himself as the literary equivalent of a showrunner.
He has a way of making grand statements calmly – in contrast to his fevered characters – but with the absolute conviction of a very successful man. He labels “BookShots” “a revolution” and “a huge thing”.
The paperbacks will be sold in US airports, pharmacies, large stores, sometimes affixed to clip strips like bags of Gummy Bears. The motto: “Books at the speed of life.” “People want things faster. They want to binge,” says the former ad man and onetime creative-in-chief at J Walter Thompson. “These books are like reading movies.”
In the buffet of fiction, “BookShots” are small plates if we’re being kind, junk food if we’re not: less than 150 pages, roughly the size of an iPad mini. Two titles a month to start. Snaps Patterson of that last decision by publisher Little, Brown: “Honestly, I would have been more aggressive.”
In the past year, he’s written 117 volumes for “BookShots”. Although written is not the precise verb. Conceived, outlined, co-written and curated. Patterson delivers exhaustive notes and outlines, sometimes running up to 80 pages, to co-authors, his printer regularly discharging collaborators’ efforts like lottery tickets. “The success rate when I write the outline is almost 100 percent. When other people do, it’s 50 to 60 percent,” he says.
He is among the first writers credited with promoting books through television spots, releasing more than one title a year, and maintaining a stable of writers. “It may be a factory,” says Robinson, “but it’s a hand-tooled factory.”
His tidy study is stacked with book projects past and present, including a thick folder labelled “Ideas”.
The brevity of “BookShots” serves another master: Patterson’s mortality. “Jim realised his ideas were never going to all get done at the regular pace of publishing,” says Robinson.“Publishing doesn’t innovate,” says Patterson. “It’s kind of weird, in this world where everything is changing every 10 minutes.” Patterson’s 1976 debut novel,
was initially rejected by 31 publishers. It remains among his most acclaimed, winner of the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. It sold about 10 000 copies. By comparison, created with Maxine Paetro and, yes, the 15th volume in the Women’s Murder Club series, sold 20 000 copies in one week.
For a man of words – so many, many words – Patterson also boasts a staggering amount of numbers. Over 40 years, he has produced 158 titles and sold 325million copies.Last year, according to his publisher, one in 21 hard-cover adult novels sold in the US featured Patterson’s name on the cover. Forbes estimates his annual book-related earnings at around $89 million.
But if he lives like few authors, he also champions philanthropy at a spectacular level. He and his wife Sue fund 400 annual teacher education scholarships at 22 colleges and universities, many of them historically black.
Patterson has provided more than 650 000 books to US soldiers and 250 000 to public school students in multiple cities. He has given millions to school libraries and more than a million to independent book stores.
All the success stems from one simple root: his love of telling stories. “I remember wandering around the woods as a child and telling story after story,” he says. On long drives, “I would write entire musicals in the car and sing songs I had written for them.”
And he’s never at a loss for stories.“I don’t like doing non-fiction. It shuts down my strength, which is my imagination.”
Patterson’s fictional characters tend to be nothing like him, except in their frenzy of activity. His Michael Bennett series features a widowed detective with 10 adopted children.
He and Sue, a sunny former all-American swimmer and ad designer a decade his junior who created several “BookShots” covers, have been together for 19 years.
Their home is a museum of images of their only child, Jack, his recent graduation from boarding school, the rare writing day off for his father.
Patterson’s best-known hero is Alex Cross, an African-American DC detective with a doctorate in psychology. (Patterson dropped out of the graduate English programme at Vanderbilt after a year.)
Patterson welcomes the challenge of creating heroes unlike himself: “The more difficult the task, the more unlikely that someone else has done it, which allows it to be fresh.” – The Washington Post A selection of the books that landed on Vivien’s desk. Some of these books may be reviewed later.