Please Donate to Akbar Comics by visiting this Kickstarter link.
Hi friends,
Today I bring you great news, there’s a new comic in town! The stories are based in Nigeria and the artists are authentically Nigerian. They go by the name ‘Akbar Comics’ and they need your money to realize their dream of disrupting the scope of African Pop culture as we know it with their collective artistic genius, they have created a Kickstarter campaign and they have till June the first to meet their goal of crowd-sourcing $$$.
Please keep on reading this post to learn more about the guys behind Akbar Comics and to peruse characters from their debut release titled CAPTAIN CALABAR. Here’s to supporting Nigerian creatives.
– Jayjeystic
The year is two thousand and thirteen, the location is Covenant University, Ota, Ogun State Nigeria. A group of teenage boys, some fresh out of secondary school, have just been sorted to the same room in one of the male hostels in campus. The algorithm that put them together is a small but important stroke in the grand scheme of things. They are not just roommates, they each become their brother’s keeper and evolve into the lifelong friends destiny predisposed them to be. Time will unveil them as a gifted trio from the Department of Architecture. With a holy combination of mad skills, hard work, and a shared love for cartoons, they birth the new anti-hero: Captain Calabar. They have great dreams of changing the landscape of African pop culture through the utilization of their natural talents in telling the stories of modern day Nigeria.
Meet Timehin Akinde
Timehin is a simple guy, you will find him anywhere near chill vibes and Palm trees. He is one of the two initial founders of and the creative writer at Akbar Comics, he also coined the name ‘Captain Calabar’ as a testament to the popular Nigerian stereotype of assuming that anybody from the Efik/Ibibio speaking South-South sub-region of Nigeria is from CALABAR.
Calabar (also referred to as “Canaan City”) is a city in Cross River State, in south southern Nigeria.
Many moons ago, in the small dorm room occupied by a tight circle of friends, Timehin nicknamed his friend Joshua Akpan “Captain Calabar”.
Meet Joshua Akpan
Even though he is from Akwa Ibom State, his squad quickly took to calling him Captain Calabar. Joshua is a talented Artist who loves Bob Marley and Kendrick Lamar. He is a trained Architect, works as an illustrator, and is one of the three initial founders of Akbar Arts.
The original name for Calabar was Akwa Akpa, from the Efik language.
He joined his friend Abasido Akpan in Akbar Comics.
Meet Abasido Akpan
Abasido is also from Akwa Ibom State in Nigeria, he is the visionary behind Akbar Arts, an illustrator, and a business man with a great sense of humour. Abasido has been described as “a really really good artist” by some of his friends, probably because he is known to give beards to the beardless in his cartoons. Abasido A.K.A Akbar pushed his art under Akbar Arts before he came up with the idea for Akbar Comics as a subsidiary of Akbar Arts in July of two thousand and sixteen.
Calabar is a port city, near the Cameroon border. It sits on a hill near the Calabar River and the Cross River delta.
Timehin in telling the story of Akbar Comics had this to say about Abasido’s pivotal role:
“Then one day Abasido hit me up and was like let’s make something with this, initially it was supposed to be an animation but making a comic is easier. So long story short, we’ve been friends since and broke-ness forced us to come up with the idea! (laughter)”
-timehin akinde, akbar comics
Meet Some Of The Characters:
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