B'wana Beast

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Qsicon Ueberarbeiten.svg This article or section was due to content or formal deficiencies in the quality assurance side of the portal comic entered. This is done in order to bring the quality of the comic-themed articles to an acceptable level. Please help fix the shortcomings in this article and please join the discussion ! +

B'wana Beast ( Bwana Swahili for "lord", beast English "beast") is the title of a series of comic publications that the US comic publisher DC has published since 1967. The comics deal with the adventures of an American big game hunter in the African jungles and steppes .

Plot and main character

The title character is a man named Mike Payson Maxwell, who is only called B'wana Beast by the residents of the areas where he goes stalking . The name Bwana results from the habit of the Africans of these years - a remnant of the colonial era - to call whites as masters or in Swahili "Bwana". Maxwell is nicknamed "Beast" because, unlike most hunters, he does not go hunting in a safari suit and a pith helmet, but only wears a loincloth in the style of the natives. In addition, Maxwell mostly wears a futuristic helmet, which gives him the ability to temporarily fuse two different animals into a single chimerical new being that obeys his will.

Between his hunts and other adventures, B'wana Beast lives together with his constant companion, the gorilla Djuba, in a hiding place on the summit of Kilimanjaro .

Publications

The inventor of the character and the plot scenario of B'wana Beast as well as the author of the first stories, which were published as one of several features in the anthology series Showcase , was the American Bob Haney . The visual appearance of B'wana Beast and its surroundings was designed by the draftsman Mike Sekowsky , who also put the first stories about the character - together with the ink artist Joe Giella - into the picture in a showcase . The first B'wana Beast story finally appeared in Showcase 66 in January 1967 .

After B'wana Beast was removed as a feature from Showcase in favor of other series, the concept temporarily disappeared. In the 1970s, new stories about the character were finally published in the DC Challenge series, in which the Beast teams up with Congo Bill , another jungle hero. In the 1980s and 1990s, more B'wana Beast stories were finally published in the series Animal Man written by Grant Morrison . In doing so, the authors finally took account of the processes of decolonization and emancipation of black Africans by letting Maxwell surrender the role of the beast in favor of the African Dominic Mndawe, who also adopted the name Freedom Beast.

B'wana Beast is also - in the US original dubbed by Peter Onorat - one of the main characters of the episode This Little Piggy of the US cartoon series Justice League Unlimited .

Web links