“Where are the women?” Arriving in an office full of men, Marie Javins asks a good question. The answer is at once revealing and not: “You’re the woman!” the men agree, smiling. A veteran comics editor and colorist, she’s entering into a new environment at the start of the documentary Wham! Bam! Islam!. As she he meets with Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa and Sven Larsen, two affable men trying to get a new comics project off the ground, she’s enthusiastic about the new possibilities, even if she’s all too familiar with the gender dynamic.

If girls in comics are still too often big-eyed and wasp-waisted, what’s different, according to Isaac Solotaroff’s movie—premiering as the first film in the new season of Independent Lens on 13 October—is the premise of Naif and Sven’s story. Their book, The 99, focuses on a group of superheroes who take up the 99 attributes of Allah: they’re Muslim superheroes. As you might anticipate, this stirs controversy. And, to an extent, that’s precisely what the creators plan for, that the resistance to their project will help to generate “buzz”.

Naif’s first idea, he says more than once, was to counter the conventional post-9/11 (and before) depictions of Muslims as villains and monsters. “For me, the problem is not in fundamentalism or in literal translation of religion,” he explains, “The problem is when the noose is tightened around those that don’t think in that way.” He wants to change outsiders’ perceptions of the religion, and also Muslim children’s feelings about themselves. As he explains to one skeptical listener, “These names and virtues are shared by every religion in the world. They’re basic human values.” At the same time, he says, he feels a “strong personal responsibility and accountability to do what I can do in The 99 as my contribution.” The film shows him praying with a mass of men in a mosque, and then cuts to its title, using animated comic book-style.

An amiable and charismatic hero, Naif owns up right away to the stereotypes he might seem to embody: he was a nerdy kid growing up in Kuwait, he says, “on the outskirts.” Photos illustrate his self-estimation as “fat” and short, wearing glasses and cursed with acne starting at age eight. “I would rather jump rope with the girls at recess than play soccer with the boys,” he says. He also loved reading books, which became “my passport” to other worlds: comic book panels show him as Huck Finn, Sherlock Holmes, and one of the Three Musketeers. “I did feel on the outside and I did feel this desperate need for acceptance,” he smiles now.

He still seeks that acceptance, he admits, and he means for the characters he’s conjuring to contribute to that process for other children, too. Marie Javins sees this as a universal cause: “I think kids need to have representations and pictures of people who look like them,” she says. “It may be entirely unrealistic, but you do what you can and what we can do is make comics.”

The “representations and pictures” trick here is twofold. First, there’s the problem of depicting religious icons. As the film points out, using the 2005 Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy as an example, demonstrations against representations of the prophet can escalate into violence. Naif doesn’t want that sort of “buzz,” and so he visits with a series of ministers and religious experts, hoping to convince them of the distinction between individual characters with Allah’s 99 attributes and Allah or Muhammad per se. “I know it sounds like a wordplay,” he says, following a less than successful meeting with a representative of the Saudi Ministry of Information.

In lieu of a “blessing” from that institution, Naif decides to wait for the market to speak, that is, for the demand to grow as word of the product expands. And that leads to the second image issue: the characters must be both familiar and different to readers who know from comic books. Comic book writer Fabian Nicieza reminds his new employer, Naif, that even though he wants his characters to be inoffensive (so they might be marketed in Arab countries), the illustrators tasked with coming up with concepts are working within a tradition: “Superheroes have been spandexed since 1939.” Point taken. Still, Naif sees the 99 superheroes as traditional in other ways too, modest as well as sensational. And so they’re muscular and impossibly bodied, but they’re also fond of leather jackets and hijabs, scarves and boots.

As they straddle a set of conventions, the superheroes of the 99 are then packaged and pushed. The film doesn’t look at the books’ actual storylines, but suggests that the struggle to get these storylines “out there,” is something of a heroic venture. Naif’s own story stands in for those of his characters. For one thing, he sells The 99 to potential investors by showing them his potential competition, a Palestinian comic book, The Intifada Album. This shows “bloody scenes of the Israeli occupation of Palestine,” he points out, as well as “suicide bombers with captions extolling the virtues of martyrdom.” Naif insists that his message for kids is healthier. And, assuming that his business model is sound, well, he adds, “I want this to be rewarding financially. There’s no shame in that.” 

Naif’s steps to market the product are like much like the product, at once traditional and unusual. He pitches the book to an investment bank and he’s praised by Barack Obama, he’s developing a line of gear (hoodies, caps, and t-shirts) and he’s looking to broker an animated series, or maybe a movie. Javins notes here the exceptional ambition of this project (“What did it take the X-Men, 40 years to reach the movies?”), but Naif sees the scope as part of the concept. “At the end of the day,” he says, “It’s the market that decides if this a success or if this a failure.” That decision seems nearly made: as Wham! Bam! Islam airs on PBS, an animated film, The 99: Unbound is screening at the New York Film Festival. If Naif has his way, it won’t be long before Dr. Ramzi, Bari the Healer, and Jabbar the Powerful are visible worldwide, along with Noora the Light (who glows from within), Musawwira the Organizer, and Hadya the Guide.