African Perspectives in Comics and Animation: The Agbaje Brothers

And now for something completely different: Recently, we had the opportunity to sit down with John and Charles Agbaje, the two brothers behind The Elite Comics & Art Studio at Central City Tower. Their now concluded and wildly successful Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of an 11-minute pilot episode of Spider Stories, the duo’s new ‘action cartoon set in a[n] African inspired fantasy world,’ has been the subject of growing buzz in a variety of internet circles. Through Spider Stories, the two Nigerian-American brothers hope to bring a unique African cultural perspective to the universal narratives found in cartoons, comics and animation – a world where such perspectives have been defined primarily in terms of their glaring absence.