![]() Casual clothing and formal armor eschew Orientalist fiction and instead pull from real world Middle Eastern/Southwest Asian fashion, especially the Ottoman Empire. ![]() There are knights and squires and swords and sword fights, but all of those things (deftly drawn in a style that evokes both manga and Adrian Alphona’s superhero comics) are, like the rest of Squire, rooted in (meticulously researched) history. However, Squire, despite being marketed as a fantasy graphic novel, diverges from these works in a significant way: there is no magic in Aiza’s world. In fact, artist Alfageeh and writer Shammas cite Mulan (1998), alongside Avatar: The Last Airbender (for which they did a Free Comic Book Day story in 2021) and Fullmetal Alchemist as influences. Squire puts a young Arab woman, Aiza, at its center, and she is less Jasmine than Mulan. Three decades (and a live action adaptation) later, Arab women still rarely appear in American film, television, or comics, let alone star as leading characters. Squire Sara Alfageeh (artist), Nadia Shammas (writer)Īs an Arab American woman born after Disney’s Aladdin (1992), the first time I saw anything like myself in popular media was in Princess Jasmine, the love interest in the titular male protagonist’s story. Sara Alfageeh and Nadia Shammas’s Squire is a comic I have been waiting for - not just since it was announced, but also my entire life. ![]()
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