Maliki’s comic hits the streets

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Renowned comic book writer and artist Boyd Maliki, whose syndicated cartoons have been featured in several newspapers and magazines in the southern African region and abroad, has released a full colour comic

Renowned comic book writer and artist Boyd Maliki, whose syndicated cartoons have been featured in several newspapers and magazines in the southern African region and abroad, has released a full colour comic City Life which has already hit the streets.

By Our Correspondent

This is Maliki’s 15th book since he began self-publishing comic books in Zambia in 1979. City Life is a compilation of his hilarious cartoons from different publications and as bonus to his readers, he has included three illustrated short stories from his Concoctions series. Concoctions — a light-hearted weekly commentary on urban social life used to run in our sister paper, Southern Eye and Zambia’s Daily Nation.

So hot were these fictionalised articles which took many readers by surprise as they had all along assumed Maliki was only an artist, not a writer.

“Maliki’s short stories under the title Concoctions also make good reading. He’s a reputable and experienced cartoonist, but I didn’t know he was also a prolific writer,” wrote one of the readers of the Southern Eye who commented on the articles in the paper’s letters page on November 1 2013.

In his introduction of the book, Maliki comes close to mentioning the name of the tycoon — an elderly friend of his in Kitwe, Zambia several years ago. He drew his inspiration when the concept of launching a cartoon strip featuring a rich and naughty “sugar daddy” began germinating in his mind.

“If you were a fan of the Nyathi, Moyo or Taikuni comic series, I’d like you to know that my current lead character Sande comes closest to the antics of this rich man who had many social climbers in town jostling for friendship with him,” said Maliki.

He said the same rich man ironically funded the printing of Maliki’s first comic book in Zambia, despite the strip’s resemblance to the man’s lifestyle.

Besides the strip cartoons, the first section of the book features colour panel cartoons introduced in the Southern Eye days after its launch. A first of such a feature, so unique and refreshing were these cartoons that, within days in circulation, other newspapers added colour to their cartoons.