Ms Shabash can move it, whether she is on the dance floor or flying in the air beating up villains. A Bangladeshi superhero, Ms Shabash destroys white- and pink-skinned monsters who force fairness creams upon the citizens of Dhaka, followed by auntybots – whom she defeats in a dance battle.
Created by writer Samir Asran Rahman of the Mighty Punch Studios, a Bangladesh-based production house, this female superhero is a lot like the elusive Clark Kent (better known as Superman): A journalist by day and a caped crusader by night. Ms Shabash, or Shabnam Sharif, is a reporter with a lifestyle magazine who hates her day job, but when required, turns into a superhero (powered by atomic mangoes), fighting crime in a gender normative society.
Ms Shabash is the superhero that every woman in Dhaka – and the world – deserves.
It was the original cape-wearing, crime-fighting superhero created by Rahman, a young man named Shabash (a somewhat reluctant hero), that made the writer realise the need for a female counterpart. The result, Ms Shabash, is a strong female character featuring in a comic book that attempts to move past token feminism and create a narrative that does justice to its female protagonist.
Their story of origin is as complicated as it is intriguing: Both superheroes live in the same city, were raised by the same set of parents and get their powers from eating mangoes from the same tree – which was hit by an asteroid – but they have never met, because Ms Shabash is in fact Shabash, born as a girl in an alternate universe.
“Most of my comics, apart from Shabash, have strong female characters, but their stories are set in imagined, Narnia-esque worlds,” said Rahman. “I wanted to give Dhaka a female superhero and Ms Shabash was born of that idea.”
Shabash and Ms Shabash are worlds apart, literally and figuratively, in their outlook. Rahman describes Shabash as a “lovable doofus who needs to be coaxed into taking action”, while Ms Shabash is a go-getter. A lot of that has to do with the fact that she is a woman, according to Rahman.
“I did not want Ms Shabash to be an Adam’s rib sort of a character,” said the writer. “Being a woman in this world is a very different experience and by virtue of her gender, she has different issues that she needs to deal with.”
Rahman’s writing makes for easy reading. The plot moves quickly and is easy to follow. Rahman has given his female superhero quick reflexes and a quick wit, thanks to which the book has some genuinely amusing moments and one-liners to make the reader laugh out loud.
According to Rahman, the obsession with fair skin, advertisements for skin-lightening creams like Fair & Lovely and the constant pressure from self-appointed moral guardians to conform to gender norms, are some of the issues that have always bothered him.
“Bangladesh and India are very similar in these things,” said Rahman. “As if it is not bad enough that women have to deal with eve-teasing and harassment on the streets, there are also these aunties sizing them up, asking for their bio-data for their sons of marriageable ages, or just simply telling them how they should or should not dress.”
When it came to choosing a villain for Ms Shabash, Rahman settled on the CEO of a fairness cream company, named Ms Porcha (a play on the word “forsha”, Bengali for fair) who fell into a vat of her own fairness chemicals and became a ghostly-white monster accosting men and women on the streets of Dhaka and forcefully smearing her fairness cream on them.
He also created Auntybots – droids in saris who poke their heads out whenever there is an “indecency alert”. In a segment, titled “Attack Of The Auntybots”, female bots scold young women for dancing in public and dressing inappropriately. At one point, Ms Shabash is asked not to wear spandex – the material her superhero costume is made of.
The men, or the uncle-bots, are missing in action in the first book, but Rahman plans to introduce them in future issues.
“My team and I settled on skin colour and moral policing as the issues we wanted Ms Shabash to fight, after much discussion,” said Rahman. “We also considered introducing evils like eve-teasing and acid attacks, but it was getting a little too dark and it seemed best to leave it until we could find a more balanced way to approach it for a comic book.”
Unlike most female comic heroes, Ms Shabash is not hyper-sexualised. At work, she is only given fluff pieces to write, because she is a woman – but it is on one of those seemingly easy assignments that Ms Shabash first meets Ms Porcha.
“I would love to do a story on how the Whitewash company preys on the insecurities of people in order to sell their products,” exclaims Ms Shabash, only to be told that the story should focus on the CEO’s success.
Rahman draws his inspiration from the books he grew up reading. “I read both comic books and regular books,” said Rahman, whose favourite superhero is Spider-Man. Rahman also credits an episode of Adventure Time, a Cartoon Network series, for the idea behind Ms Shabash. In the episode the characters are gender swapped and the protagonists Jake and Finn become females, making an insightful statement about gender roles that are deeply problematic. “I think that was one of Adventure Time’s best episodes. It became the reason behind why we made Ms Shabash as a female counterpart for Shabash, instead of a fresh new character,” said Rahman.
The writer plans to write an issue soon in which the two Shabashs will meet and exchange notes on how they were raised by the same parents, but in entirely different ways.
Ms Shabash’s appearance, says Rahman, was inspired by a cartoon character called Korra from the Legend of Korra. “She is not as muscular as Korra, Ms Shabash is a little more petite, but we wanted to emulate the attitude that Korra has. Some of the earlier illustrations had Ms Shabash looking a little more... err... let’s say ‘voluptous’ with long-flowing hair, as female superheroes tend to be seen, but we wanted to move away from that trope. “Her suit is a bit snazzier than Shabash’s though.”
Illustrated by Fahim Anzoom Rumman, Mosharraf Hussain and Shamim Ahmed, the comic book depicts Ms Shabash with short blunt cut hair and a believably healthy female physique. (Notably, studios across the world have begun to upgrade the costumes for their female heroes, like Marvel’s Spider-Woman and DC’s Bad Girls, to make them look more like regular women and less like bikini models.)
All the Shabash action is set in current-day Dhaka, and instead of using nondescript buildings as backdrop, the illustrators have situated the characters and events in the actual city. The criss-crossing, tangled electric wires, phuchka (a popular Bengali street food) sellers, the potholes and the way in which the people are dressed – saris, lungis – are all authentically Dhaka.
Like every hero Ms Shabash too has a fatal flaw – she can get self-righteous and hot-headed. “That’s going to land her in trouble one of these days,” said Rahman, with a laugh.
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