Following its coverage at Fanboy Planet, the new trade paperback Kismet, Man of Fate – Volume 1: Boston Strong has received some impressively thorough coverage from Aysha Khan at the Religion News Service.

Lewis rattled off a list of common tropes about Muslim characters he hoped to avoid with his character: the “noble savage” who is uncorrupted by modern civilization; the mystical Muslim superhero; the docile Muslim woman; the perishable “cannon fodder”; and, more broadly, Muslim characters being carelessly boiled down to a nebulous racial and religious mass.

For Lewis, writing a Muslim superhero was also an opportunity to address the connection between superhuman ability and cosmology. Do the powers to, say, fly or manipulate fire come from God?

It will be exciting to see if this leads to greater discussion about religion in comics, the superhero genre specifically. Can there be a secular narrative on a character who credits his abilities to some aspect of divinity?

(And, normally, we would warn “don’t read the Comments,” but there may be something informative to them at RNS, potentially.)

First Muslim superhero returns after 70 years, just in time to take down a few Nazis