28. Some Comics Don't Have A Punchline
Author's note: Since this comic hints some more about slavery in the world of Mountain Leopards, I thought I should mention some aspects of this here as side text: it's rightly a very sensitive topic, and I figured it'd be good to explain where I'm coming from with it, and with Faay's character. The Gulansharenes as depicted in Mountain Leopards are - like their medieval literary namesakes - a slave-owning culture. Indeed this is one of the two points on which Faay is based: the character of a slave, unnamed, in Rustaveli's
The Knight in Panther Skin, who is explicitly able to walk through walls as part of the narrative of that text (which directly inspired Faay's escape depicted on page 16). Faay's background combines this with a number of tropes and ideas loosely indebted to, but which should not be seen as necessarily authentic to, Somali traditions and folklore.
Given the tone of Mountain Leopards, that there are a number of specific forms of violence common to real systems of slavery that will not be depicted herein: I recognise that those exist, but this is not the medium for sensitive discussion of them. I also want to stress that slavery as it exists in this setting should not be treated as a close direct allegory or analogue for the dominant paradigm through which we see slavery today, that of the colonial era slave trade. Nor should Faay, though I have placed on her character the articulation of certain experiences, be seen as representative: as one of the heroines of the story and a character with significantly more inherent agency than most people, she is definitionally not experiencing many of these things in the way that most people exposed to them would do. The experience of slavery as portrayed here will therefore be both self-consciously limited, and meaningfully different to any specific real counterpart. Those differences, however, do not lessen in any sense the central evil of one human being treated as the property of another, an evil that I hope I manage to portray with the consideration that it deserves.
