Comic hero ‘Super Sikh’ catches fancy of UK youth

Shyam Bhatia in London

A fictional Sikh super man brought to life as a comic book hero — Super Sikh — is winning hearts and minds among young British Sikhs.

A stunning 40 per cent of demand for the US-created comic is now coming from the UK. Orders can be placed direct with the Nostalgia and Comics book shop in Birmingham, the second oldest book shop of its kind in the country, or direct from Internet sites like gosikh.com and supersikhcomics.com.

Bookshop manager Dave Hopkins told the Tribune: “I like the idea of it, it’s a really good looking comic and something we’d like to stock.” In London, a spokesman for the Forbidden Planet chain, which also stocks comics, commented: “The UK is quite multicultural and loves comics, so there’s a demographic for it here.”

London-based Sikh solicitor Gurpal Singh Oppal added: “It’s wonderful to see Sikhs in a positive light, especially in an era when religion and people’s identity are focused upon, rather than their inner qualities.”

Super Sikh reveals the life and adventures of Oxford-educated Deep Singh who wears a turban, sports a beard and uses his brains rather than brawn to defeat the forces of evil.

Stylish, multilingual and multicultural, Deep has been described as incorporating a mix of special qualities, somewhere between the likes of Superman and Jason Bourne. But unlike Superman and Bourne, Deep is Asian to the core and more than happy to project the Sikh values with which he was raised. Hence the slogans “Waheguru ji ka khalsa” and “Waheguru ji ki fateh” that are used to illustrate the posters depicting Deep’s adventures across international badlands where the Mujahidin/Taliban tell intended female victimsL “Women shouldn’t fill their heads with numbers and reading” and “you’ll soon be free of education.”

All this changes with the arrival of Deep who uses his bazooka “boom” to free the women of their Taliban captors. No surprise that one of the Taliban commanders sports an eye patch, not dissimilar to the one used by real-life Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who is currently engaged in secret talks with the Afghan and US authorities. Deep, an Elvis Presley fan, whose cover is working for ‘India International Innovative Technology’, while his real job is working as a top-notch agent for the British secret service, confronting and defeating the wicked plans of mad Taliban commanders such as Salar Al Amok. Deep’s creator is California-based techie, Supreet Singh Manchanda, who was educated at the London School of Economics before heading off to the US.