Raising Dion Is A Revolutionary New Comic Book About Raising A Child Superhero
(Photo: Facebook/Raising Dion)
I know Alison Bechdel’s award-wining graphic novel Fun Home is in the #1 spot on the Mommyish Fall Reading List thanks to being boycotted by whiny conservative college students everywhere, but once you finish that you should pick up Raising Dion, a beautiful and funny new comic book about a little boy with superpowers and about the young, widowed mother raising him.
According to Fusion, Raising Dion is a comic book about Nicole, a widow raising a 7-year-old son with superpowers. She faces the same issues a lot of us face when raising our children–discipline, education, making sure they grow up to be moral people–but her son can go invisible or teleport. How do you put a kid in time out when he can teleport? And how do you keep your son safe and make sure he grows up to be a good man when there are people out there with a lot of resources who want to use his powers for their own gains? Liu describes Nicole as being like a fusion of Superman’s mom, Martha Kent, and Batman’s butler, Alfred Pennyworth.
”If these key parental figures did not raise these superheroes correctly, then who knows what Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne would have become?” Liu said in an interview with Fusion. ”Parents instill a value system.”
To be fair, I spend a lot of my Batman-reading time thinking, “Alfred, WTF did you do!?”
Raising Dion is a very cool concept for a superhero comic book, because the world is full of books about superheroes, but not nearly as many books about what it would be like to not have super powers in a world full of people with super powers, which is a pretty fascinating subject.
”Traditionally in comics and really most stories, the protagonist is the one with the powers,” said artist Jason Piperberg, who draws the comic. ”You see the world through the eyes of the character with all the abilities usually because they are immediately the most exciting and/or interesting person in the story.”
But Nicole’s story is interesting too. There’s a great scene in the trailer where Nicole is struggling to get her squirmy 7-year-old dressed and suddenly–poof!–he vanishes in a puff of smoke.
“Dion! I am not playing!” she says, in a voice that sounds like everyone who has ever seen their kid’s naked butt go running down the hall five minutes after they were supposed to be in bed.
Liu also says he chose to make Nicole and Dion black in response to the need for superhero stories from more diverse perspectives, and that’s pretty cool. The first issue of the series is available now, with more in the works. Considering that Dion is being followed by shadowy government Mr. Smith types, it seems like Nicole might have some action in her future outside of wrestling a super-kid into his pajamas.
”The most important thing about raising a superhero,” she says. ”Is learning how to become one first.”
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW9EIxEqrJw]
It looks way cute. Raising Dion is available for free online, but also can be purchased in hardcopy for $4. Buying the paperback is a good idea if you like it, because the money helps the creators keep making it.
