Meet Michel Mulipola, a Sāmoan comic book artist and professional wrestler based in Māngere, South Auckland in Aotearoa (New Zealand). He's been an illustrator for 19 years and has worked on awesome projects like WWE comics, Marvel trading cards, video games, and the first ever Sāmoan language comic book, O Le Aiga Sāmoa. He just finished an eight-month stint as a Story Artist for an upcoming Disney+ series and is currently serving as a Cultural Consultant for Disney Animation.
Recently, he created his own version of a Marvel's Voices comic book cover in response to the all-too-common issue of Pacific Islanders being ignored and forgotten during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (APAHM).
To learn more about the motivation behind his art, BuzzFeed spoke to Michel. "Every May, I see my social media flooded with AAPI heritage month celebratory posts, and every year without fail, I see ZERO representation of the PI part of AAPI," he said. Since APAHM is an American thing, he finds it weird that Asians and Pacific Islanders are forced to share a heritage month and gets "quite heated" at "the continuous erasure of the PI part."
One such example of PIs being actively excluded is Marvel's 2023 AAPI Heritage Month issues. Each of the four issues features an Asian character on the cover, but no Pacific Islander characters are highlighted. Additionally, each issue contains special stories from Asian writers and artists, but no PI creatives. So, Michel created his mock Marvel's Voices cover to spotlight the three Pacific Islander Marvel characters: Kiwi Black, Mondo, and Loa. "If Marvel wasn't gonna showcase PI characters and creators, I’ll do it myself," he told BuzzFeed. He also explained the changes he made to each character to ensure more authentic portrayals.
"Kiwi Black is the Māori half-brother of Nightcrawler. In the two issues of X-Men he appears in, he’s dressed in a black overcoat and has a moko (facial tatau), but the design is just some random squiggles. With my redesign of Kiwi Black, I wanted to create a more authentic-looking mataora moko and also added the pūhoro — the tatau on the thighs and buttocks area. I also stripped his costume back to a more warrior-like garb inspired by The Dead Lands (directed by Fijian film maker Toa Fraser). I used an obsidian, carved, flame-looking hook as a symbol on his waist to go with Kiwi Black’s half-demon 'black flame' theme."
"Mondo is a Sāmoan mutant who was part of Generation X. In all his iterations in the comics, he’s never looked Sāmoan. I tried to give him a more Sāmoan face with Troy Polamalu's luscious locks."
"Loa is a Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) mutant who was a student at the Xavier Institute. Her character design features weird, blocky, geometrical 'tattoos' all over her body, so the first thing I did was try to incorporate traditional Hawaiian kakau designs instead of random shapes. I also tried to give her a more rounded Hawaiian-looking face, too, as the versions of her in the comics don’t make her look Hawaiian."
When asked about the response to his versions of the Marvel characters, Michel said that it's been "fantastic, especially from Tagata Moana" (his preferred term for Pacific Islanders). He added, "Seeing our very few PI Marvel characters shown in a more respectful and tasteful way, illustrated by a Sāmoan artist, fills our people with a sense of joy and pride."
Michel is always creating Pacific Islander art, whether it's overtly PI or not. "Tagata Moana are natural-born storytellers utilizing art to tell our stories. It’s just the mediums I choose as a comic artist/pro wrestler/animator are not the norm. I am continuing to not only make more Pacific Islander art, but also try to uphold and represent our culture in the various spaces I find myself in."
You can find more of our Asian Pacific American Heritage Month coverage here.
