''Revue Mfumu'eto'' is a comic

magazine A magazine is a periodical publication, generally published on a regular schedule (often weekly or monthly), containing a variety of content. They are generally financed by advertising, purchase price, prepaid subscriptions, or by a combinatio ...

series first published in 1990 at

Kinshasa Kinshasa (; ; ln, Kinsásá), formerly Léopoldville ( nl, Leopoldstad), is the capital and largest city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Once a site of fishing and trading villages situated along the Congo River, Kinshasa is now one o ...

Democratic Republic of Congo The Democratic Republic of the Congo (french: République démocratique du Congo (RDC), colloquially "La RDC" ), informally Congo-Kinshasa, DR Congo, the DRC, the DROC, or the Congo, and formerly and also colloquially Zaire, is a country in ...

(DRC) by Jaspe-Saphir Nkou-Ntoula under the pseudonym ''Papa Mfumu'Eto 1er'', which he adopted as his brand along with many variations. He led a small creative team to publish a variety of extremely popular

comic books A comic book, also called comicbook, comic magazine or (in the United Kingdom and Ireland) simply comic, is a publication that consists of comics art in the form of sequential juxtaposed panels that represent individual scenes. Panels are of ...

from 1989 to 2005. This series and others were written in urban

Lingala Lingala (Ngala) (Lingala: ''Lingála'') is a Bantu language spoken in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the northern half of the Republic of the Congo, in their capitals, Kinshasa and Brazzaville, and to a lesser degree in ...

(Kinshasa's

Lingua franca A lingua franca (; ; for plurals see ), also known as a bridge language, common language, trade language, auxiliary language, vehicular language, or link language, is a language systematically used to make communication possible between groups ...

includes Tshiluba and

French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...

words) and produced on inexpensive paper in the language of his neighborhood, explicitly to make it accessible to them. His comic books were self-produced using stencils, cut-and-paste (adhesive-taped) montages, photocopy machines, printed on lithographic presses, and distributed informally on the streets and in Kinshasa's open markets. The first story in the series, ''Nguma a meli mwasi na kati ya Kinshasa'' (“The python that swallowed a woman in Kinshasa”), seized readers’ attention in 1990 and was widely interpreted as a daring attack against the DRC's notorious dictator, Mobutu, bringing instant fame to the ''Revue'' and its creator. Along with other low-cost and locally distributed comic books, Mfumu'eto's comics inaugurated the era of the author as the producer in the

's literary world. Like other comics produced in Kinshasa at the time they were heavily influenced by urban culture. Mfumu'Eto also drew inspiration from local traditions, combining African traditional medicine with religion, pulp fiction with politics, and irony with attitude. This culminated into an eclectic display that directly contested dominant colonial systems of knowledge. The author transferred his manuscript
Papa Mfumu’eto 1er Papers
' to the University of Florida in April 2017, where they are physically preserved and digitized for public open access. Items from the ''Revue Mfumu'Eto'' series were exhibited in Paris with the creator's paintings in 2015, following the international success of popular painters such as Cheri Samba and growing interest in Congolese popular art.

References

Democratic Republic of the Congo comics {{DRCongo-stub