In 2019 coverage of Etan Comics highlighted Hawi, a bilingual English–Amharic series created by Beserat Debebe’s all-African team and widely described as Ethiopia’s first comic starring a female superhero.
The story follows Ethiopian-American Ement Legesse, who returns toward Ethiopia and must rescue her kidnapped mother while discovering flame-linked powers inspired in part by the historical figure known as Queen Yodit Gudit. Debebe had earlier published Jember as an Ethiopian male superhero title and said he wanted young readers to see themselves as people who can act.
Comics are not only entertainment. For diaspora and local readers they are a soft archive of belonging, history, and language at a time when many Ethiopian stories abroad still arrive only as conflict news.
Kept as culture and arts reference, Hawi marks a dated creative milestone: Ethiopian myth and modern migration put into sequential art for a Horn audience that rarely sees itself in that form.
Sources: OkayAfrica, The Namibian