It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a new super team-up, joining forces to tackle one of our society’s biggest topics: voting. Show Up Strong ’24, funded and led by The Voter Project, is a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan initiative that is tackling the mission of using the creative arts, music, art, and comic books for raising voter engagement.

“Voting is scary to some people, they have a lot of anxiety,” said April M. Burks, director of neighborhood activations for Show Up Strong. “It seems like a much more complicated process than it is. People don’t understand it.”

In September 2024, Show Up Strong collaborated with REC Philly and held a think tank pitch competition to develop a solution for getting over 50,000 young adults in Philadelphia to register and vote in this coming election. Those who were selected for the finals of the competition were given a set amount of funding and 30 days to generate said solution.

“These comic books are to help motivate people to go out there to register to vote,” said Derick Allen, founder and CEO of Konkret Comics, a Black-owned comic book publishing company based in New Jersey. Allen’s idea didn’t win the pitch contest, but the company still went ahead with supporting the concept of a free comic book for voter engagement to encourage young people to get out to the polls.

The winning idea, “Liberty Knights,” created and written by Allen, is about a team of superheroes representing the best of Philadelphia as they fight their archnemesis, whose goal is to steal the “power of the voting” from the people of Philadelphia, underscoring how comic books for voter engagement can effectively convey a convincing storyline.

“It was a combination of everything I thought was the most important aspects of Philadelphia, look-wise, presence-wise and just what they represent,” said Allen, who talked about the motivation behind the comic book for voter engagement, its name, and its story. “And each of the characters, they come from a different section of Philadelphia. South Philly, West Philly, North Philly, Fishtown, Frankford. Every one of them comes from a different part of town. Some are teachers, some are students. I just wanted to give a face to everyone I could imagine in Philly.”

Read the full article about comics books for voter engagement by Eric Nixon at PBS.