64 african appropriations
sesses a brain machine which is able to read and transfer people’s minds
(nos. 150–152); and Professor Rubens, who succeeds in transplanting ani-
mal organs into humans, thus producing a werewolf (nos. 176–180). Each
of these prominent antagonists have a number of hired thugs who regu-
larly kidnap any of the four protagonists, allowing Spear and his friends to
engage in a minimum of at least one fistfight per issue. As white faces were
absent from the magazine, a black cast portrayed bad and good guys alike.
African Film magazine perfectly fits the category of the suspense novel
within Tzvetan Todorov’s typology of detective fiction. According to
Todorov (1977: 50–51), this category sits between two other categories
of crime fiction, the whodunit and the thriller, and combines their key
properties: the mystery of the crime that has to be unraveled through a
story of investigation, typical of the whodunit, and the emphasis on the
present—on crime in the making—typical of the thriller. While the who-
dunit raises the reader’s curiosity, the thriller aims at creating suspense.
In African Film, mystery—the story of a past criminal event that has to be
detected—is reduced to a mere point of departure while the main inter-
est derives from the story set in the present, the plot which unfolds dur-
ing Spear’s investigations (see figure 2.4). This coincides with Todorov’s
(1977) observation that in the suspense novel, “the reader is interested not
on ly by what ha s happened but a lso by what w i l l happen ne x t; he wonders
as much about the future as about the past. The two types of interest are
thus united here—there is the curiosity to learn how past events are to be
explained; and there is also the suspense: what will happen to the main
characters” (51)? As is typical of suspense novels, Spear and the other main
characters are constantly risking their lives. Though tough and always
proving victorious in the end, Spear is by no means immune from his
adversaries’ fists as the story unfolds. Often he comes out of a fight worse
for wear, with severe bruises, aching limbs, and a black eye, and he has to
be bandaged by his assistant Sonia. Apart from the plot, suspense is also
created by clever employment of the specific properties of the photo-novel
medium: the last images at the bottom of many right-hand pages serve as
cliffhangers, keeping the reader engrossed and waiting with bated breath
to see what will happen with the turning of the page. Most Spearman
stories were stretched out over at least four issues of the magazine, which
means that a suspenseful climax had to be created toward the end of all but