Communiqué 72: Comic Republic wants to be Africa’s Marvel
After building a global audience with free digital comics, Comic Republic is reimagining its business with a $4 million deal, a subscription play, and an animation studio.
Key points
1. Intellectual Property (IP) ownership is the core asset: Comic Republic’s refusal to sell its IP, despite tempting offers, underscores a critical lesson: the most valuable asset in the creative economy is the IP itself. Investors should prioritize backing creators and companies that retain control over their IP, as this allows for diversified income (e.g., from merch, games, licensing) and long-term value beyond one-off deals.
2. Distribution and monetization must evolve with audience behavior. Comic Republic’s pivot from print to free digital downloads, addition of a subscription model, and now launch of an animation studio show the importance of adapting. Investors should look for businesses that are agile and data-driven in their approach to audience engagement and revenue generation, especially in sectors where piracy, low purchasing power, or platform dominance are concerns.
3. Value capture requires full-stack participation, not just rights retention: While licensing deals can provide capital, true value capture often requires participation across the value chain—from development to production to distribution. Comic Republic’s launch of CR Motion+ is a strategic move toward vertical integration, allowing it to shape and profit more directly from its stories.
1. The paywall rises
In May, Lagos-based digital comic company Comic Republic quietly rolled out subscriptions on its platform. Under the new system, readers can access the first three editions of any comic for free, but beyond that point, they hit a paywall. To continue reading, fans have to subscribe.
With the introduction of the paywall, Comic Republic was moving away from its longstanding tradition of offering its titles entirely for free. This model would not only open up a new revenue stream for the company but also channel more income directly to the creators behind its growing roster of African superheroes.
Reaching an audience of 2.3 million monthly, of which 90% is based outside Nigeria, Comic Republic will consider the subscription experiment successful if it can convert 10% of that audience into paying subscribers.
The subscription play is part of a broader reimagining of the business, which now includes CR Motion+, an animation arm set up to bring its characters to life beyond static images.
Since its founding in 2013, the company has carved a unique space for itself in the comic book ecosystem, offering digitally distributed, African-themed stories that challenge both the dominance of Western superhero tropes and the notion that African content can’t scale globally.
Much like Marvel, which built a universe of superheroes adored worldwide, Comic Republic, with titles like Guardian Prime, Avonome, and Eru, has built a loyal following at home and abroad. Drawing attention from Hollywood studios, international publishers, and fans hungry for representation. Now, a little more than a decade after its founding, the company is expanding to focus on much more than comics alone.
2. Origin stories
Long before Jide Martin built a business around African superheroes and drew interest from Hollywood studios, he was just a boy who loved to draw. He got into trouble several times with his mother for mutilating his school textbooks to draw cartoon characters.
The entrepreneurial instinct came while Martin was still a law student at Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. While in school, he started a fashion brand. Later on, he founded an event management company (he eventually exited both businesses to focus on Comic Republic). But no matter what venture he ran during the day, he would return to drawing comics at night. “After work, I’d just draw till like 2 a.m.,” Martin told Communiqué.
With a group of three friends working from his dining table; Michael Balogun, a colourist, Tobe Ezeogu, a graphic designer and Wale Awelenje the group's writer, Martin initially started Comic Republic in 2010. But they did not release anything until 2013.
That year, Man of Steel was scheduled to hit cinemas, and Martin saw an opening. “Our flagship character, Guardian Prime, is a Superman archetype. So we thought, the best time to launch was when people were going to watch the Superman movie.”
Jide Martin struck a deal with Silverbird Cinemas to feature Comic Republic’s first series in its cinema brochures—those glossy leaflets listing upcoming blockbusters and popcorn deals. For 200,000 naira, Comic Republic debuted Guardian Prime, a Nigerian superhero dressed in a forest green and snow-white suit, reminiscent of the country's national flag colors. Silverbird’s brochures played a pivotal role in launching Comic Republic, but they also posed a significant limitation, as only cinema-goers had access.
Around the same period, digital distribution of comics gained traction globally. In 2012, Strika Entertainment, the creator of the popular Supa Strikas comic books, launched a digital version to complement its print and TV offerings. Furthermore, Webtoon, originally known as Naver Webtoons in its native South Korea, where it first launched in 2004, began to gain widespread popularity following its global launch in 2014.
Martin saw an opportunity to pioneer a similar digital-first model in Nigeria. By the end of 2013, Comic Republic ended its distribution deal with Silverbird Cinemas and pivoted to digital. Initially, the company shared its comics via Facebook before launching its digital platform, where fans could download PDF copies of new issues every two weeks. By 2016, Comic Republic was averaging 28,000 downloads per issue.
That same year, Martin decided to tell the Comic Republic story to a wider audience. He contracted Agence France-Presse, the international wire service, to have Comic Republic profiled. Several international outlets picked up the AFP story, bringing Comic Republic to the attention of major brands. One of them was Aviva, a Nigerian stationery company that approached Comic Republic for a licensing deal to feature its characters on school notebooks.
The partnership paid off. Aviva’s notebook distribution soared from 14 million units to 43 million over the next three years. In 2017, Aviva invested in Comic Republic, acquiring a 10% stake at a ₦120 million ($360,000) valuation. The deal also included Tseyi Hammond, an avid comic fan and CEO of investment banking major FBN Quest, as a co-investor.
3. From Lagos to Hollywood
Comic Republic made a killing from advertising inside its comic books. Alongside that, it also built out a B2B business helping brands like Samsung, Sahara Group, and Meta produce comic content.
But Martin knew Comic Republic’s real value wasn’t in ads or agency work. It was in the intellectual property, the sprawling universe of African superheroes and mythologies they had spent nearly a decade building. By the late 2010s, with over a dozen recurring characters and thousands of pages of lore, Comic Republic began looking for a partner who could help take its IP global.
The success of Marvel’s Black Panther in 2018 changed the game. The film’s billion-dollar run and cultural impact proved there was an audience for Black and culturally rich superheroes.
As a result, Comic Republic was in high demand. Hollywood studios, production houses, and investors came calling. But many proposals came with a catch: complete buyouts that would strip the company of control over its characters. Martin refused. “I have constantly insisted that we must own the right to the IP.”
In 2021, Comic Republic licensed one of its titles, Ireti, to Emagine Content and JackieBoy Entertainment for a proposed feature film adaptation. But the project never got off the ground, and after a year, Comic Republic revoked the license. After that, the company signed a representation deal with Creative Artists Agency (CAA).
With the help of CAA, Comic Republic negotiated a deal with Universal Studios to develop both a live-action film and a television series inspired by its Vanguard universe, a pantheon of Comic Republic characters that includes Guardian Prime, Ireti, Eru, and Amadioha. The plan is ambitious: to build an interconnected universe of African superheroes, similar to Marvel's cinematic universe.
The contract’s total earnings will amount to $4 million for Comic Republic. But the most important part of the deal is that it's only a licensing agreement, and Comic Republic retains its IP.
“The licensing deal is only for audio, visual, TV, and film. What that means is that we can take the same characters and make games. We can continue to make our comic books. We can merchandise shirts and things like that, as long as they're not in the likeness of the movie actors.” Also, the license exists for only a period, after which it has to be renewed. It's been two years since the Universal deal was signed, and work on the movie is still ongoing.
4. Comic Republic’s animation moment
The Universal deal was a milestone for Comic Republic, but it also forced the company to reflect deeply on its long-term vision. While the licensing deal preserved its IP ownership, it also exposed a hard truth: the real financial windfall in Hollywood doesn’t always go to the creators. Mad Massive Entertainment, the production house tasked with producing the live-action adaptation of Comic Republic’s universe, reportedly earned nearly twice what Comic Republic received from the deal.
For Martin and his team, it was a wake-up call. If they were going to fully realise their IP’s potential, they couldn’t only own the rights to the content, they had to be actively involved in its development. In 2024, Comic Republic took its boldest step yet by launching CR Motion+, a full-fledged animation studio to develop its slate of original content, including feature-length films and animated series based on its characters.
This move coincided with a global surge of interest in African animation. In 2020, Disney announced a groundbreaking partnership with UK-based but Nigerian-owned Kugali Media to create Iwaju, a sci-fi series set in a futuristic Lagos. The show premiered in 2024 to critical acclaim and earned three Emmy nominations. Also, in 2021, Disney teamed up with South African studio Triggerfish to release Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire, a collection of Afrofuturist sci-fi shorts, which further cemented Africa’s rising status in the animation world. Comic Republic is betting that it can ride this wave.
With CR Motion+, the company is laying the groundwork for telling African superhero stories on its own terms, without intermediaries. Comic Republic has come full circle, first starting on the pages of a cinema brochure, now a film based on its characters is in development, poised for a cinematic blockbuster release. Yet the journey is still unfolding.