Alter Ego is a 2015 graphic album series which originated in Belgium and became available in English via Europe Comics. This review will be quite unlike my reviews of American comics about Angola; as I've noted before, European creators seem much better informed about Angola than the Americans.
The Europe Comics website states that the series Alter Ego is: "A series conceived in the American style by a team of European creators." Roughly, the series is driven by the idea that people possess a quasi-psychic link to someone else on the planet who was conceived around the same time as they; their lives are entwined and what befalls one may befall the other.
The first book in the series Camille (by Denis Lapière, Pierre-Paul Renders and Mathieu Reynès) is where Angola comes in. This album concerns one Camille Rochant whose mother has just died and left behind a cryptic message which leads her to Angola, seeking ze Texeira, a man who happens to be the same age as her mother; but he's never heard of her mother and has no answers for why she knew his name.
The amount of detail given to the Angola sequences in Camille is excellent - many believable depictions of Angolan buildings and landscapes. It's set primarily in N'Dalatando in Cuanza Norte, but there are also scenes in Luanda at the Hospital Maria Pia. Texeira's background is also steeped in Angolan history - he recounts how he was beaten by the Portuguese in colonial times, then at age 13 went to fight for Savimbi until at age 21 he lost an arm and a leg to a landmine.
I haven't read all of Alter Ego but it's a very dense web - each story features different protagonists entrapped by the same conspiracy and gradually exposing the connective tissue. There may even be more of Angola in other volumes - I hope eventually I get around to reading them!
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