Otiléon’s next steps are pragmatic: a national comics prize, a print co-op with Brazzaville’s lone press and a residency programme for Central African writers. “If we build the structures,” he says, “the talent is already here”.
Summarised from an interview with with Agnès Debiage and Jevic Josué Otiléon, Prix Lili 2025 winner and founder of Centrale Comics.
Brazzaville-based Centrale Comics is no longer a one-man passion project; it is the engine-room of a nascent national comics culture. Founder Jevic Josué Otiléon, 24, collected the Prix Lili 2025 for best Congolese comic, but insists the medal is “a responsibility, not a trophy”.
The citation rewards a decade of grassroots work: free after-school workshops, micro-financed print runs and a stubborn belief that “our stories deserve to be printed, read and passed on,”
Otiléon began as a lone cartoonist photocopying school-notebook stories. When no local publisher would touch African-language scripts or political satire, he turned editor himself.
Centrale Comics now publishes six titles a year – histories of the Kongo kingdom, eco-fables set in the Congo basin and YA dramas that swap Parisian banlieues for Makélékélé streets. Print runs remain modest (300–800 copies) but sell out through informal networks: teachers, church halls, WhatsApp pre-orders and the annual Bilili BD Festival, the country’s first comics convention, which Otiléon co-curates.
The obstacles are systemic.
There is no dedicated comics curriculum, no public print subsidy and only a handful of bookshops outside the capital. Every release is crowdfunded; every shipment across the Congo River is a logistical improvisation.
Yet the model is travelling: Ivorian publisher Vents d’Afrique will co-print “Mwinda!”, a bilingual anthology of YA comics, in Abidjan this autumn, while Senegalese education NGO African Comics Hub is adapting Centrale titles into lesson plans.
Otiléon’s bigger dream is a pan-African distribution grid. He is courting partners in Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria and Morocco to swap translation rights, shared print-runs and digital serialisation. “We are told to be African, but not too African,” he laughs. “I want a Congolese hero in hausa, a Moroccan story in lingala – our continent reading itself”.
The timing is propitious.
Across Africa, comics are shedding their “kids-only” label. South Africa’s Kwezi and Nigeria’s Comic Republic have proved superhero universes can travel; Kenya’s Avandu and Ghana’s Leti Arts secure games and streaming deals.
In francophone West Africa, Abidjan’s Culturia and Dakar’s Selly Raby Kane studio are experimenting with bandes dessinées that double as fashion storyboards. Still, only a handful – Centrale Comics included – control the full pipeline from script to shelf.
Otiléon’s next steps are pragmatic: a national comics prize, a print co-op with Brazzaville’s lone press and a residency programme for Central African writers. “If we build the structures,” he says, “the talent is already here”.
Read the full interview over at Actualitte.
This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn newsfeed.
