Dear reader,
Two years ago, we noticed something that bothered us enough to start TheACE.
Mainstream media talk about “the creative economy” often enough, fashion, music, film, the usual list. But ask most of them to define it, and something is always missing. Comics and animation rarely make the cut. Government is only just beginning to look seriously at animation, and even that is still early, still soft around the edges. Meanwhile, an entire industry, studios, publishers, animators, writers, has been building itself in plain sight, largely unreported.
So, we started acting like the industry media in this space did not have. Covering releases, events, projects, and the people behind them. Last year, that work became something more formal: the first Bookause Annual Nigerian Comic Industry Report. This year, the second edition. Slowly, a documented record of an industry that used to only exist in scattered conversations.
But documenting an industry is not the same as growing one. And somewhere in the last two years, we noticed the actual bottleneck, not on the supply side, but on the demand side.
More studios have come up in the last two years than ever before. More creators, more projects, more ambition. But a lot of that supply is finding its demand outside the continent, not within it. African comics and animation are being made here and consumed elsewhere, at a scale that should worry anyone who wants this to be a sustainable industry and not just a well-documented one. You can’t build a lasting creative economy on an audience you don’t have.
That is the actual problem TheSPACE is trying to solve. Not “how do we get more people talking about comics”, but “how do we build genuine demand for African comics and animation, inside Africa, at home.”
Here is where we think most efforts in this space get it wrong. Almost every event, every community, every gathering built around this industry is built for creatives. Writers, artists, studio founders, the supply side, talking to itself. You will rarely find the people who just read, who just watch, who have no stake in the industry beyond loving what it makes. So that is the deliberate bet TheSPACE is making: a community where non-creatives outnumber creatives. Not as an afterthought, but as the whole point.
Because if we want to understand what actually makes someone care, like “really care”, and not just scroll past, we need to be in the room with people who are not already convinced. We need to learn how an engineer talks about the last comic he read, what a nurse remembers from the animated series she grew up on, what a hairdresser’s excited about when a new series drops. When we know a language, we can speak in it. And when TheACE speaks in the language people already use to talk about the things they love, it stops being industry coverage and starts being a genuine, felt connection. That connection is what eventually becomes demand, not because anyone was sold anything, but because they were invited into something that already made sense to them.
At this juncture, a genuine question to ask is “What does someone actually get for being part of this?” A few things, though, we won’t lay out every perk here, because some things are better discovered than advertised. Two are worth saying plainly.
First, because TheACE has real relationships with the creators and studios doing this work, TheSPACE members get early and subsidised access to things that would normally cost more, or that most people never get to see before release, like screenings, platforms, and work still behind a paywall elsewhere. Second, and maybe more important: TheSPACE is built to celebrate the people in it, not just the creatives adjacent to it. Most creative spaces only spotlight the artist, the founder, the person who made the thing. We want to spotlight the researcher whose thesis connects to a comic book character, the community member who has been quietly part of this from day one, the person whose day job has nothing to do with any of this and who is here anyway because they love it. That is not a small thing. That is the whole community, made visible to itself.
There is also a version of this that matters beyond fandom, and it is part of why we are building TheLibrary, a centralised, searchable record of the creators, studios, projects, policies, and events that make up this industry. Right now, if someone wants to study the psychological or economic impact of African comics, genuinely research it, empirically, the data barely exists in one place. And search for African comics and animation on Google today, and you’ll mostly find the same problem from a different angle: results that are months, sometimes years out of date, in an industry that moves weekly. Other creative sectors like fashion and music don’t have that problem. Ours does, because nobody has been feeding the machines the current, structured information they need to keep up.
That’s the gap a contributive solution like TheLibrary is built to close. Our goal is that by 2030, a search for what is happening in African comics and animation returns something as fresh as an hour old, standing level with any other creative sector you could name. Not because we will out-market anyone, but because TheLibrary will be the place Google and the AI tools people already use go to find the real, current picture, i.e one of the reliable sources they index and pull from, not an afterthought they miss.
None of this happens without the industry itself showing up for it. Our longest-running media partnerships, with Lagos Comic Con and Comic Con Ibadan, alongside RendaCon, Geek Pop Up, and others, have shaped how we think about access and community from the start. We are now looking beyond Nigeria, toward partnerships with events like Animatex and Comixandria in Egypt, and we won’t stop there.
The goal, if we are honest about where this is all going, is a closed loop: an industry that makes things here, and an audience here that wants them enough to actually sustain the people making them. Right now, that loop is broken because supply is outpacing demand, and talent is finding its audience abroad because the audience at home has not been built yet. TheSPACE is our attempt to build it. Slowly, with the people who will actually make up that demand, not just the people already inside the industry talking to each other.
If any of this means something to you, there is a place for you in it. Readers and fans can apply to join TheSPACE directly. Researchers and institutions who want to help build TheLibrary, or who need the kind of data it will hold, can reach out to us directly. Creators and studios who want to offer early access, or partner with us the way others in this space already have are always welcome to start that conversation. And if you are in a position to support this financially, whether through direct contribution or by pointing us toward grants and growth opportunities we should know about, we would genuinely love to hear from you.
Two years in, this is still the same fight it always was: making sure this industry gets seen. Now, it is also about making sure it gets supported. TheSPACE is the next part of that.
With love, TheACE
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AI Use at TheACE
TheACE uses artificial intelligence tools to support research, drafting and analysis across Africa’s creative industries. All content is verified, edited and approved by our human editorial team to ensure accuracy, clarity and responsible storytelling. AI assists our work; it does not replace human judgment.
