Mohammad Sayed was injured in Afghanistan when he was a young child, and became a paraplegic. His mother had died, his father left him, and he spent seven years in a hospital. Sayed earned money by fixing other patient's cell phones. In 2009, he came to the U.S. and is now an American citizen. Sayed studied engineering, developed several devices for wheelchair users, and started his own company. Now at 19, Sayed has has created a comic book superhero: Wheelchair Man!
I thought: "This is the greatest country, how is it possible that they have no wheelchair superhero?"
Well, I wasn't going to wait for Marvel to do it. I want to celebrate the powers and abilities that wheelchair users have, so I started to create a superhero called Wheelchair Man based on my own real-life story.
I write the stories and then I have an artist, Arielle Epstein, who is very talented, draw the images.
Wheelchair Man is a teenager, he's an immigrant and he's a Muslim. He's against hatred and he wants to end violence and make this world a better place. One of his main superpowers is that he can make criminals see the consequence of a crime before they have even committed it.
My plan is to develop a comic book series to inspire people with disabilities. There will be four other original superheroes - Wheelchair Woman, Wheelchair Girl, Wheelchair Boy and Captain Afghanistan - and all of them will be based on the real lives of wheelchair users from developing countries.
You can read the story of Sayed and his alter-ego Wheelchair Man at BBC News. -via Metafilter
(Image credit: Mohammad Sayed/Arielle Epstein)