“I decided to take pencils, crayons, paints, sketchpads as my weapons to challenge the so called ‘future,'” the South African Themba Siwela once wrote of his decision to become a comic-strip artist. Mr. Siwela is one of 35 artists, from approximately 20 countries, included in “Africa Comics,” a poignant and utterly engrossing exhibition at the Studio Museum of Harlem.

Most of the artists wield pencils or crayons as weapons against a miserable future or against political and social injustice. For them, the borders of a sheet of paper mark off a space in which one can express oneself with relative impunity. Not, however, with complete safety: A number of these artists do not live in the countries they represent, and one imagines that many would not be alive for long if they tried to live at home.

Tayo (Tayo Fatunla), for instance, was born and continues to live in England, although he was educated partly in Nigeria and directs his politically charged work at a West African audience. His two sheets on view, in black ink on paper, come from a didactic series titled “Our Roots.” One depicts Henry Nxumalo, a South African journalist murdered in 1957; the other, the actor Paul Robeson. In each, several portrait drawings — not caricatures — accompany short biographical paragraphs written in a style similar to what one might find in a child’s encyclopedia.

Tayo is uncommonly decorous. A number of the artists aim their darts with bloodier intent. The comics they draw open windows on a world of brutality and anguish: Malevolent police and soldiers populate many of the strips.

The title character of “Monster in Khaki” by the Nigerian Kola Fayemi is a “brutal district police officer” rendered with muscular menace in black ink, who illegally arrests a man and then threatens to kill him if his sister won’t sleep with the officer. Mr. Fayemi’s strip goes on to depict torture and an attempted assassination on a trash heap — there is nothing comic about it.

As a quick survey of the titles demonstrates, most of these comics are tragic: “O Mon Pays” (“O My Country”), “Enfant de Rue” (“Child of the Street”), “People are poor, traders raise prices too much,” “Dur d’Etre un Enfant Esclave” (“It’s Hard To Be a Child Slave”), “Visa Rejeté” (“Visa Rejected”). Even the instances of comedy are often sinister, as “Komerera” by the Kenyan Tuf, in which a hunter stalking antelope becomes the hunted when he is attacked by a cheetah. Two of the contributors, South Africans Conrad Botes and Joe Dog (Anton Kannemeyer), collaborate on a graphic magazine called Bitterkomix, a title that captures the tone of much the work here.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking of the drawings is by Cisse Samba Ndar, a Senegalese woman who writes in French and works in ink and watercolor. The front panel of “Oulaï: Pour que Cesse L’Excision” (the latter part translates as “in order to end circumcision) shows a woman with a naked girl in her arms, draped in a bloody cloth, screaming as she flees from her tribespeople. It is a horrifying story, but one that is so beautifully drawn that you don’t want to avert your eyes, though you probably won’t want to linger on the central action. The mother wears a diaphanous violet dress, a multicolored bead necklace, large fanlike purple earrings, and her hair pulled back; she is barefoot, running on hard dirt from men in yellow, red, and green clothes with conelike hats. Leaves shimmer in the yellow heat above the dust.

Ms. Ndar works in a lush, naturalistic manner, but the range of styles is extensive. The elegantly patterned black-and-white images by Amanvi (Bertin Prosper Amanvi), from Ivory Coast, drawn in watercolor and ink and, one delights to notice, employing collage, were influenced by Belgian art nouveau. They look like photographic negatives or etched prints. Also from Ivory Coast, Mendozza y Caramba (Mixime Aka Gnoan Kacou) swivels between a graphic 1960s poster style, with broad planes of color and outlined images, and jaunty, childlike figures. Others, like Gado (Godfrey Mwampembwa) of Tanzania, employ simple, bubbly forms in austere black ink that call to mind any number of Western comic strips.

By the standards of art, the history of comic strips is brief. The first newspaper strip appeared in the New York World in 1895, though a comic-strip book by a Swiss artist named Rodolphe Töpffer was published in 1833. The first comic book, “Funnies on Parade,” didn’t come out until 1933.

Almost all of the work in “Africa Comics” benefits from the expanded notion of comics that took hold in the 1960s, when politics, sex, and edgier humor began to rough up the texture of the heretofore smoothly bland genre. But the amplitude of the comics from Africa comes, one feels, from the directness of the medium.

“My interest in art is derived from the fact that it’s the best tool I’ve ever come across that can be used to express one’s ideas and emotions about life,” Tuf once said in an interview. “It provides a door to escapism and allows you to create forms and beings, and even destroy them, making you (the artist) something like a demigod.”

Most of the ideas and emotions expressed by the comic artists at the Studio Museum are neither comfortable nor escapist, but they are exciting, like weapons unsheathed.

Until March 18 (144 W. 125th St., between Lenox and Seventh avenues, 212-864-4500).